Country Slickers

Metropolitan newsmen who daydream of retiring to a country paper have long viewed weeklies more as a rural retreat than as an influential segment of the press. But with the swift growth of suburbs and small towns since World War II, weeklies have largely shed their cracker-barrel ways, developed sophistication and a new sense of mission. Today they are the fastest-growing publications in the U.S. Weekly Newspaper Representatives, Inc. reported last week that the 8,478 weeklies in the U.S. in 1956 reached a paid circulation peak of 18,529,199, up 6.5% over 1955. Estimated gain for the 1,700 dailies (total circ. more than 56 million): about 2%. Advertising in weeklies increased 1.2% to a record $112 million; this includes a 30% jump (to $25 million) in national ads since 1954 v. an estimated 10% gain for dailies. Said W.N.R.'s Eastern Sales Manager Robert Moore: "The weekly editor used to sit on a porch whittling a pencil. Today he's more apt to be worried the Cadillac will get scratched when it's loaded on the Queen Mary."

The weeklies' resurgence reflects editorial as well as economic vitality. In addition to relaying the back-fence chit-chat on which weeklies have traditionally thrived, the papers are the only inter preters and watchdogs of local governments in hundreds of U.S. communities, whose problems, aims and achievements go largely unrecorded in the metropolitan press. "We wouldn't be here if the dailies hadn't created the void in the first place," says a staffer on Seattle's weekly Argus (circ. 5.142), which has beaten the city's dailies on big local stories. Last week the Argus came out with a scorching editorial --first to appear in any Seattle paper-- condemning the Teamsters Union in Dave Beck's home town for its "affront to the public" in refusing to answer Senate investigators' questions.

John Gurwell, publisher of Houston's suburban Bellaire Texan and River Oaks Times (combined circ. 6,958), says that weeklies "are giving back the home town" to suburbanites who have lost contact with community responsibilities.

Boilerplate & Bumpkin Prose. In many areas, fast-growing suburbs have produced weekly and semiweekly chains that are as slick in appearance and informative in content as their city cousins. Chicago's Arlington Heights Herald and seven other suburban weeklies (combined circ. 20,630) owned by Paddock Publications led all U.S. weeklies last year in advertising volume. Cleveland's Heights Sun-Press (circ. 29,000), serving 14 communities, runs a regular Washington column on subjects that affect suburbanites, boasts that none of the political candidates or school bond issues it has backed in twelve years has been defeated.

Even outside metropolitan areas, most small-town weeklies, from the Reedsport, Ore. Port Umpqua Courier (circ. 1,620) to the Lexington Park (Md.) Enterprise (circ. 2,356), have thrown out the smudgy type and bumpkin prose that once characterized the weekly press, now run staff-written stories and editorials instead of the boilerplate and canned sermons that once crammed country papers. The old-time jack-of-all-trades country editor has been largely supplanted by trained staffs. Lured out of the cities by the prospect of editorial and economic independence, trained newsmen in increasing numbers are bringing professional standards to weekly newspapering.

Crusading Spirit. Though once renowned for their timidity, many weeklies have developed the crusading spirit that has vanished from many a fat-cat daily. In the two years since the Austin Texas Observer (circ. 6,347) was founded by Editor Ronnie Dugger, 26, it has played a leading role in exposing Texas' insurance scandals. Santa Monica's weekly Independent, in competition with a local daily as well as the Los Angeles press, has become one of the biggest U.S. weeklies by giving readers four-alarm coverage of gambling and other crimes that it charged were ignored by the local government. Three weeks ago Washington, D.C. dailies ran stories on the victory of Virginia Beach, Va. Publisher J. Willcox Dunn in his fight against the local Democratic machine. His Princess Anne Free Press won $65,000 damages--biggest libel award in Virginia's history--from a machine-owned opposition weekly that said Dunn "survived by lies."

In the South, many weeklies have consistently taken a more liberal stand than the region's big dailies on the touchy desegregation issue. In the midst of the race riots in Clinton, Tenn., last December, Weekly Editor Horace Wells's Page One Courier-News column calmly argued for peaceful integration of Clinton's high school, helped elect a pro-integration slate to the city council (TIME, Dec. 17). "How long," asked the Courier-News at the height of the hoodlumism, "are the people of Clinton going to continue to sit idly by and see their officials kicked around merely because they believe in law and order?" Georgia's Eastman Times-Journal (circ. 2,530), which was credited with killing off a postwar revival of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in 1950. has been one of the few papers in the South to urge Negro voters to go to the polls.

Boycotts & Bullets. Since weeklies are closer than dailies to readers and advertisers and more vulnerable to the pressure of advertisers, they are often hit by economic boycotts. But few editors cave in under such threats--or worse. In Granite City, Ill., after Editor Cornelius E. Townsend had waged an editorial campaign against organized gambling in the community, a hoodlum recently emptied his revolver into Townsend's Press-Record office. Echoing many a fighting editor before him, Townsend said: "Maybe they'll scare hell out of me someday and I'll quit. But I don't think so."

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