The plan was neatly and quietly executed. For over a year, Chicago's Marshall Field Enterprises debated establishing a new paper, but not a word leaked out to the public. Projections and surveys were examined at meetings of the board of directors, then all papers were destroyed before the meetings were ended. An editorial and sales force of 20 was hired and trained without knowing where it was going to work. When the competition began to ask questions about all the Field activity, false rumors were spread to throw them off the scent. Finally, two weeks ago, Field announced that it would start a new suburban daily in Arlington Heights, 23 miles from downtown Chicago. This week the Arlington Day appears on the newsstands.
The first suburban daily ever founded in the U.S. by a metropolitan daily newspaper, the eight-page Day will serve a community that Field executives think is an ideal testing ground. The population of Arlington Heights has quadrupled in the past 15 years to 44,100, four times the average rate of increase in Chicago's suburbs. Almost half its largely white-collar families earn an income of more than $10,000; retail trade has increased 206% from 1954 to 1963. "A dynamic and expanding community needs a daily voice," says Day Editor and Publisher John Stanton, 56, who moved over from managing editor of Field's Chicago Daily News.
The Day, which plans to run mostly local news with a smattering of wire-service copy from U.P.I., faces competition from a weekly, the Arlington Heights Herald, whose editors feel that suburbanites lack the time to read a local daily. The Day thinks otherwise. "A suburban dweller who hears a fire engine in the middle of the night wants to know what has happened right away," says Stanton. To make sure that other competition does not grow too strong, Field Enterprises has bought up a string of 13 suburban weeklies and a modern offset printing press on which the Day will initially be printed. Field will also distribute a shopper—a throwaway containing mostly ads—in order to soak up any additional advertising in Arlington Heights.
Flight of the Middle Class. Field Enterprises is moving into the suburbs at the right time, for suburban dailies have never been more prosperous. While the circulation of metropolitan dailies rose a scant 1.9% from 1945 to 1962, the circulation of suburban dailies jumped 80.5%. The combined circulation of New York City's six competing dailies declined in the past decade, while out on Long Island, the nation's biggest suburban daily, Newsday,* almost doubled its circulation from 239,000 to 400,000.