One Down in Houston

For years, the death of the Houston Press has been merely a matter of time. By last week the time had come. For a reported $4,100,000, the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain sold its weakest link to Houston's other afternoon daily, the Chronicle.

The Press had suffered from a double trouble -- and either would have been enough to kill it. The first problem was the paper itself. Once the feistiest daily in town, with an insatiable appetite for spirited crusades, the Press seemed to lose heart as rapidly as it lost readers. It lost touch with its community until, in the end, the Press's only municipal role was that of the paper that nobody needed and almost nobody read.

It also suffered mortal wounds in a hang-the-cost contest for supremacy be tween Houston's other two papers, the morning Post and the evening Chronicle. After all three papers went to a dime in 1961, only the Press failed to recover lost ground. Its circulation fell to 89,000 -- against the Post's 225,000 and the Chronicle's 227,000. Last week both surviving papers were bidding briskly for the Press's abandoned flock with offers of free papers.

With the Press gone, there are only three cities left in the U.S. with more than two separately owned dailies: New York (6), Boston (4) and Washington (3).-- The dwindling statistics are one more indication that the news-hungry public no longer need rely exclusively on its daily newspapers--whose dominion has been seriously challenged by news magazines, radio and TV.

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