(2 of 3)
The turning point for the Star was 1954, although no one knew it at the time. It was then that the Post acquired the Times-Herald, more than doubling its own circulation and securing a monopoly in the morning. Instead of starting a morning edition to compete with the Post, the Star stood pat. Conservative in politics and outlook, the Star's proprietors failed to recognize that Washington was becoming a far more liberal and sophisticated place.
The Star's plight was similar to that of other big-city evening papers, which lost about 20% of their circulation between 1965 and 1979. The flight of city dwellers to the suburbs and the gradual postwar shift from a blue-collar to a white-collar work force have created an audience predisposed to morning papers. Today's reader goes to work later and has less time for reading a newspaper at the end of the day. Although television coverage offers less depth, it can provide much fresher news: many evening papers go to press before midday so that delivery trucks can beat the evening rush hour.
More important than its troubles in the afternoon, the Star could not buck the deeply entrenched Washington Post. Acknowledged Munro: "We were either naive enough or unrealistic enough to think we could come in and steal some of the market share from one of the most powerful newspapers in the country." Throughout Time Inc.'s ownership, the Post was able to hold on to 75% of the city's newspaper advertising. In tight economic times, advertisers cling to the dominant paper. Says Chicago Sun-Times Publisher Jim Hoge, who tried and failed to save that city's evening Daily News: "Once you get deep in the hole, it is almost impossible to get out."
In hindsight, some newspaper experts fault the Star's editorial strategy, although their analyses are often contradictory. Some argue that the paper should have stressed soft features and service articles, since the Post already offered a comprehensive package of local, national and foreign news. On the contrary, argues Ben Bagdikian, former Post national editor and now a journalism professor at the University of California at Berkeley: "I would have gone head to head against the Post in the morning . . . with a steady diet of authoritative, detailed pieces."
Time Inc. studied these possibilities but found serious flaws in all of them. Says Grunwald: "I am convinced that the 'soft feature' approach would not have worked in the long run. As for converting the Star to a morning paper, we concluded that it would have been prohibitively expensive." The editors also considered turning it into a racy tabloid, but quickly rejected that idea as being contrary to the company's editorial tradition. Moreover, it is far from certain that such a drastic change in the Star's character would have succeeded commercially. Says Washington Publishing Analyst John Morton: "There wasn't any real solution to the Star's problems."