Sale in Los Angeles

"For the past couple of years," said a Los Angeles Daily News staffer, "we have never known when we left at night whether the paper would be open the next day when we showed up at the office." The fear was justified: the ailing News (circ. 188,453) was losing between $75,000 and $80,000 a month. News Publisher Robert Smith thought he had found a way out of his trouble when erratic Coos Bay (Ore.) Times Publisher Sheldon F. Sackett put down a $20,000 deposit to buy the News and signed a contract to pay $1,525,000 for it. But Smith was forced to call off the deal when, as Smith said, Sackett "failed to put up financial and collateral requirements" (TIME, Nov. 23). Last week, with the paper still at death's door, Smith finally found a buyer: Clinton D. McKinnon, 47, a successful San Diego newspaper publisher and businessman, former Democratic Congressman and a vice chairman of the state's Democratic Central Committee.

Shoulder the Debts. How much Mc Kinnon paid for the paper was a secret, but newsmen guessed that he got his 83% share of the News stock largely by assuming responsibility for its debts (estimated at between $1,000,000 and $2,000,000), plus about $50,000 in cash. "The amount of money that changed hands," said Publisher McKinnon, who has some $750,000 in cash in the bank and bought the News with his own money, "was not sufficient to endanger my financial position."

As the only Democratic daily among Los Angeles' five newspapers, the News looked worth saving to Democrat McKinnon. He hopes to do so with the same moneymaking skills that brought him success in the San Fernando Valley. He started out there in 1935 with a shopping throwaway, shrewdly built it up into three free newspapers for the booming region's war workers. With his profits at war's end, he started the San Diego Daily Journal and radio station KSDJ, overnight made them big moneymakers, and sold them for more than $1,000,000 in 1948 when he ran for Congress for the first time. Twice elected, once by the biggest plurality ever rolled up in San Diego County, he tried unsuccessfully last year for the Senate against Republican William Knowland, now Senate majority leader.

Start a Crusade. For the News, McKinnon already has the moral support of Democratic politicos and A.F.L. President George Meany, who offered to enlist unionists to sell subscriptions. McKinnon is free to run the News as he wants to, since "Mr. Smith will be active in neither the management nor the editorial end of the newspaper." (In his sale contract, McKinnon also took the precaution to free himself from any responsibility in the $3,475,000 damage suit Sackett has filed against Smith.) McKinnon hopes that, with 50,000 more circulation and a 25% increase in ads, he can lead the News out of the woods while paying off its debts "over a considerable period of time." Says he: "Los Angeles [needs a paper that] will be pro-Democratic and a friend to labor. This is more than a business venture; this is a crusade . . ."

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