Competition Makes a Comeback

In most large cities, the newspaper trend is toward fewer competitive dailies; mergers are the order of the day. Last week in Chattanooga, Tenn., competition made a comeback. A quasi merger ended, and the city suddenly had two new papers. The morning Times and the afternoon News-Free Press parted after 24 years of joint operation. Once they split, the Times promptly began to publish the afternoon Post, while the Free Press started to put out a Sunday edition.

The merger had never been an especially happy one, even though both papers had expected to gain by joining forces to form a third agency, Chattanooga Publishing, which handled all business operations. Editorial staffs and editorial operations were entirely separate, but everyone was on the payroll of Chattanooga Publishing; expenses and income were split evenly. If the Times got an indirect boost because the Free Press boasted a larger circulation (63,418 to 55,615), the Free Press, on the other hand, accepted no liquor ads, yet shared the Times's earnings from all the liquor advertising in town.

Nor were the papers' political differences the basic reason for the divorce --although the Times reflects the liberal attitudes of its Northern cousin, the New York Times, while the Free Press speaks for its conservative, segregationist publisher, Grocer Roy McDonald, 64. What disturbed McDonald was that he thought the Times spent far too much space and money on national and international coverage, while he concentrated on local events in a lighter fashion at less expense. Why should he pay for half the cost of printing presidential speeches verbatim? Replied a Timesman: "We paid for half the Cub Scout pictures in the Free Press."

In 1964 McDonald served notice on Times Publisher Ruth Sulzberger Golden that he wanted out. Since the Times by then had acquired full ownership of the plant, McDonald needed another building. Last May he found one, and no sooner had he moved in last week than he started producing the Sunday edition that had been suspended under his agreement with the Times. Mrs. Golden fought back by bringing out the afternoon Post.

The Post faces an uphill struggle against a paper that caters to Chattanooga's disapproval of Lyndon Johnson and his "Great Society. But Mrs. Golden is confident. The 45-year-old granddaughter of famed Times Publisher Adolph Ochs, she has been a power on her paper for 20 years, and when she divorced her husband, Ben Golden, two years ago, she took over his position as publisher. Breezily written, with plenty of pictures and eye-resting white space, her new paper will concentrate entirely on local news. It will be as little like the Times as possible.

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