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Mrs. Murphy's Outhouse. From Southern California's sprawling super-metropolis to the exurbs of New Jersey and Long Island, the middleweights give readers a commodity that increasingly defies the resources of the big-city daily: intensive home-town coverage plus an increasingly sophisticated coverage of world affairs. Now a giant among examples of the trend, Alicia Patterson's broadly curious, ad-fat Newsday (TIME. Sept. 13, 1954) has scooped 268,626 Long Island readers right out of the pants pockets of New York City's seven major dailies since 1940. Under the guns of Los Angeles' four dailies, 30 suburban and small-town papers share more than 700,000 circulation; in West Covina. only 20 miles from the Los Angeles Times building, the three-year-old San Gabriel Valley Tribune (circ. 30,195) last week published a paper of 78 pages—only two pages smaller than the mighty Times —and crammed with news of the six communities it serves. Says the editor of a prospering middle-sized Illinois daily: "The Chicago Tribune and the Detroit Free Press come into our towns like a ton of bricks. But we cover the local news like a tent over a dime. For us. the biggest news in the world is that Mrs. Murphy painted her outhouse red this morning."
Where small-town papers once focused exclusively on Mrs. Murphy, the multiplying middleweights have built circulation with the worldwide coverage for which readers formerly turned to metropolitan dailies. Many newspapers are prospering in spite of almost irresponsible mediocrity. But in a comparative survey last week, TIME correspondents across the U.S. found that in a majority of cases top national and international stories got substantially the same play in big cities and small. The middle-tier papers have also been quick to seize on such technological advances as color printing, tele-typesetters and cheap, fast methods that enable them to use as heavy photo coverage as most city dailies.
Nibbled to Death. Many fast-growing papers, such as California's San Bernadino Sun and Telegram (combined circ. 58,076), which cover the biggest county in the U.S.. fence metropolitan competitors with networks of string correspondents, special editions for local communities, one of the city-slick Sunday magazines. Says the publisher of a small-city Midwestern chain: "You have to be the plus paper." Through such tactics, Michigan's middlesized dailies have pared more than 100,000 Sunday circulation from Hearst's Detroit Times. Laments a metropolitan newspaper executive in Atlanta: "We're being nibbled to death by small ducks."