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"Pallid" & "Better." The changes in the Tribune rate mixed reviews. Says Larry Fanning, executive editor of the competing Sun-Times: "It's more pallid today than it was. The guy who hated the Tribune and used to read it to find out what the old buzzard was saying today has no reason to buy it." Fanning's boss, Sim-Times Editor Milburn P. Akers, takes a different view: "It was always a great newspaper, but now it's more objective."
Now and then, the colonel's ghost gets restless, and the old-style fire burns. It usually flares up on the editorial page, where the top hand is Leon Stoltz, who has been belting out Tribune editorials since 1928. "A habitual and unrepentant drunkard delivering a temperance lecture," sneered the Trib of President Eisenhower's 1957 State of the Union message, which expressed his alarm over inflation.
When Iowa and Minnesota, both states with Democratic Governors, used troops to maintain order in a meat-packing strike last month, the Trib gave both Governors the back of its hand: "The Democratic party in Iowa and Minnesota can justly proclaim itself the goon party." But such blazes are getting rarer. Tribune Publisher Chesser Campbell and his aides are far less interested in McCormick's shade than they are in improving the Trib's tight grip on Chicagoland. Circulation has slipped since McCormick's death—883,213 today against 892,058 then—but the competition has lost ground, too (the Sun-Times is off 10,123, down to 546,862), as Chicago's burgeoning suburban dailies, more than 80 in all, slice into the city papers' domain. The Tribune, always prosperous, is sleeker than ever. In the last five years, annual gross income rose $18 million to an estimated $91 million for 1959; in the same period, ad linage rose 14%.
Trib staffers are pleased with many aspects of the post-colonel era. "It used to be," said one upper-echelon executive, "that you would go to a cocktail party and someone would want to punch you on the nose just because you worked for the Tribune. That doesn't happen any more." But then he added with some nostalgia: "Those guys who used to take to their white chargers over an issue just don't seem to be around any more." Not many of them are.