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Such hell-for-leather legwork has become almost routine at the Herald, the strongest link in the Knight newspaper chain.* Pulitzer-prizewinning Reporter Gene Miller has the Herald's carte blanche to travel to big stories: the Attica prison insurrection, the Howard Johnson rooftop Shootout in New Orleans, the court-martial of Lieut. William Galley. After nearly three years of digging into Miami operations of the Federal Housing Authority, Herald reporters tracked down the existence of an alleged political slush fund for Florida Senator Edward J. Gurney. Although the paper backed Nixon in 1972, it has kept reporters busy looking into Bebe Rebozo's Florida finances.
The Herald excels in covering Miami's rich ethnic mix: Southern WASPS, Cubans, blacks and Jews. It is particularly alert to its Cuban communities; Reporter Roberto Fabricio spent a week in Spain last year, came back with an exclusive series on some 30,000 Cuban refugees there who were having trouble getting U.S. visas. Many had relatives in Miami. It daily flies 8,000 copies into Latin America, prints eight separate inside editions for the eight areas of southern Florida where it stations news bureaus.
THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL Evening (circ. 305,005) and Sunday (543,992).
For years the Journal was locked in an acrimonious conflict with popular Milwaukee Mayor Henry Maier. The paper's extensive coverage of Father James Groppi's open-housing marches in 1967 and 1968 blurred the mayor's liberal image. When the Journal later criticized the concentration of all Milwaukee's model-cities strategy inside the mayor's circle, Maier proposed antitrust legislation against the Journal Co.'s news empire (it also owns the city's other daily, the morning Sentinel, plus radio, TV and rural cable stations). Yet the paper endorsed him for re-election to a fourth term in 1972, support which the startled mayor quickly repudiated.
Like 80% of Journal-backed candidates, Maier won. But the paper's heavy influence on Milwaukee voting patterns cannot be explained away by its monopolistic hold on the city. It has a long tradition of fair-minded coverage (a recent Journal-commissioned poll found that 60% of its readers feel that the paper is balanced. The remainder were evenly split between those who find it pro-Democrat and those who find it pro-Republican). Editor Dick Leonard insists that his reporters keep daily tab on all issues affecting Milwaukee. So close is its monitoring of local government that the pace of city office work slows perceptibly shortly after 1:30 each afternoon when the Journal appears — officials are checking to see what their colleagues are up to.
The paper's civic pride can occasionally be cloying. It goes into annual paroxysms of praise over such events as the state fair and the Fourth of July circus wagon parade (sample lead: "The parade wasn't long and the route was short, but the enthusiasm . . . ). Although it does send reporters and editorial writers on international fact-finding tours, the paper's thrust is unabashedly local.
NEWSDAY Evening (circ. 450,000) and Sunday (360,000).