Chicago Daily News
The Daily News was founded on 25 December 1875, by Melville E. Stone, Percy Meggy and William E. Dougherty. It was an evening paper at one cent. The combined capital was about five thousand dollars, and its quarters were extremely limited. It had an office about ten by twelve feet on the first floor of the building (pictured in 1903) located at No. 123 Fifth Avenue (15 N. Wells Street), and its editorial and composing room took up a part of the fourth floor of the same building. For the first few weeks the printing was done by the Scandinavian newspaper which occupied a part of the same premises. After a short time, Mr. Dougherty got discouraged and gave up the enterprise, and a few months later, Mr. Meggy did the same, thus leaving Mr. Stone in sole possession. Although the paper was not paying expenses, Mr. Stone saw before six months had passed it was gaining rapidly. It published three editions regularly, at 12 midnight, and at 3 pm and 5 pm. One difficulty that the cheap papers had always encountered was the lack of cents in circulation. Mr. Stone purchased, at the mint, cents by the thousand dollars’ worth, and would send them around to trades people and get them to takea quantity for change. In this way he got cents in circulation. The paper did not succeed in attracting much attention until the republican convention in 1876, when Hayes was nominated. By a stroke of activity the News published the fact of Haye’s nomination, and was on the street for sale before even the Western Union Telegraph Company had its bulletins up. This drew considerable attention to it, and ran the circulation up about fifteen thousand.
The paper was not entitled to the associated press dispatches, but it often got specials and important items that the association did not get. The only rival of the Daily News at this time was the Evening Post, a two cent paper, published by the Messrs. McMullen, which had the press dispatches. The Daily News accused the Post of stealing its dispatches, which was indignantly denied. It was at the time just preceeding the Turco-Russian war, and to fasten its charge on the Post, the Daily News published a hoax-dispatch from Bulgaria, containing what purported to be a cry or an expression in the Slavonic tongue, “erus siht laets lliw snellum cm eht,” and then followed a translation. Sure enough the dispatch appeared in a later edition of the Post. In its next edition, the News in great glee pointed out the fact that the so-called foreign words, taken backwards, would read, “The McMullens will steal this for sure,” thus raising a great laugh at the expense of its contemporary. This event gave the News an increased notoriety and consequent increase of circulation. In 1878, the Post suspended, and Messrs. Lawson and Stone purchased the remains of it, including the press franchise for $16,000.
When Victor F. Lawson bought the paper in July, 1876, he retained Mr. Stone as editor. The Daily News started with a one-cent afternoon edition; in 1881, it introduced a two-cent morning edition. By the late 1880s, when it lowered the price of the morning edition to a penny, it enjoyed a daily circulation of about 200,000, which made it one of the most widely read newspapers in the world. At this time the Daily News employed about three hundred persons, about forty of which were editors, special writers and reporters. After Mr. Stone retired in 1888, Lawson took over complete control of the paper. It remained Chicago’s most popular newspaper until 1918, when its circulation was surpassed by the Chicago Tribune. Even after Lawson died in 1925, however, the Daily News remained an important local publication. By the end of the 1920s, circulation was about 430,000, and the paper employed over two thousand people at its headquarters on West Madison. The Daily News, with a circulation of over six hundred thousand, was purchased by Field Enterprises, who also owned the Chicago Sun-Times, in 1959.
Chicago’s last afternoon newspaper, the brilliant and brawny Chicago Daily News, refused to go quietly. Its final edition on this day was breezily headlined “So long, Chicago.”
It died at the age of 102, the last of a long line of newspapers that tried to survive by reporting and writing from the heart and failed.In the process, though, they gave Chicago its reputation as the city of The Front Page.
In the newspaper cemetery, the Daily News had plenty of company. Less than four years earlier, Tribune Co.’s afternoon paper, Chicago Today, had closed. The Inter-Ocean, the Journal, the Post, the Herald and Examiner–all these and others had already gone to their graves.
The city was down to two papers: the Tribune and the Sun-Times.
The death of the Daily News was one more sorrowful testament to changing times.
People did not read news- papers–especially afternoon newspapers–as they once did.
With jobs and people moving to the suburbs, there were fewer strap-hangers commuting home on public transportation. Instead, people were in their autos, homebound on expressways. Traffic made it harder for delivery trucks to get the paper to the readers who remained. And for many people television’s evening news was enough.
Circulation had skidded from about 614,000 in the 1950s to 327,000. Publisher Marshall Field V, who inherited the paper from his father, decided to shut down the legendary place.
The Daily News had always been a writer’s newspaper. It hired Carl Sandburg and Mike Royko, and scores of lesser-known door-kickers and Balzacs.
The Daily News invented the daily newspaper columnist. The first was Eugene Field, whose children’s poems “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” and “Little Boy Blue” were originally published in the Daily News.
The last was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Royko, voice of Chicago for more than 30 years. Ben Hecht, co-author of the play “The Front Page,” was a reporter for the Daily News. Ground-breaking reporter Lois Wille won a Pulitzer Prize for the paper and went on to win another after joining the Tribune.
In all, the Daily News won 15 Pulitzers, five of them by members of its vaunted Foreign Service.
“It was a reportorial staff half daft with literary dreams,” Hecht said. In the end, that was not enough to save it.
