The Press: The Fair Lady of Milwaukee

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The Milwaukee Journal serves the public by 1) reporting virtually everything that happens in the city of 637,392, even down to the theft of a few chickens; and 2) covering national and world news with meticulous thoroughness. To European visitors, and even Americans from cities much bigger than Milwaukee, the Journal is often a sharp surprise, for it confounds both the mistaken idea that the American Midwest is a wellspring of unrelieved isolationism or that "provincial" journalism must indeed be provincial.

Fifty-One Million. Board Chairman Grant himself lives in Milwaukee only six months of the year. The rest of the time is spent on High Tide or in his home on Biscayne Bay; they are the paper's nerve center and Grant's office. Grant makes "the Journal's decisions whenever I want and wherever I am," and "nobody's ever challenged that." There is little reason for challenge. Under Grant, the Journal's fat (up to 100 pages) weekday and Sunday (up to 400 pages) editions average 1,140 columns of local, national and international news a week. They are brightened by the best newspaper color printing in the U.S., for both news pictures and ads. For the last four years, the Journal has run more advertising than any other paper in the world (51 million lines in 1953). Though it has a monopoly of the afternoon field, its ad rate is the lowest of any major eight-column daily. Its radio-TV station, WTMJ, is one of the top moneymakers in the U.S. For close to half a century, the Journal has earned a handsome profit ($2,000,000 after taxes in 1953), which is shared by many of the 1,337-man staff; the Journal is one of the few U.S. dailies whose employees own the paper they work for.*

The Three Bs. Milwaukeeans (nine out of ten families read it) rate the Journal on their own even scale. They know that the paper's all-encompassing interests have brought the city everything from the Milwaukee Braves (TIME, March 30) to a $327 million expressway, now abuilding. They also know that the Journal's campaigns have helped cut local crime to the lowest rate of any major city in the U.S. Milwaukeeans can thank the Journal for virtually eliminating gambling (it prints no daily horse-racing results), helping to give the city high health and housing standards and a government whose bonded indebtedness is only $30 million, one of the lowest metropolitan debts in the U.S. In this climate of civic rectitude, says Police Chief John W. Polcyn, the Journal "watches officials like a hawk. God help you if you get out of line. They take the flesh right off your bones."

In molding Milwaukee, the Journal has also been molded by it. Milwaukeeans have never taken crime or corruption lightly. Largely the descendants of sturdy Germans and Poles, Milwaukeeans have a healthy respect for civic discipline, orderliness and hard work. While Journal stories may seem too long and stodgy to outsiders, Milwaukeeans like the Journal's Germanic thoroughness, relish its fondness for lengthy details and rich quotation.