The Press: Country Slickers

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Metropolitan newsmen who daydream of retiring to a country paper have long viewed weeklies more as a rural retreat than as an influential segment of the press. But with the swift growth of suburbs and small towns since World War II, weeklies have largely shed their cracker-barrel ways, developed sophistication and a new sense of mission. Today they are the fastest-growing publications in the U.S. Weekly Newspaper Representatives, Inc. reported last week that the 8,478 weeklies in the U.S. in 1956 reached a paid circulation peak of 18,529,199, up 6.5% over 1955. Estimated gain for the 1,700 dailies (total circ. more than 56 million): about 2%. Advertising in weeklies increased 1.2% to a record $112 million; this includes a 30% jump (to $25 million) in national ads since 1954 v. an estimated 10% gain for dailies. Said W.N.R.'s Eastern Sales Manager Robert Moore: "The weekly editor used to sit on a porch whittling a pencil. Today he's more apt to be worried the Cadillac will get scratched when it's loaded on the Queen Mary."

The weeklies' resurgence reflects editorial as well as economic vitality. In addition to relaying the back-fence chit-chat on which weeklies have traditionally thrived, the papers are the only inter preters and watchdogs of local governments in hundreds of U.S. communities, whose problems, aims and achievements go largely unrecorded in the metropolitan press. "We wouldn't be here if the dailies hadn't created the void in the first place," says a staffer on Seattle's weekly Argus (circ. 5.142), which has beaten the city's dailies on big local stories. Last week the Argus came out with a scorching editorial —first to appear in any Seattle paper— condemning the Teamsters Union in Dave Beck's home town for its "affront to the public" in refusing to answer Senate investigators' questions.

John Gurwell, publisher of Houston's suburban Bellaire Texan and River Oaks Times (combined circ. 6,958), says that weeklies "are giving back the home town" to suburbanites who have lost contact with community responsibilities.

Boilerplate & Bumpkin Prose. In many areas, fast-growing suburbs have produced weekly and semiweekly chains that are as slick in appearance and informative in content as their city cousins. Chicago's Arlington Heights Herald and seven other suburban weeklies (combined circ. 20,630) owned by Paddock Publications led all U.S. weeklies last year in advertising volume. Cleveland's Heights Sun-Press (circ. 29,000), serving 14 communities, runs a regular Washington column on subjects that affect suburbanites, boasts that none of the political candidates or school bond issues it has backed in twelve years has been defeated.