New York is a city of newspaper superlatives. Its biggest paper is the biggest in the U.S.—the Daily News (circ. 1,980,338)—and even its smallest, the Post (343,140), outranks all but 28 of the country's 1,750 dailies. It puts out more papers every day (45) in more languages (eleven) and in greater variety (there is even a daily paper for metal workers) than any other city. And even if the list is restricted to newspapers of general circulation, New York's seven big dailies still put the city in a class by itself.
Boston is second, with five dailies, and Los Angeles and Chicago share third-place honors with four each. Although daily competition has vanished in all but 61 U.S. cities, in New York it flourishes with such savage intensity that Hearst's Journal-American spent $500,000 last year on circulation contests alone.
Behind this impressive front lie some disturbing facts. In the last ten years, while daily newspaper circulation rose 6,000,000 nationally, in New York it fell 358,000, and Sunday circulation slippage was far worse: 1,819,000. In the same decade, only one New York paper, the Times, logged any significant gain, rising 220,000 to 744,763. New York's newspaper competition is not merely savage; it is mortal. Two of New York's four morning papers and all three of its evening papers are fighting for their lives.
Monopoly on Merit. "This town can't support seven newspapers," says New York Newspaper Broker Vincent J. Manno. "If you added all seven together, you wouldn't come out with a net profit of $2,000,000 a year." To Scripps-Howard's Roy Howard (World-Telegram & Sun) and William Randolph Hearst Jr. (Journal-American, Mirror), the cost of keeping their papers going is worth it just for having New York as a prestige outlet for their chains.
But Samuel I. Newhouse, a man who has spent a lifetime buying newspapers (he now has 14) and making them pay, has never seriously shopped in New York; he feels that Manhattan's field of seven will ultimately shrink to four. Times Publisher Orvil Dryfoos, agrees that the presence of seven Manhattan dailies is "freakish." Says Dryfoos, without naming those papers he thinks are doomed: "Within ten years there's bound to be a different lineup."
Paradoxically, the first casualties are likely to occur in the morning lineup, where the New York press shows greatest strength. The four morning papers not only vastly outcirculate the three evening dailies (3,933,000 to 1,459,000), but hold a monopoly on merit. The Times, the
Daily News and the Herald Tribune, all morning papers, are generally regarded as the only good newspapers in town. But the Herald Tribune is locked in a vise between the Times and the News, and the city's fourth morning paper, Hearst's tabloid Mirror, is dangerously close to death.