Surgeon at Work

In a seventh-floor office in the Chicago Sun-Times plant, Publisher Marshall Field, Assistant Publisher Marshall Field Jr. and other top brass met last week with a 22-man emergency committee of the Sun-Times Newspaper Guild unit. The committee spokesman told Publisher Field that the Guild had heard rumors of an impending bloodletting, wanted to get the bad news straight from the surgeon himself. Replied urbane Publisher Field: it was no mere rumor. His money-losing, round-the-clock Sun-Times was an "economic impossibility," so he was planning to drop the evening editions and turn it into a morning paper. There was no point in arguing, added Sun-Times Editor Dick Finnegan; dismissal notices were being handed out at that very moment. More than 300 Sun-Times staffers had been, fired, including 56 editorial employees (one out of five).

Four hours later, a packed, tense meeting of the Sun-Times Guild tabled a motion to take a strike vote, chiefly because the staffers--and ex-staffers--felt that nothing would be gained by a strike that might destroy what was left of the paper. But to newsmen, the firings were one more packet of evidence from Millionaire Publisher Field that it takes more than money to make a successful newspaper.

No Razzle-Dazzle. After founding his Manhattan tabloid PM, now folded, Field launched the morning Chicago Sun as a full-sized newspaper in December 1941. He was gunning for Bertie McCormick's entrenched and ably edited Chicago Tribune. But in the next six years, the Sun never quite got its sights on the target and steadily lost money. In July 1947, with his major adversary still as potent as ever, Field took on two more. For $5,339,000, he bought the afternoon Times, a peppy, popular and moneymaking tabloid competing with John S. Knight's Daily News and Hearst's Herald-American. Six months later, under the impact of the Chicago printers' strike, the Sun and Times were merged into a Vari-Typed 24-hour tabloid.

The combined Sun-Times was Chicago's second biggest newspaper. But it lacked the razzle-dazzle, the assurance and the savvy of the old Times. When the strike ended, production costs shot way up, chiefly because of three shifts plus overtime for mechanical and circulation crews.

$1,000 a Day. Reader surveys showed that TV was also cutting into the evening editions, and that most Sun-Times evening readers were willing to shift their subscriptions to the morning editions. So this week Publisher Field killed off what was left of the once successful afternoon Times. Optimistically, Field hoped that the cut from eight to five editions would cost only 20,000 of the Sun-Times's 620,000 readers.

With production costs sliced one-third, Field thought that the truncated Sun-Times would get into the black. He could also devote all of the Sun-Times's remaining energies to his original war with the Tribune (circ. 915,000), which has itself dropped 110,000 circulation in the last 30 months. As a starter, the SunTimes this week began giving away $1,000 a day in a circulation-building quiz contest. But it would take more than hand-outs to worry the Tribune.

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