The War of the Weeklies

Cutthroat newspaper competition is on the wane in most U.S. cities, but not in Boston. The big daily papers, the Globe, the Herald Traveler, and the Record American, are not scrapping. But two small weeklies that feature radical politics, rock-music and movie reviews, plus gamy classified ads, are presently engaged in a fierce--and profitable--battle for readers and revenues. Moreover, their hard-digging reporting is beginning to stir up the downtown dailies as well.

Until recently, Boston After Dark was little more than a modest entertainment guide with a giveaway circulation of about 30,000. Its only competition was the Cambridge Phoenix, which was run by a radical collective and had a circulation of only 890. But seven months ago, Phoenix was bought by Ray Reipen, 35, a Harvard Law School graduate, and Richard Missner, 28, who has a degree from the Harvard Business School. They hired an able staff of ten newsmen and imported Harper Barnes, a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as editor. Early this year Missner bought out his partner and proceeded to plow about $350,000 of his own money into his new property--money that he is now beginning to recoup.

Trash-Can War. To get out of the red, Missner employed hundreds of hungry young hawkers in blue jeans and headbands who swarmed over Boston and Cambridge every Monday morning, making 20-c- on every 25-c- copy sold. Boston After Dark soon felt the impact of this sales army and began to press upon each willing Phoenix hawker 50 free copies of BAD, also to be sold at 25-c- apiece. Phoenix retaliated by offering the hawkers one, then two free copies of Phoenix for every copy of BAD they tossed in the trash can. Eventually, the hawker war was ended by court order. By that time, Phoenix's paid circulation had risen to 33,000 and BAD's to 20,000 (plus another 67,000 copies distributed free).

As competition between the papers tightened, BAD strengthened its news coverage. Both papers did hard-hitting pieces on a Boston fire that took eight lives last April, and for weeks published details about negligence in the building industry; finally the city dailies picked up the trail. The BAD staff took particular delight in the fact that their story on the FBI investigation of Daniel Ellsberg was picked up by the Washington Post, syndicated, and eventually appeared in the Boston Globe.

The Competition Myth. The better of the two papers is the Phoenix. As Publisher Missner sees it, most newspapers are merely '"reactive," reporting news when institutions release it. The function of a weekly, he says, is "to find out and explain how local institutions work, and what the people who run them are like. And that can involve anything from how to buy meat at Haymarket to explanations about how government surveillance operates." In three recent issues, Phoenix published a long, comprehensive report on real estate profiteering and the resulting urban problems in Cambridge. As Phoenix sees it, the villains are Harvard University, M.I.T. and the city's chief tax assessor, among others.

Since the BAD-Phoenix rivalry began, the Boston Globe has stepped up its investigative reports and expanded its weekend entertainment coverage. "The competition," says Globe Editor Tom Winship, "is going to keep us on our toes." Another result of the newspaper war is a change in the attitudes of some of the young radical newsmen. Says BAD Editor Ted Gross, 26: "A lot of us tend to think that the great American myth of competition is crap. But there is something about the competition of two papers that makes working for them or reading them exciting. It's what the rest of the media need."

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