Lerner Newspapers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lerner Newspapers, once the largest chain of weekly newspapers in the world, was a force in community journalism in Chicago from 1926 to 2005.[1]
Leo Lerner founded the chain in 1926 when he bought the Lincoln-Belmont Booster and turned it from a shopper to a real newspaper. In its heyday, Lerner published 54 editions in Chicago and suburban Cook County with a circulation of some 300,000. Titles included the Booster, Citizen, Life, News, News-Star, Skyline, Star, Times and Voice.[2]
Journalists who got their start at Lerner include the late Mike Royko, Crain's Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz, Sun-Times columnists Bill Zwecker and Robert Feder, sportscaster Bruce Wold, novelist Bill Brashler, syndicated columnist Robert C. Koehler and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy celebrity Ted Allen.
After the deaths of Leo Lerner and his son and successor, Louis, the Lerner family sold the chain to Pulitzer Publishing, publishers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in 1985. The sole weekly group in Pulitzer's stable, the Lerner chain was left to founder. In 1992, Pulitzer was on the brink of shutting down the papers but, at the last minute, with final editions set in type, sold the chain's assets to Sunstates Corp., an investment firm led by Clyde Engle and in the business of buying moribund companies for tricky financial operations. [3].
Under Sunstates, which owned a mixed bag of companies such as an insurance firm,[4] a chocolate factory,[5] a furniture factory[6] and an apple orchard,[7] but had never before run newspapers, the Lerner chain continued to erode while Sunstates managers constrained journalists to keep 9-to-5 hours and ordered senior newspaper staff to cook doughnuts and pick apples after orchard workers walked out.
In 2000, in an underhanded arrangement that came to be known as the "Lerner Exchange,"[8] Sunstates sold the chain to Hollinger International, the publishing company fronted by Canadian press baron Conrad Black. This and other illegal maneuvers by Black and sidekick David Radler, Chicago Sun-Times publisher, ultimately led to their conviction on fraud charges when they were found to have looted millions from the company. [9]
Amid Hollinger reorganization in the wake of the scandal, the company merged Lerner Newspapers into its longtime suburban rival, Pioneer Press, in 2005. Pioneer management dropped the now-embarrassing Lerner name and ceased publishing all suburban editions. Pioneer continued to print a handful of city of Chicago newspapers with the old Lerner nameplates — the Booster, News-Star, Skyline and Times — converting them from broadsheet to tabloid until January 2008, when the company announced it was pulling out of urban publishing entirely. At the last moment, the Booster, News-Star and Skyline titles were sold to the Wednesday Journal, another Chicago-area weekly group.[10]
