Passing of Tribune Is a Sad, All Too Familiar Story
By Harry Moskos
For the Journal
After Saturday, Albuquerque will be a one-newspaper town. The Tribune— this city's afternoon newspaper since June 22, 1922— will publish its final edition.
It is the newspaper where I started my career almost 55 years ago. But before that, it was how I got my after-school dose of news. After getting off the Ernie Pyle school bus, I would buy a Tribune to read while riding a bus across town to my father's Nob Hill Shoe Repair. I definitely was more interested in newspapers than following my father's career as a cobbler.
I was 16 and it was early June in 1953. I had just completed my junior year at Albuquerque High and another year on the school paper when I visited the Journal/Tribune building at Fifth and Gold SW to inquire about a job.
I can't recall why I walked in the Tribune door rather than the Journal's. Perhaps I liked the Tribune comics better. Or was it a subliminal act?
My favorite radio program in the '50s was NBC's "The Big Story," a crime show in which a journalist played a significant role in assisting police with an actual case. In 1952, Tribune reporter Wallace McCollum was featured. It impressed me then that an Albuquerque journalist was featured in a national radio drama.
I introduced myself to the Tribune receptionist and told her I was interested in a copy boy's position. She took me directly to the editor, Dan Burrows.
Burrows noted that the paper did not have a copy boy position but appreciated my interest in journalism and took my phone number.
Two weeks later he called to report the paper had signed a contract with United Press International to subscribe to its telephoto news picture service and asked if I would be interested in operating the machine that received and transmitted the pictures.
I was in his office within a half hour.
The plight of the Tribune, purchased by the E.W. Scripps Co. in 1923, is just another chapter in the history of afternoon newspapers in this country. When I started at the Tribune there were about 1,400 afternoon newspapers in America. Today, there are about 600.
Another footnote: Closure of the Tribune is a milestone in the history of the joint operating agreements that preserved newspaper competition in many cities.
On Feb. 18, 1933, the Journal and Tribune combined business operations to form the Albuquerque Publishing Co. under the first of many U.S. joint operating agreements. APC handled advertising, circulation and production for both newspapers, while each newspaper remained under separate ownership with independent news operations.
This was the idea of publisher T.M. Pepperday, who had purchased the Albuquerque Journal on July 1, 1926. He came up with the idea of printing the Journal and the Tribune in a consolidated plant as an economic move.
"Neither publication has absorbed the other," Pepperday announced in the Journal at that time. "A new corporation has been formed ... and from one plant will publish the Journal, mornings and Sundays, and the Tribune, evenings."
Pepperday noted that the arrangement will in no manner affect the editorial policy of either the Journal or the Tribune, adding that editorially each newspaper will be separate and independent of each other as in the past.
The Tribune compared the arrangement as "to the railroad practice of operating two lines over a single system of tracks."
In the industry, it was known as the Albuquerque Plan until 1970 when Congress changed it to the Newspaper Preservation Act. At one time there were almost 30 JOAs in America. Today only about a half dozen remain.
The Tribune isn't the only newspaper to fade away from a JOA. The Cincinnati Post published its last edition Dec. 31, leaving the Ohio city with one daily newspaper. Like other newspapers, the problems faced by the Post and Tribune— declining circulation— were not new.
In his 1984 book, "Death in the Afternoon," journalist Peter Benjaminson wrote, "America's big-city afternoon newspapers are in trouble. Many have died."
He attributed the decline in afternoon newspapers to several factors including changes in American society where service workers, going to work later in the morning, replaced early-working industrial workers who would read afternoon newspapers upon coming home from work.
Other factors cited by Benjaminson included evening news on TV, earlier deadlines for newspapers, problems with delivering newspapers in peak traffic hours and a decline in mass transit systems where passengers would read afternoon papers while commuting— like I did.
Benjaminson also noted that some efforts to save an afternoon newspaper simply didn't work, including "gimmicks" as sensationalizing crime and violence or turning an afternoon paper into a feature-oriented product.
Will Rogers once said, "Well, all I know is what I read in the papers."
All I know, is that we now have fewer papers to read.
Harry Moskos is letters editor for the Journal. He can be reached at hmoskos@abqjournal.com.
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