Fold the front page

Peter Paterson

Chicago The Chicago school of journalism is quite as well known, I suppose, as the Chicago school of economics. Possibly more so, since its chief celebration is the film and Play versions of The Front Page, the black Comedy of newspaper life by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and more people have seen that than have listened to Professor Milton Friedman. Chicago-style jour nalism, if it ever really existed in the form Portrayed by Hecht and MacArthur, hasn't been around for a long time, and the Chicago Daily News, one of the papers that flourished the idea of foot-in-the-door reporting in the 'twenties, is due to fold next week.

The demise of the Daily News, an evening newspaper, has been accompanied by a great many lachrymose obituaries, all of Which mention Ben Hecht. He will chiefly be remembered in Britain for the campaign the Daily Express ran against him at the time of the British departure from Palestine, when he enraged Lord Beaverbrook, among others, by saying that every time a British soldier was killed, 'there's a song in My heart' .

Nobody in America remembers that, With the possible exception of the great Chicago sage Studs Terkel; and Mr Hecht (along with our own Nicholas von Hoffman) takes his place in the pantheon of Journalists who have served the Daily News, earning its fifteen Pulitzer prizes and engaging in its battles with successive mayors of Chicago during its 102 years' history. Incidentally, Mr Terkel, who has an uncomfortably long memory, insists that the two heroes of The Front Page were, in fact, modelled on two double-dyed villains, and that Hecht and his co-author were the most uninvestigative reporters in Chicago's history.

Be that as it may, a great wave of sentimentality surrounds the death of the Daily News, as is customary when a casualty occurs in the newspaper business. Not that It came as any surprise. As long ago as 1971 the Chicago Journalism Review, an earnest Publication which itself succumbed to remor -less market forces a couple of years ago, was suggesting that its owner, Marshall Field V, should either sell the Daily News to someone who would really care for it, or fold it: 'To prolong the agony is cruel.' In fact, it has been both cruel and expensive. Since 1974 the paper has lost $21 million, half of that sum disappearing last year alone. And in three years its circulation has fallen from about 400,000 to just over 300,000 a day.

While the American newspaper business is booming, thanks largely to the creation of monopoly papers in most cities, evening newspapers have been something of an

exception. Many of the Daily Mail's readers have fled the inner city to the outlying

suburbs. There they are catered for by giveaway sheets and local weeklies that provide a sharper focus on their shopping and entertainment needs, and in any case, it has proved too costly to distribute the paper during the rush hour to the outer suburbs.

Ner could the Daily News, in spite of much thrashing about with new layouts, new features and a succession of editors, ever learn to cope with the arch-competitor, television.

Even so, for a management which has known for so long that their paper was doomed, Marshall Field V and his advisers have conducted the last rites over the Daily News with astonishing ineptitude and insen sitivity. I arrived in Chicago while the paper was in its death throes, just before that special day in the city's calendar also associated with death throes — St Valentine's Day. There was little evidence of that hardboiled toughness personified by Walter Burns, the ruthless editor in The Front Page. Nor the can't-do-too-much-for-a good-firm attitude displayed now and then by reporter Hildy Johnson. Riccardo's, which is Chicago's haunt for drinking journalists, was packed with gloomy Daily News men wearily resigned to acting as extras for the gloating cameras of the local TV stations, liquidly comforted by their colleagues on Chicago's two morning papers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times.

However, about thirty staff on the Daily New's sister paper, the Sun-Times, got the sack as well. In making room for some of the Daily News men, and a few women, Marshall Field V decided to trim back the staff of the Sun-Times. And, surprise, surprise, the people who were first shown the door on both papers were the most active members of the journalists' union, the Newspaper Guild. There may, oddly, be a perverse justice in this. Had the Guild been more effective, the staff of the Daily News and the Sun-Times would have been better protected. It is hard to imagine a Fleet Street closure which would first involve a number of discreet interviews with individuals on the paper assuring them that they would be transferred, while the rest anxiously bit their finger nails, wondering whether they too might be saved at a later stage.

The level of severance pay was also surprisingly low by British standards. Departing journalists are entitled to two weeks' salary for each year of service — about half or less than a redundant British journalist could expect.

• The Guild, having been completely outflanked by Marshall Field V, is now attempting a come-back by suing the company on various technical points. For example, they claim that their contract prevents any compulsory transfer of journalists between papers within the Field group, and that the closure of the Daily News amounts to coercion. It is a line that is highly unlikely to disturb the sleep of Marshall Field V.

It is hardly surprising that journalists on the prosperous Tribune, looking down from the gothic fantasy of the skyscraper built by the great Anglophobe Colonel Robert McCormick, are congratulating themselves on having remained firmly non-union. It means that they have greater security, higher pay, profit-sharing and a better deal if they are required forcibly to part company with the paper.

Some Daily News and Sun-Times writers will, of course, fall on their feet. The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle both took hotel suites in Chicago where they interviewed potential recruits, flying some of them out of the disaster area overnight. Mike Royko, the biggest asset of the Daily News, floated across to the Tribune, was offered a job and then declined it, before agreeing to move his syndicated column to the Sun-Times. 'I just wanted an offer from the Tribune for the sake of my memoirs,' he said.

But for lesser mortals there were certain humiliations. Marshall Field V, in a burst of old-world paternalism, had a list of his sacked journalists circulated to the other Chicago and out-of-town papers. It reads like the manifest for a slave auction: 'Frank Brennan — Good utility man, copy reading, rewriting, expert on weather; John Tweedle — Black, energetic, capable; Steve Good — Superb young reporter with good attitude; Morris Thompson — Black, fine writer, experienced auto industry reporter. . . As usual, it is Studs Terkel who draws the otherwise unmentionable political lesson from it all. 'Journalists think they are above the battle, immune, spectators of the passing show. Then, all of a sudden, the,y find they're not. They can be laid off just like any other worker.' Meanwhile, everyone else is saying they can't imagine Chicago without the Daily News.' They will, alas, soon grow used to it.