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The dean's reticence is understandable. He might have been asked to justify and compare his picks. And no one yet has found a fair and reliable means for measuring any two newspapers on the same scale. Reading tastes, requirements and styles vary so widely that to grade the performance of the New York Times, say, against that of the Minneapolis Tribune would do an injustice to both papers.
In a speech last September, the Tribune's president, John Cowles, pointed out that the New York Times reached only one in eight families in its distribution area. "It simply doesn't appeal," said Cowles, "to the seven-eighths of the population who have less education and less intellectual curiosity" than the Times assumes of its readers. Concluded Cowles: "No Minneapolis paper that appealed to only one-eighth of the people here could possibly survive."
Conscience & Guide. But despite such difficulties of comparison, ways do exist for gauging newspaper excellence. All superior papers have something in common, wherever they are published and for whatever readership. The late Paul Patterson, onetime publisher of the Baltimore Sunpapers, pointed out one common denominator: "If you put out a good enough paper, people will read it. If enough people read it, advertisers will support it." The statement illuminates a fundamental truth: newspapering is a business, and a good business makes money.
Beyond this purely commercial factor lie others that bear on a newspaper's place in its community. Any paper, even a poor one, is inevitably cast by its readers in the role of community conscience, guardian and guide. The truly great newspaper eagerly, tirelessly and aggressively acts the part; it becomes deeply immersed in the main currents of its community. The truly great newspaper is also consumed by a catholic curiosity that carries its readers along with it.
With these criteria, and with the experience gained in 40 years of appraising the performance of the Press, TIME has made its own choice of the top daily newspapers in the U.S., culled from the country's 1,760 dailies. The unranked selections, in alphabetical order:
THE SUN
The Baltimore Sun will be free, firm and temperate.
—From its first issue Circulation 187,000 mornings. 215,000 evenings. 330,000 Sundays. Independent-Democrat. Supported Roosevelt in 1932, no one in 1936. Republicans since.