The Press: Solid Citizen

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Surrounded by newsprint in a storage room at Ohio's Lima Citizen, 350 stockholders perched attentively on rented chairs last week to hear the first progress report on the daily that 1,100 Limaites had pitched in to start (TIME, July 15). For the owners, ranging from the president of Lima's telephone company to a 13-year-old Citizen carrier boy. Publishers James Howenstine and Sam Kamin had nothing but good news. Founded on $300,000 to fight the 25-year-old Lima News after crusty old Raymond Cyrus Hoiles and his Freedom Newspapers had turned it into a soapbox for his ultrareactionary views, the Citizen had edged out of the red after only two months. "We were warned," said Publisher Howenstine, "that a new paper couldn't expect to make a profit in less than two years."

The Citizen has built a circulation of 25,000, while the News's has dropped 50% (to 17,000). In the first three weeks of November the Citizen ran 65,093 in. of local, national and classified ads, while the News carried only 39,346 in. Said the Citizen's Business Manager Wayne Current: "Never before has a newspaper stepped in and taken the lead in national advertising in so short a period."

Even more important for the Citizen's survival, said Publisher Kamin, is its owners' duty "to see that apathy does not creep into Lima." Said he: "We have sought to build a paper that the community can be proud of. We are here to do a good job of publishing a newspaper, not to carry on a feud."