Newspapers: A Plum in the Valley

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The double-page ad in the New York Times posed two flat-footed questions: "What Evening Newspaper Leads the Nation in Total Advertising Linage?" and "What Morning Newspaper Ranks Sixth in the Nation in Total Advertising Linage?" Readers who scanned the tables printed below must have done a double take when they saw the answers: the San Jose News and the San Jose Mercury. How did those papers get so far up on the lists? And where is San Jose anyway?

San Jose is in California, 60 miles down the bay from San Francisco, and the Mercury and News climbed so high-simply by being there at the right time.

Lebensraum. Neither San Jose nor its two newspapers were going anywhere in particular 15 years ago. The city seemed buffered from San Francisco by pastoral miles of Santa Clara County fruit trees, interspersed with canneries. Then the space age dawned in a thunder of rockets, and its artisans moved West in quest of Lebensraum.

Soon San Jose was transformed from a somnolent agricultural county seat into a hive of technical industry. Lockheed, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and United Aircraft all built big plants amid the plum trees. By last year Santa Clara County had surpassed San Francisco County in population, retail sales and annual payroll.

In 1952, prompted either by hunch or foresight, the Ridder newspaper group snapped up San Jose's dailies for what proved to be a bargain $3.5 million. From humble origins, this chain has steadily lengthened over the years until it now spans the continent. It was founded in 1895 by Herman Ridder, who had bought the German-language New Yorker Staats-Zeitung.

*The top ten in advertising linage:

MORNING

Los Angeles Times

Miami Herald

Washington Post

Chicago Tribune

Phoenix Republic

San Jose Mercury

New Orleans Times

Picayune

New York Times

Orlando Sentinel

Cleveland Plain Dealer

EVENING

San Jose News

Phoenix Gazette

Fort Lauderdale

News

Houston Chronicle

Milwaukee Journal

Montreal La Presse

Detroit News

Cleveland Press

Montreal Star

Toronto Star

Laissez Faire. Herman Ridder was less interested in earning a niche in journalism's record book than in providing newspapers for the profit of his male descendants. Today, there are 21 Ridders to work the chain, a figure that neatly corresponds with the number of Ridder newspapers. The papers vary in size from the Aberdeen, S. Dak., American-News (circ. 21,000) to the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch (227,000 combined). But they all have one thing in common: a Herman Ridder heir at the helm.

The Ridder in San Jose is Grandson Joseph B., 44, who went West after the acquisition, applied the laissez-faire Ridder formula, and still cannot quite believe in his luck. Like all Ridder newspapers, Joseph's pair are run as if the others did not exist. The last San Jose newspaper crusade petered out ten years ago, after the city built the new civic center that its two dailies had plumped for. By then the boom was well under way, and about all Grandson Joseph had to do was let it boom.