Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [52]
Chicago is the publishing center for a very important class of magazines – the nationally distributed, general-interest periodicals edited for a selected audience. Here you will find the editorial offices of the world’s largest and most influential chain of Negro magazines, headed by John H. Johnson, the handsome, forty-four-year-old son of a former Arkansas sharecropper who left an insurance company house organ to launch Ebony, Jet, and the Negro Digest. Johnson does not claim to be a civil rights crusader. However, his role as publisher of Ebony has enabled him to break down some significant barriers in the path of interracial progress.
It was Johnson who first demonstrated to the advertising executives of major corporations that the economic and educational levels of the American Negro have risen greatly in recent years. By the impressive response that his readers made to Ebony advertising, he proved that a new market had developed. And, editorially, Ebony’s many articles about leading Negroes have filled a void created by the failure of other publications to give adequate coverage to this important minority group.
On many occasions Johnson’s magazines have managed to strike some telling blows for our country in the battle for the minds of men: their South Michigan Avenue office, a handsomely refurbished mansion that had once been used as a funeral home, is a high-priority stop on the itineraries of visiting African and Asian dignitaries. Johnson himself has traveled abroad with former Vice-President Richard M. Nixon, and has dined with Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.
Chicago is also the home of such influential select-circulation publications as Advertising Age, Down Beat, Poetry, Christian Century, and Today’s Health, and headquarters for dozens of trade periodicals and professional journals so highly specialized that they are distributed only to readers who can prove that they are qualified to receive them.
But newspapers, not magazines, are the backbone of the press. And what of Chicago newspapering today?
There is still an occasional reminder of the spirit of The Front Page. Take the promotion stunt that the Daily News almost pulled off a couple of years ago, to advertise its various editions. It was announced that three homing pigeons named “Blue Streak,” “Red Streak,” and Triple Streak” would race cross country, with the News issuing periodic bulletins on their progress. But one pigeon got lost. This prompted the News’ afternoon competitor, the American, to burlesque the whole affair with references to a mythical pigeon named “Losing Streak.”
There is the City News Bureau, the co-operative reporting pool maintained by the Chicago press for basic spot-news coverage. It is traditionally the beat on which cub reporters learn their trade. With so many rookies on its staff, the events of any single week at the Bureau are almost enough for a full-length comedy.
A few years ago, for example, a reporter covering his first fire made the mistake of trying to phone his story from a booth inside the burning building itself. Despite the smoke and flames, he kept relaying details to his rewrite man. “It’s getting awfully hot,” he kept saying. “I may have to quit soon.” Suddenly there was a tremendous crash and the line went dead.
From the rewrite man’s description of what he had heard, the entire Bureau staff had all but given up the youth for lost. And then the telephone rang again. It was the young reporter. Almost unbelieving, the rewrite man grabbed the phone.
“Bill,” he shouted, “tell me – is it very hot where you’re calling from now?”
(City News is far from being a mere comic operation, however. Under veteran editor Isaac Gershman, it has trained hundreds of successful “graduates,” including Charles MacArthur; NBC-TV sports director Tom S. Gallery; Ernest Leiser; the Tribune’s City Editor, Thomas Furlong, and its Washington Bureau Chief, Walter Trohan; Hollywood columnist (and my good friend) Mike Connolly;