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Article: Home free: is delivering free newspapers to affluent homes a recipe for success in today's volatile media environment? The fate of Philip F. Anschutz's three Examiner dailies should provide a clue.
- Article from:
- American Journalism Review
- Article date:
- April 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 University of Maryland. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IN 1981, Henry Grunwald, then editor-in-chief of Time Inc., and another company executive paid a visit to newspaper consultant John Morton. Time's Washington Star had recently folded, just three years after the company acquired the daily. But Grunwald still wanted to have a paper in the nation's capital, Morton recalls. The pair asked him to figure out what kind of paper that should be.
Morton, who is also a longtime AJR columnist, conducted an analysis and came back with a verdict: "What it ought to be is free. It ought to have a distinctive but fairly conservative look," he recalls saying. And it ought to be mailed to the 200,000 richest households in the ...