New Daily, Mckinnon Up

Newspaper competition comes next week to war-big San Diego (estimated pop. 390,000; 1940 pop. 203-341). Clinton Dotson McKinnon announced that the first edition of his New Dealish evening Journal would be published on St. Patrick's Day (because his mother was Irish). The Journal will break the San Diego general newspaper monoply of rich, myopic, 79-year-old Colonel Ira Clifton Copley owner of the arch-Republican morning Union (circ. 44,359) and evening Tribune-Sun (circ. 74,954).*

The Colonel's challenger, Clinton McKinnon, 37 is little bigger than an outsize jockey. It has taken him only about three years to gallop an idea, and little else, into his San Diego daily. The idea: local news sheets handed free to Los Angeles County's swarming war workers (TIME, Nov. 2, ). Last August McKinnon sold these throwaways -- the San Fernando Valley Times, Los Angeles Aircralt Times, Long Beach Shipyard Times (they had grossed $700,000 in ads in 1942) 1942)--and 1942)--and moved to San Diego where he set up the triweekly Progress-Progress-Journal.

"Hardship." In planning his daily, McKinnon neatly got around the newsprint shortage. When the WPB refused to let him transfer his job-printing quota to a newspaper allocation, he put together his authorizations for job work, circulars and the Progress-Journal, kept out of WPB's newspaper limitation jurisdiction by not applying for second-class mailing rights.

Turned down by War Manpower's production urgency committee on a plea to lift his employment ceiling from 42 to , McKinnon won an appeal to the local War Manpower Commission. His argument, backed by Mayor Harley Knox, labor, religious and other groups: there was "community hardship" in that freedom of the press existed only for Colonel Copley's papers.

McKinnon felt confident of at least 30,000 circulation. His news and features lineup: United Press, Dorothy Thompson, Drew Pearson, Samuel Grafton, Walter Lippmann, Superman, Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka, others.

* Also publisher in Illinois of the Aurora Beacon-News, Elgin Courier-News, Joliet Herald News, Springfield Illinois State Journal; for six terms (1911-23) an Illinois GOP Congressman, long a utilitycoon.

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