When a crowded passenger train jumped the tracks and crashed in Medford, Mass, one morning last week, the Quincy Patriot Ledger had to race twelve miles farther for the story than the dailies in nearby Boston. Nonetheless, the alert evening Ledger (slogan: "Cover the World and Don't Forget the South Shore") had its expert wrap-up of the story (EXPRESS TRAIN WRECKED ON BRIDGE IN MEDFORD; 2 KILLED, MANY INJURED) in readers' hands long before metropolitan papers got to the South Shore with the story.
The feat was routine for the Patriot Ledger (circ. 44,349), which has its own U.N. correspondent, staffed the Olympic Games in Australia, and sent its own reporter to cover the 1955 summit meeting in Geneva. But the fast footwork of Editor John R. Herbert and staff also typified the vitality of middle-sized dailies across the nation in a David-Goliath competitive struggle that is fast transforming the U.S. press.
In a historic shift of newspaper influence that has paced the human exodus from big cities, the middle-sized dailies (very roughly speaking, with circulations of 20,000 to 75,000) in smaller cities and suburbs since World War II have passed the metropolitan press with the biggest circulation upsurge in their history. While big-city papers' share of the reader market has actually slipped (from 39% to 37%) since 1953, middle-sized dailies today account for 39% of all the 57 million daily papers sold in the U.S.—and they are forging ahead at a steady 1% a year. They have also been hit less hard by spiraling costs than their metropolitan competitors. Most middle-tier dailies net between 8% and 12% a year, v. 3% to 5% for the prosperous big-city papers—and few of the big-city papers are truly prosperous. They also compete less fiercely for advertising than most metropolitan dailies, which not only charge lower line rates but must pay far more to boost out-of-city circulation. Says a Chicago metropolitan newspaper executive: "Anybody who's looking for a newspaper with a future ought to look in the middle-sized cities. Most big papers today are nothing but big trouble."