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71 A STRIKE AT THE MILL While the Journal, along with the rest of Tupelo’s central business area, was not touched by the tornado, the paper still struggled for advertising and for general printing contracts that might allow it to survive. Circulation had grown modestly as readers discovered the energetic let’s-work-together tone that McLean gave the paper. But advertisers stayed away, preferring the far more dominant Tupelo Daily News to the new owner in town—and no doubt hearing occasional rumors from Memphis that he was a socialist. McLean was just barely paying his bills. Things couldn’t go on the way they were. In late 1935 or early 1936, he decided on a radical change that would either ensure the Journal’s survival or guarantee its death.Instead of trying to establish a niche that the twice-weekly Journal could occupy, McLean decided to compete head-on with the Daily News. He would make the Journal a daily newspaper . The Daily News was published in the afternoons; he would publish the Journal in the mornings. McLean’s planning for the change continued through the tornado’s aftermath and into the late spring.“Having lost money in the job printing and the weekly,we started the Daily Journal,”McLean told a newspaper publishers’ group years later.1 “That surely wasn’t good business.” The Daily News, which claimed a circulation of around ten times the Journal ’s five hundred, looked vulnerable to McLean. The owner, J. Fred Price, had bought the paper in 1930 and had not done much about cementing its place in the city. It contained some local coverage, but much of the paper was filled with Associated Press stories from other parts of the country. Equally important, Price had a drinking problem, and the paper suffered from poor management and indifferent customer service. McLean saw a real chance to become the newspaper of choice in Tupelo, and he planned to do that by strongly emphasizing local news and community involvement. His paper would not be one to sit back and merely opine; it would be an active, constructive participant. He recognized early on that the 4 72 A Strike at the Mill prosperity of his newspaper and of most Tupelo businesses depended on the prosperity of people in both the city and the rural areas outside Tupelo. If they did well—if people could get decent-paying jobs and if their farms prospered —they would have more money to spend; when that happened, Tupelo businesses would see higher profits, and the Journal would get more advertising and more readers. It made sense financially, and it meshed perfectly with his Social Gospel tenets: believers had a charge directly from Jesus to help people materially as well as spiritually. But the switch to daily publishing was an enormously complicated process in terms of money and logistics. The Journal would definitely keep its focus on covering the Tupelo area in detail, but to do so, McLean needed more reporters to take care of the heavier publication schedule. As a daily, the Journal needed to be a primary news source for readers, so McLean needed access to state, national, and international news. He needed the comic strips and crossword puzzles and Hollywood articles that readers enjoyed and expected from a daily paper. The existing typesetting equipment and press could handle a daily load, but he needed at least one more person to set the type and help run the press, as well as a greatly increased supply of ink and newsprint—the paper that came in huge rolls that was fed into the press. He needed a reliable system of carriers to deliver the papers to city homes every morning, new mail permits to send papers to the outlying homes,new advertising rates,and new subscription rates. The details seemed endless. The Daily News’ contract with the Associated Press, the nation’s oldest news service, guaranteed that the AP would not be supplied to any other papers in the area. So McLean turned to the United Press, an alternative news service founded in 1907 by E. W. Scripps, the newspaper chain owner. (The AP dated back to the late 1840s.) Scripps’s UP offered what was called a “radio wire,” a news service designed more for radio stations than for newspapers, but it was cheap and available, so McLean signed up. The Journal’s agreement involved a thirty-minute telephone call to...

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