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Troubled second newspapers

When the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain threatened two years ago to fold its longtime flagship Cleveland Press, at which E.W. Scripps launched his empire in 1878, Joseph E. Cole, 67, a Democratic Party activist and millionaire merchant, stepped in. Cole insisted that a local owner could better compete with the Newhouse-owned rival Plain Dealer to keep Cleveland from becoming a one-newspaper town. With the same confidence that had lifted him from poverty as the youngest of a peddler's eight children, Cole spent $1 million acquiring the Press and an estimated $18 million to $20 million sustaining and transforming it, launching a Sunday edition and splashing the pages with color photographs. The newspaper's unions cooperated in layoffs, wage restraints and other concessions; Scripps-Howard agreed that most of the reported $20 million purchase price could come from any profits. Discounts and gimmicks helped push circulation from 304,000 to 316,000 and boosted advertising by 5.5 million lines. For once, the rescue of a big-city paper seemed to be working.

But not, alas, fast enough. Last week Cole conceded that his pockets were not deep enough to continue covering losses gauged at $500,000 or more a month; efforts to secure a partner had failed. Said Cole: "I had my heart set on keeping two vibrant and independent voices, but we just could not make it."

The Press was the tenth metropolitan editorial voice to be stilled in the past year. The collapse of the Washington Star and Philadelphia Bulletin left those cities at least temporarily with one newspaper ownership. The New York Daily News Tonight and the Minneapolis Star were folded into morning editions published by the same companies; the Des Moines Tribune is scheduled for the same fate. Competing morning and evening news staffs have been merged by owners in Dayton, Duluth, Atlanta and Fort Lauderdale. Fold-or-sell rumors persist for the Hearst-owned Boston Herald American.

Another Hearst paper, however, won a new lease on editorial survival last week. Attorney General William French Smith approved a joint operating agreement that will combine the money-losing business operations of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with those of its profitable rival, the Seattle Times. Challengers to the plan, including suburban papers and disgruntled P-I employees, pledged a court battle, but similar agreements are lawfully in effect in some 23 U.S. cities. Should the Seattle proposal hold up, it will preserve one more community as at least a one-and-a-half newspaper town.

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