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The Globe is known as "a writer's paper"—permissively edited, and allowing a variety of tone and approach. In George Frazier, whose columns are a continuing tirade against lapses in taste, morals and common sense, it has one of the few genuine eccentrics left in daily journalism. Music Critic Michael Steinberg's running quarrel with Erich Leinsdorf s direction of the Boston Symphony was a major factor in the maestro's departure in 1969. Sport Columnist Bud Collins is easily the best tennis reporter in the country.
With a five-man bureau in Washington, the Globe's national coverage is excellent. It is somewhat weaker in covering Boston's own sprawling suburbs. Overall, the Globe is one of the country's most improved papers during the past decade.
THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE Morning (circ. 681,766) and Sunday (1,157,032).
Gone from the front page are the old-fogyish editorial cartoons, as well as the proclamation that this is the "American Paper for Americans." The comic strip Moon Mullins no longer adorns the first page of the sports section, and most of the Shavian experiments in phonetic spelling (frate for freight) are a thing of the past. Thanks to its flamboyant long time publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick, the Tribune's history is as colorful as that of any paper in the nation. But its raucous eccentricities have given way to a calmer tone and a less polemical approach to events.
The Trib has always excelled at local investigative reporting—for which Chicago provides ample raw material —and it keeps bearing down hard. Under the direction of George Bliss, 55, muckraking teams have scored an impressive number of exclusives, including the Pulitzer- prizewinning exposé of 1972 Cook County vote frauds and an eight-part series on police brutality that resulted in several indictments.
Major credit for the paper's new orientation goes to Clayton Kirkpatrick, 59, a 34-year veteran of the paper who became editor in 1969. Kirkpatrick toned down the Trib's Republican war cries, which were sometimes as audible in news columns as in editorials, and balanced them with other viewpoints. The paper supported Nixon in 1972 but gave regular front-page coverage to McGovern. The Trib has occasionally endorsed Democrats for local and state offices. "We are no longer backing a particular point of view all the time," says Kirkpatrick. "We are using balance."
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES Morning (circ. 1,036,911) and Sunday (1,226,132).
With the strike-crippled Herald-Examiner as its only metropolitan competition, the chief threat facing the Los Angeles Times could be lethargy. It is fat (average daily size: 106 pages) but not exactly sassy. It carries more advertising linage than any other U.S. daily (1973 total: 117,450,860 lines); yet it gives the impression of just falling short of its great potential. Its metropolitan staff of 96 has problems making sense of its turf—4,800 sq. mi. of overlapping municipal governments that constitute a city editor's nightmare.