The Danger of Being in Second Place

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

The decline, and even the disappearance, of some once great American newspapers is to those who love the craft of newspapering like the personal loss so many travelers felt when the great transatlantic liners disappeared. Those big liners had their distinct personalities--the French liners with their exuberant meals, the reliable and stately Queens. Newspapers had decided characteristics too, in the days when the Philadelphia Bulletin jauntily advertised that in Philadelphia NEARLY EVERYBODY READS THE BULLETIN, when the Washington Star faithfully reflected the "cliff-dwellers" in the nation's capital. Later, attempting to change with the times, but perhaps too late in doing so, proud papers like these became more like the QE2 with its disco sounds and mod settings--up to date but still not able to attract the crowds of old.

Not that newspapers are going the way of ocean liners. Trouble among newspapers is more selective. Most papers, particularly in suburbs and in smaller cities, prosper. Often they are monopolies, "the only game in town." The endangered species is the second paper, the one that gives the community an alternative voice. John Morton, a newspaper analyst, reports that at least eleven major papers are in trouble, and predicts that in the years to come there will be no second newspaper anywhere, "with the possible exception of New York and perhaps Chicago."

As the number of big-city papers dwindles, the survivors become less partisan and become all things to all men. Their editorials seek more to reason than to rant. Op-Ed pages give others a voice. Papers that don't want to make waves rent their opinions from elsewhere and are careful to choose columnists across a spectrum of views. Even highly opinionated columnists are diminished in impact when they become simply another carefully chosen hue on a color wheel of opinion. Editorials, particularly on chain-owned newspapers, are apt to be blandly in favor of worthy causes and prudently evasive on issues that rile and divide the city.

It is a tone curiously like that the Government imposed on television when parceling out its scarce and lucrative channels. "Equal time" and the "fairness doctrine" have narrow, legalistic application, but the public has extended these phrases to mean that the entire press should be a neutral, unbiased conduit of information. This notion of the press as a quasi public utility would have enraged the domineering newspaper czars of earlier days. It might also have distressed the constitutional forefathers, who counted on a competitive free press to initiate robust, even unsporting debate.

Some of the second papers now in deepest trouble were slowest to abandon the autocratic attitudes that gave them their character. Morton thinks that troubled second newspapers suffer from decisions they made or failed to make decades ago. Perhaps it is no accident that the papers Hearst owns in Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle are the troubled second papers in those cities. "The Hearst papers have been on a downhill slide for 30 years and are now a third-rate chain," says Allen H. Neuharth. The arrogance of Neuharth's remark comes from his success in building up the profitable Gannett chain of more than 80 newspapers, many of them local monopolies. Most exemplify the new blenderized newspaper, which leaves no mark because it has so little sting. But if newspapers are similar in tone and coverage, who needs to read a second paper to balance the first? Newspaper readership has been declining for years. Young people read fewer newspapers than their parents. The drop in circulation is sharpest on the second newspaper in town.

Big-city afternoon papers are particularly vulnerable because their best readers have fled to the suburbs, where newspaper trucks in afternoon traffic jams have trouble reaching them, and evening television brings more up-to-date news. But another trend is more devastating: when one paper dominates a city, increasingly it is winner take all.

Advertisers, not readers, have placed this unhealthy emphasis on dominance. Morton is convinced that the Washington Star and the Chicago Daily News need not have folded, and the Philadelphia Bulletin and Cleveland Press would not be in such difficulty if their share of the city's advertising was as large as their share of the city's circulation.

Leo Bogart, executive vice president of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, thinks that most major markets can support two competing newspapers if merchants wake up to their self-interest. Instead, most advertising decisions are made not locally but on Madison Avenue or at national headquarters of local department stores and supermarkets. There, decisions are reached, says Bogart, "with single-minded impersonal efficiency. The second paper gets dropped if the advertiser is satisfied that the dominant paper gives him 60% of the target audience." Does the disappearance of the second paper matter to anyone, except in an anguishing way to its owners and staff? "The political and social ramifications are horrible to me," says Bogart.

He sees this as an atrophy of "the number of channels of civic concern." Official wrongdoing or shocking conditions in local schools or hospitals often require persistent and exhaustive reporting. "What are the odds, if you have one paper instead of two, that it will go after the story?" Bogart asks. Of course, local television does investigations, which can be effective when the evidence is largely visual. Too often, however, such stories are mere exchanges of charges and countercharges in interviews by news personalities with too little command of the subject. A newspaper is much better at giving enough facts and arguments to let readers make up their own minds.

Now that the Reagan Administration is throwing the costs and burdens of Government back on states and cities unused to such sums and such authority, there is more need than ever for a vigorous, tough-minded and competitive local press. But will it be there?

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