The Challenger

Softspoken, middle-sized, myopic Marshall Field Jr., 44, has the mild, diffident mien of a church usher. Ho neither looks nor acts like a fighter, but the publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times and Daily News is enthusiastically engaged in a scrap. What is more, he picked it. With his two papers, Field is hurling a daily challenge at the late Robert Rutherford McCormick's big and powerful morning Tribune.

These days, Field handles his end of the fight with increasing assurance and effect. The Trib (circ. 869,958; still dominates Chicago, but Challenger Field is making long strides. His Sun-Times (566,219) is gaining circulation on the Trib and is taking the new advertising at three times the Trib's rate. Field's two papers produce an annual net profit of $2,000,000--a figure that Field confidently expects to rise to $3,000,000 before the end of the year.

Dignity for the Peanut Gallery. Field's success as a Chicago publisher is due in part to the fact that Bertie McCormick is no longer around. One of the last practitioners of firebrand personal journalism, McCormick hoisted the Trib to greatness on his own inexhaustible choler; when he died in 1955, succession passed to men who possessed neither the qualifications nor the will to carry on in the colonel's style. As the Tribune's tumult lessened, Chicagoans began to hear another newspaper voice. It belonged to Marshall Field's Sun-Times.

The Sun-Times voice is very much the echo of the reserved and unassuming man who runs it. It is the most intellectual and unsensational tabloid in the U.S.; on Sundays it carries a "dignity section''--Field's own idea--full of thoughtful articles on educational techniques, the constitutional aspects of the Presidency, and the agenda of the last U.N. General Assembly session. Two years ago, when Field bought the Daily News from John Knight, he was advised to reach for a mass market with the tabloid Sun-Times and to aim the News at quality readership. Field disagreed. "Newspapers outside of New York," said he firmly, "should speak to the orchestra seats as well as the peanut gallery."

Yachts, Grouse & Newspapers. Marshall Field Jr. was not always that decisive, and the Sun-Times not always that moderate. The paper began its life in 1941 as the Chicago Sun, the creation of Field's father, Marshall Field III. Heir to a department store fortune accumulated by his grandfather, the senior Field was also a fervent New Dealer and devotee of liberal causes. He founded his paper mainly to give battle to McCormick's ultraconservative, Roosevelt-baiting Tribune. The paper was something of a flop. By 1950, after turning the Sun into a tabloid, merging it with the Chicago Times and spending $10 million of his own money, the elder Field had succeeded only in evoking the colonel's amusement ("Marshall Field is an authority on horse racing, yacht racing and grouse shooting, but he knows little about newspapers"). Marshall Field III apparently agreed with his competitor; he declared the Sun-Times an "economic impossibility" and installed his son as editor and publisher.

Since then, Marshall Field Jr. has grown along with the paper. He cut off all family subsidy, forced the Sun-Times to pay its own way. and it now nets a handsome $1,000,000 annual profit. But his first steps were marked by uncertainty. When the Hearst organization put the failing Chicago American on the block, Marshall Field III lay dying of brain cancer in New York. Field Jr. commuted nightly by plane to his father's bedside. He was back in Chicago every morning to negotiate for the American. In the unnerving process, he was beaten by the Tribune's high bid of $14 million. Totally exhausted, he took six months to recuperate before facing the solitary responsibilities he inherited with the death of his father.

On his own, Field has shown a new sureness of hand. Without touching his personal fortune of some $75 million, he got up $18 million to buy a controlling interest in Jack Knight's Daily News in 1959, selling off the Field Enterprises' Sunday supplement, Parade, for $12 million and floating a bank loan, like any other less lavishly capitalized entrepreneur. He no longer agonizes over decisions: "The policies of the papers are my policies," says he firmly. While his editorial writers may smile on an occasional Democrat, his papers reflect his own progressive Republican tastes, not his father's somewhat vague liberalism.

In recent years he has beefed up the Sun-Times news staff--from 210 to 243. has increased the daily news space from 140 to 180 columns, and transformed the paper's financial section into the best in town. Now that the Daily News has completed the move to the new building where it is being printed with the Sun-Times, Publisher Field is ready with a similar improvement program for his afternoon paper.

Watching all this from the Tribune Tower, the Trib's editors pretend unconcern. "He's got a binful of money," says Trib Editor Don Maxwell, "and so do we. We don't feel any challenge." But if the Tribune doesn't, the Sun-Times's Marshall Field Jr. does. Said he last week: "As of right now, we're in an expansion period."

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