Ask Marshall Field
Enough capital to start a paper is only the beginning. Marshall Field, who inherited $164,000,000, found that all his millions could buy him only a curiously limited area of press freedom. His Chicago Sun, set up to combat the ultra-reactionary Chicago Tribune, had to fight for its very life—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Field’s conclusion as the result of his own experience is that it is easier to buy an established daily newspaper than to launch a new one.
Do you want to buy a newspaper? There is probably not a daily in America that can be bought for less than $2,000,000! The Philadelphia Inquirer was sold in 1930 for a reported $18,000,000. The New York Times has no price. It boasted a gross annual business of $20,000,000 as much as twenty-five years ago. Since then, the bulk of its constantly mounting profits has been ploughed back into the business year after year until the paper, considered purely as a business, represents a fabulous investment. Naturally, money will not buy it.
Very well, you can’t buy a paper. Try to establish a new one. Field found out what that meant. The local news-gathering service, in Chicago, was barred to him. He had to set up his own reportorial staff on a scale to overcome this handicap. But for national and worldwide news, no such solution was possible. Not even his fortune could finance an adequate global news service.
There are only three such American news agencies, Associated Press, United Press and International News Service. Associated Press is a professedly “cooperative” membership association embracing some 1,300 of America’s 1,744 English-language dailies. United Press, controlled by Roy Howard, is based on his newspaper chain. I.N.S. rests on the Hearst chain. Major newspapers try to have as many of these services as they can get. The Howard-owned papers, for instance, are by no means content with their own U.P. service, but seek also the A.P. “report.” The Hearst papers never operate with I.N.S. alone; almost all have A.P. franchises and several boast that they alone, in their respective areas, have all three services. For a variety of reasons, however, A.P. is the decisive agency. It is rather hopeless to try to compete with a major paper on the basis of U.P. or I.N.S. service.
Field could not get A.P. The by-laws of the “cooperative” permitted the Chicago Tribune to blackball his application for membership. He could not get I.N.S. because it is available only to the Hearst paper in Chicago, the Herald-American. He had no choice but to publish on the basis of United Press service only. That cost him $110,000 in 1942 against an estimated $50,000 he would have paid for the superior A.P. report.