For years, newspapers have followed their readers to the suburbs, and now they’re following them back to the city: Next week, a new free weekly will be launched in Chicago’s South Loop, West Loop and Near West Side.
The Oct. 19 publication of the Chicago Journal is not a man-bites-dog story, but a recognition of the explosive growth that has occurred in recent years in these areas. The biggest building boom in Chicago since World War II has created new residential neighborhoods and, with them, a fertile ground for a newspaper. And the folks at Wednesday Journal Inc., which publishes three weeklies and Chicago Parent magazine, are going where the money is.
“There’s not another community this big or this affluent that doesn’t have a weekly newspaper,” said Dan Haley, publisher of Wednesday Journal Inc. “The biggest risk for us is that we miss hitting this market.”
These areas of the Loop and the Near West Side have been magnets for new housing, starting with lofts and moving up to upscale condominiums, filled with empty nesters wanting to rediscover the city and young people with plenty of discretionary income.
“It’s not like this is some sort of little boomlet. This is a fundamental shift in how people see the city,” Haley said. “And what we’re trying to do is get involved in community building in neighborhoods that, in some cases, didn’t exist 10 years ago.”
The Chicago Journal will be printed on peach-colored broadsheet, much like the Financial Times. It will start with 12 to 16 pages and will have an initial circulation of 15,000, Haley said. It will be available in 50 news boxes.
Haley’s independent weeklies–Oak Park’s Wednesday Journal, Forest Park Review and Austin Weekly News–have bucked the nationwide consolidation of weekly and community newspapers, led in the Chicago area by Northbrook-based Liberty Group Publishing and Sun-Times owner Hollinger International Inc.
The launch reflects an evolving national trend toward free newspapers–dailies and weeklies–aimed at readers who don’t get the intensely local news they want from the big city-based dailies and sprawling suburban dailies.
“Many large suburbs or large neighborhoods in a city are completely under-covered by their metro or suburban paper,” said David Cole, publisher of NewsInc., an industry newsletter. Cole said free papers have sparked newspaper wars in San Mateo, Calif., Aspen, Colo., and Laconia, N.H. Free transit newspapers have cropped up, such as Philadelphia’s Metro, but those are not designed to speak to specific communities.
“There’s a news vacuum in some communities,” Cole said. “Part of the problem is that metro dailies, even the best, don’t have the penetration to reach the majority of readers. … What the free papers have in common is a willingness to devote significantly more space to readers’ opinions than do the traditional dailies.”
Cole said the newspaper industry is “heading into a very interesting trend of stratified news.”
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Haley said Chicago Journal is being patterned after the New York Observer, which Hollinger considered buying two years ago. He said it will not be a “smart-ass” alternative, but it will have edge.
“A lot of newspapers are boring,” Haley said. “This will be a substantive community newspaper, and it’s going to reflect an urban attitude. It will be a soapbox for neighborhoods to talk to each other, and it will be a sounding board for issues.”
Not your commonplace CEO: As a group, chief executives tend to present themselves with all the panache of a Model T rolling off Henry Ford’s assembly line in the 1920s. Even in broadcasting, the one-size-fits-all mode of conservatively dressed white males in their 40s and 50s seems worlds away from the quirky, cutting-edge creations aired by their companies.
Now consider Jeff Smulyan, CEO of Indianapolis-based Emmis Communications Corp., corporate parent of several large-market radio stations, including Chicago’s WKQX-FM. Smulyan is presented in a September issue of Radio Ink, an industry trade magazine, as “Secret Agent Smulyan.”
The magazine’s cover features Smulyan in a tux and grasped around the arms by a pair of young women in plunging, ribbed tank tops. “Hold Me Back!” reads the headline. “There’s no holding him back from success,” reads the headline from the inside story.
Of course, Emmis’ stock has tanked this week, hitting a 52-week low as Wall Street has, at least for now, fallen out of love with the radio business.
As to the photos, Smulyan said: “I can’t tell you how much grief I’ve taken for that. [Radio Ink] wanted me climbing an antenna in a gorilla suit, and I told them I wouldn’t do that.”
Smulyan said he consented to the shot with two Indianapolis models under pressure: “I’ve learned my lesson. You never say never in life, except when it comes to stupid publicity photos.”