TODAY, The Seattle Times publishes its final afternoon edition after some 103 years.
The paper's switch to morning publication, along with the threatened closures of the San Francisco Examiner and Honolulu Star-Bulletin, leaves the Atlanta Journal and the labor-lockout-stricken Detroit News as the only remaining big (circulation over 100,000) U.S. evening dailies. (P.M. dailies are still a big business in Canada.)
Afternoon papers used to be "home papers." The businesspeople and the commuters got their news in the A.M.; working stiffs and their families (as well as horse bettors) got their news in the P.M.
But P.M. papers also promised "Today's News Today" (a longtime Times slogan). That meant their editors always scrambled for the newest angle, the approach to the day's events that wasn't in the morning papers.
If there wasn't a new big front-page event to cover that had occurred since the morning papers had gone to press (a stock-market slide, a plane crash, a war), then they'd have to come up with at least a slightly different spin on the same items that were already on the A.M.s' front pages. Thus was born the now-routine exercise known as "instant analysis"--the on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that, what-might-it-all-mean pontificating that most papers started emphasizing by the '70s.
In 1960, evening papers outnumbered morning papers by almost five to one. As late as 1975, almost 60 percent of the copies of daily papers distributed in the U.S. were evening papers. But the main papers in most cities were always the morning papers.
The first waves of industry consolidation in the '50s and '60s bore the gravestones of such now-forgotten evening dailies as the New York World-Telegram, the Los Angeles Mirror, and the Washington Times-Herald.
As the biz continued its brutal march toward local monopolies in most cities, readers lost the Chicago Daily News, the Spokane Chronicle, Portland's Oregon Journal, the Dallas Times-Herald, the Minneapolis Star, and the Miami News.
Small-town and suburban papers that used to publish in the evenings (partly to avoid direct competition with metropolitan morning papers) switched to mornings; including the Everett Herald and the Tacoma News Tribune.
With the Times' switch, P.M.s will still account for about half the nation's 1,400 or so dailies. But almost all of them are small-town and suburban papers. In the major metro areas that still have evening papers, those papers are the decidedly weaker halves of two-paper monopolies (as in Atlanta) or of joint operating agreements (as in the once-mighty Las Vegas Sun and Cincinnati Post).
Seattle was the last U.S. city where the evening paper had more readers than the morning paper. (The last other one was Milwaukee, before that town's two-paper monopoly merged its properties.) Another of those "only in Seattle" things that's disappearing.
The Times' publication schedule was an integral part of the city's daily rhythm. The first edition showed up downtown around 10 a.m. and across the city shortly thereafter; meaning you always had something new to read for lunch. Editions came out as late as 3 p.m. (schedules varied from day to day), which meant the "Night Final" (formerly known as the "Night Sports Final" back in the days of afternoon baseball) had that day's closing stock prices and whatever national stories the network TV evening newscasts would probably cover.
And a late riser could take pride in the number of days in a week he could get out of the house before the Night Final appeared.
Now, there'll be no more of that. The Times will get trucked around the region in the same shipments as its JOA mate, the Hearst-owned Post-Intelligencer.
The Times has already changed its advertising image from that of a leisurely home paper to "The Hard-News Newspaper." The P-I (which approved of this change in the JOA contract in order to have a full website) insists it will remain a strong quasi-competitor; but already, some speculators are wondering how long it will be before the morning Times becomes the only paper in town.
I believe it's quite possible for two morning papers to coexist, so long as they continue to have at least somewhat different editorial visions and to seek somewhat different market niches. As I've written before, I believe the real reason fewer people read daily papers (readership's gone from 77 percent of the population 30 years ago to 57 perent today) is because papers have become bland, dull, one-size-fits-all nonentities. In a world of increasing media choices (on the air, on cable, on the Net, etc.), the big dinosaur daily is an increasingly unattractive choice.
No matter when it comes out.
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