Death Notice

Unless the unexpected happens, this will be our last week," said Chicago Daily News Editor Melville Stone to his composing room foreman. That was in 1876, six months after Stone launched what turned into a remarkable paper. Since then, the News has won 15 Pulitzers, printed some of the finest writing ever forgotten tomorrow and sheltered such talents as Carl Sandburg, Finley Peter Dunne and Ben Hecht--who, it is said, wrote The Front Page out of the clips.

A century later, Editor Stone's anxieties became fact. Last week Marshall Field V, whose Field Enterprises owns the afternoon News, Chicago's morning Sun-Times, World Book Encyclopedia and other businesses, announced that the News would fold March 4 "if we cannot solve our financial problems." He added, "I wouldn't get huge hopes for that."

Field's father, Marshall IV, had bought the paper from the Knight chain in 1959, just as circulation began a slide from 614,000 in 1957 to last fall's 329,000. Like some other P.M.s, the News was losing readers to the suburbs and television. After a series of unsuccessful personnel and format changes, Publisher Marshall V last year gave Sun-Times Editor Jim Hoge two years and a $2 million budget increase for one last effort to save the News.

Hoge, 42, who was made editor in chief of both Field papers, closed the News's expensive foreign bureaus, weeded the Chicago staff, added gossip and entertainment coverage, and gave the paper a crisp, well-organized new design. The result was a rash of favorable reviews in the trade--and more circulation losses. Last week the competing Tribune (circ. 757,000) dropped one of its late-morning editions, forcing the News to pay the full cost of a distribution system that the two papers had shared. Marshall, 36, and his half-brother Frederick ("Teddy"), 26, who together own 90% of Field Enterprises, decided to cut the News's losses ($21.7 million since 1974) and run.

The Fields' surviving Sun-Times is expected to absorb some News heavyweights, including Columnist Mike Royko, and may eventually become a "24 hour" paper like the Tribune, which produces fresh editions throughout the day. Down at Riccardo's, a local watering hole, reporters from the city's dailies last week drifted in from covering murder and municipal venality to speculate about last-minute rescues, swap news of job openings and hoist a glass to the past. "It might have been the greatest newspaper in the country," said Reporter David Jackson of the News's shining last year, "and still couldn't have lasted."

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