Marriages of seeming newspaper convenience stretch far wider than the courtship of the Mirror and Express. Half a century ago, the New York Daily News used to sell 2.5 million copies a day. Now it scrabbles to hold on to 200,000. The paper cost the real estate operator Mort Zuckerman $36m when he rescued it from a swamp left behind by the greatest of transient tycoons, Captain Robert Maxwell.
For years before Maxwell, the blue-collar Daily News belonged to the mighty Tribune Company of Chicago. Now the much less mighty Tribune successor, called Tronc, is back in control, having paid just one dollar.
Do any of these comings and goings make sense? Only if you think that Michael Ferro, a very rich Chicago tech wizard and entrepreneur, can fit the Daily News, prevailing tabloid voice of New York’s outer boroughs, into some kind of digital master plan for the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, the papers of choice for their cities’ movers and shakers.
It makes no more policy or audience sense than the Mirror deal. Meanwhile stand by for renewed ritual war-war with Murdoch’s loss-making, Manhattan-orientated Post – though, in a rational world, jaw-jaw would seem the only option. But this is newspapering. Who needs common sense?
