Two Voices in Chicago

In a Miami-to-Chicago plane one day last week, Basil Walters, executive editor of the Knight newspaper chain, hunched over a cream-colored sheet of hotel stationery, cautiously shielding what he wrote from the eyes of the stranger sitting beside him. "Stuffy"' Walters had a secret.

At about the same time, a Miami-to-Chicago train bringing Marshall Field Jr., 42, publisher of the morning Chicago Sun-Times, and his family home from a Florida holiday pulled into the 63rd Street station. There, to avoid reporters he knew would be waiting for him at the downtown terminal. Field got out alone. He had a secret too--the same as Walters'. Next day Field called Chesser Campbell, publisher of the rival--and dominant--morning Chicago Tribune. "I wanted you to be the first to know," he said, with the air of a man who has just slipped the competition a fast one. "We've bought the Daily News."

The Problem: Costs. It was the sixth time that the News, which began life in 1876 as a four-page daily, has changed ownership. Last week's seller was John Shively Knight. 64. who added the News to his chain* in 1944, paying $2,000,000 in cash and assuming an outstanding debt of $6,600,000. Last week's buyer. Field, has been pining after the News since the wealthy Trib picked up Chicago's other evening paper, Hearst's money-losing American, in 1956.

Since 1956, the pressure of mounting production costs inexorably drew Jack Knight and Marshall Field together. Knight, with the News's obsolescent mechanical plant, could not hope to compete with the Trib, which will eventually print both the American and the Trib on Tribune Tower presses. Field's spanking new $21 million Sun-Times Chicago River building is starved for work: the Sun-Times's 534,000 press run keeps its $5,000,000 worth of new presses busy only 3 1/2 hrs. a day.

By selling Parade. Field Enterprises' Sunday supplement, to John Hay Whitney, U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's and controlling owner of the New York Herald Tribune, for $12 million, and by disposing of several other properties, Field raised the $18 million cash that Jack Knight asked for his 75% controlling interest in the News. Ultimately the buy will cost Field another $6,000,000. as minority stockholders, with some 120.000 shares, respond to his offer to buy them out at $50 a share--5 points over the market price. For this he gets an afternoon circulation of 547,796 and a paper which under Knight has turned an average annual net profit of $1,250,000.

A Run for the Money. In the official announcement of the sale. Jack Knight pleaded "personal reasons" for dropping the biggest link in his chain. He has had a heavy heart since his youngest son. Frank, who was being groomed to take over the empire, died at 30 last spring of a brain tumor. After 40 years of answering the midnight bell. Jack Knight wanted to "relax a little." To the remaining Knight papers, he sent assurances that he had no intention of liquidating the chain.

Accustomed to a mettlesome front-page newspaper litany (30 years ago Chicago had eight dailies), 4,000,000 Chicagoans were left with but two voices: the somewhat muted Tribune echo of the late Robert R. McCormick's testy Republican conservatism and the somewhat vague independence of Marshall Field. But the end result may be good. By buying the News, newly confident Marshall Field Jr. has succeeded in doing what his father, who established the Sun in 1941. was never able to do: set himself up to give the Tribune a real run for its money. As if in testament of this, Maryland McCormick, the colonel's widow, wired Field: "You have now succeeded the colonel as first publisher of Chicago."

* Sale of the News leaves Knight with four papers: the Akron Beacon-Journal (circ. 163,191), Detroit Free Press (463,469), Miami Herald (270,573) and Charlotte (N.C.) Observer (154,179).

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