A great American newspaper stepped into history on March 4, 1978.

The Chicago Daily News wasn’t the first Chicago daily to close up shop, and might not be the last. It folded after a prolonged but ultimately futile battle against market forces and changing urban geographic realities that slowly bleed it of advertisers and circulation.

Many of the same market forces that killed off the Daily News continue to buffet print journalism. The Sun-Times more and more exudes the stink of desperation as its tries one ploy after another, yet grows increasingly anorexic. The Chicago Reader is being slowly gutted of the sort of meandering literary delight that made it a must read for three decades.

The cold reality is that times change. If people don’t change with them, they’re left behind. Still, it sometimes feels like we’ve just settled into our seat on an airplane and realized we left something essential back home on the dining room table.

Back in the 70s, Chicago had four newspapers competing for the public’s pocket change—two mornings papers, the Tribune and Sun-Times that published before dawn, and Chicago’s American and the Daily News, whose first editions came out after 9 a.m.

The News was an “afternoon” paper and the Tribune a “morning” paper, though in reality both terms were at best general descriptions . The Daily News and Chicago’s American published four and even five editions throughout the day, starting around 9 a.m. The Tribune and Sun-Times printed their first edition around 2 a.m. The Trib’s last edition the Three Star Home, nicknamed “the Bulldog,” came out in the evening.

The Daily News was a marvel, both to readers and competing journalists. The Tribune’s James Yuenger called it “one of America’s great newspapers.” The day after the Daily News ceased publishing Yuenger wrote, “Above all, the News was a reporter’s paper, and its pages have been enlivened by some of best journalists in the business.”

Indeed. While the Tribune is Chicago’s premier paper now, in the 60’s it was the Daily News that was known for exemplary journalism. The News won four of its 13 Pulitzer prizes from 1963 through 1972, while its sister publication, the Sun-Times, added two more. The Tribune won one Pulitzer over that same time period.

There was Mike Royko’s column on page three. Veteran foreign correspondent Keyes Beech sent riveting reports back from Vietnam.
Peter Lisagor, one of the most respected and well-known journalists in the United States, was the paper’s Washington bureau chief from 1959 to 1976, Editor Larry Fanning created Panorama, the first regular feature section in a daily newspaper. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist John Fischetti graced the editorial page, and Al Capp’s “Lil’ Abner” lead off the city’s best cartoon section.

For decades the Daily News was a trailblazer. At the dawn of America’s first media revolution 75 years ago, it was the Daily News that first fully joined forces with radio, partnering with the old Fair Department Store chain to launch WGU-AM. The station was eventually renamed WMAQ-AM after the Daily News took full ownership and absorbed rival WQJ-AM.

Foreshadowing future events, the paper eventually sold WMAQ to the National Broadcasting Company. The Chicago Tribune later purchased two radio stations and transformed them into WGN-AM. Unlike the management of the Daily News, it wisely retained ownership of what would become a powerhouse media outlet.

Sadly, it was printing schedules, not journalistic quality that mattered most. The Daily News, which had survived everything including a flooded printing room in 1954 that necessitated the paper being printed on, of all things, the Tribune’s printing presses, couldn’t survive the triple whammy of social, economic and demographic change. The sales of afternoon dailies declined with the rise of television and the movement of its readers to the suburbs. By the 1970s, with the decline of heavy industry, there were not as many people commuting to night-shift jobs, long the main readers of afternoon newspapers.

With the continued exodus of the Daily News’ readership to the suburbs, distribution efforts were increasingly dependent on long ribbons of concrete that grew more and more congested, making it ever more difficult to deliver newspaper in a timely manner.

In 1969, the Tribune Company converted its struggling Chicago’s American to a tabloid format and re-christened it Chicago Today, one of several moves intended to attract more readers. None of them worked, and the paper folded on Sept. 13, 1974.

The Daily News made adjustments as well, including management changes and page redesign, but again, it proved futile. The Daily News had a circulation of 600,000 in 1959 when publisher John S. Knight sold the paper to Marshall Field. By the time it folded 19 years later, published reports put it’s daily circulation at around 305,000.

Ultimately there was nothing left to do but acknowledge the inevitable and pen the eulogies. “So long, Chicago,” read the banner headline on the final Daily News, written by nightside copy desk chief Tom Gavagan.

Royko compared the passing of his beloved paper to boys playing softball watching the fading rays of late summer sunlight on a darkening school playground. The piece resonated with dread of inevitable, impending loss. He concluded with somber acceptance of the paper’s fate, writing, “But the sun always went down. And now it’s almost dark again.”

“In the end, there was nothing left to do,” wrote Allen Mutter, a former Daily news editor who’s now an internet media executive in Northern California. The final Daily News printed the name of everyone working at the paper that day, a day Mutter called “one of the saddest and proudest days of my life.”

Daily News management folded some of its staff into the morning Sun-Times, but many good journalists and most Daily News drivers were out of work. All told, in fact, 985 people—editorial, administrative and distribution—lost their job.

Some people, including the Daily News’ previous publisher, John S.Knight, contended that Daily News management could have done more. Knight, who’d run the paper profitably for 15 years, castigated Field’s handling of the Daily News, writing that it died of, “editorial ineptness and managerial malnutrition.”

Mutter disagrees. “I would have to say there is nothing — not improved content, holographic pictures or even free dental floss — that could have saved afternoon newspapers from the competing electronic media and modern commuting patterns, work styles and life styles,” Mutter said via email in 2006. “Times change and people move on. If media companies don’t do so, they will lose. In the case of the (News), we outlived our usefulness and there was nothing to be done.”

Newspapers haven’t outlived their usefulness. There’s something still to be done for newspapers, though precisely what is still unclear. Yes, there’s the Internet, television, cell phones and radio, not to mention Craig’s List. Amidst all that, newspapers often seem an afterthought

Listen carefully, however, and you’ll see that newspapers remain a strong and essential presence. The major stories are still almost always broken by newspapers. Morning radio and television news reports are often prefaced with the term, “the Tribune reports”, or “the Sun-Times reports.”

As for the internet, with the exception of a few websites like this one and sites maintained by professional news gathering organizations, the web remains a cacophony of unsubstantiated claims and opinions, interspersed with regurgitated news stories cut and pasted from traditional news sources.

The Daily News is dead, but not daily newspapers. “Content,” that dry abstraction now too often used to refer to journalism, is still king, even as the vessels that hold that content continue to be transformed.

If what those vessels hold ever goes away, the sun will truly have set on society as we know it. Democracy is a fragile thing, easily rocked and roiled by the fears and passions of those who enjoy its benefits, as the last few years have shown.

Without the light—and often heat—that quality print journalism, however imperfect it may be, brings to our public affairs, here is no free and informed society, and thus no democracy.

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