Bruce Sagan’s Unwavering Crusade

At 93, Bruce Sagan’s commitment to save local news is truly remarkable.

Bruce Sagan walked into the offices of the Hyde Park Herald on July 23, 1953. He was 23 years old and had just bought a newspaper.“ I paid $2,500 for (the Herald),” he says, “and I had another $2,500 I’d borrowed from my family. And if I lost the $5,000 by Christmas, we were out of business.”

But Christmas came and went for the Hyde Park Herald and for Bruce Sagan. For the next 69 years, he published the neighborhood South Side newspaper, maneuvering through good times and bad until July 28, 2022, when he donated the paper to the South Side Weekly, a non-profit that relies heavily on philanthropy.

Bruce Sagan

In Sagan word’s, the owners merged the two papers to achieve some economies and forge a path forward. Actually, he created something unique: a for-profit, nonprofit hybrid organization to conduct an experiment grounded in his long journalistic career. “What we did,” Sagan says, “was to put the two organizations together for a year to see if a combined effort would work.” Then Sagan told the Weekly, which was once the Herald’s competitor: “You work it. If it works, I give it to you”

The new organization passed the first test. “It turned out that the savings wound up putting the Herald back in the black,” Sagan says. Two newspapers under common ownership now serve Hyde Park. “One is narrowly focused,” says Sagan. “We used to have a saying that if a bomb falls on 61st Street, that’s not news. But if the fallout spreads to 59th Street, that’s news.” The Herald’s southern circulation area reaches to 59th Street.

Sagan says the other paper, the South Side Weekly, is a free paper distributed throughout the city in honor boxes or through the mail. It covers general news of the city and the south side every other week. But the second test he set up remains a work in progress. Over the coming years, the organization will see if its unique structure will answer some vexing questions that plague the entire news industry.

There’s no question the news industry needs some answers. Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University, recently published a report that said 360 American newspapers had died since the start of the Covid pandemic, or about two newspapers each week. “We are continuing to lose newspapers at the same rate we’ve been losing them since 2005,” said Abernathy, who coined the phrase “news desert” to describe communities without newspapers. She expects America will lose a quarter of its newspaper – or 2,500 – by 2025. And the ones that will survive will do so with fewer journalists and less space for news.

Sagan could have easily made Hyde Park a news desert by closing the Herald. After all, he’s been publishing it for nearly seven decades. But seared into Sagan’s DNA is an aversion to quitting. So, he decided to launch his innovative experiment that has ramifications for the wider world of journalism.

Known for his understated style and signature cardigan sweaters, Sagan at first glance hardly looks a latter-day Steve Jobs. He can be simultaneously cantankerous, tough, blunt, and kind. His mind remains sharp, and his questions pointed. He’s a fixture on the local philanthropy scene. Time and again he’s displayed a brand of risk-taking and foresight that has made him an under appreciated legend in Chicago journalism.

Sagan developed his appetite for trying something new as a young publisher. He became frustrated that the students at the nearby University of Chicago didn’t read his newspaper. “We had a little classified ad page in the Hype Park Herald, but I realized that the student body never read the Hyde Park Herald. So, I began reproducing the pages of our classified ads and I tacked them up on to the stump of a tree that was a readership tree on 57th Street where the kids posted ‘I want a ride to New York’ pleas. It was in front of a bookstore. And every week for years, I posted that page. And that page grew to two, and it grew to two and one half.”

The experience helped Sagan understand that readers would pay for content they wanted. Another key to his success: He plowed the additional revenues that flowed into the Herald into new publishing investments. He acquired a group of newspapers with a larger reach into Chicago’s southern suburbs. “When I got the Southtown I understood what was valuable in the Southtown Economist. It was its enormous segmentation of the city into a very large community.

Sagan says his Hyde Park experience helped him understand that readers valued: good journalism and good information published in classified ads offering everything from a job opportunity to a good price on a used car. He soon expanded the Southtown operation into other suburbs and acquired papers on the west and the south side. “At one point,” he says, “we were publishing 30 community newspapers. “We merged the Southtown papers into a daily suburban newspaper, which we called the Daily Southtown Economist, which still exists in modified form and is owned by Tribune Company,

Sagan had also invested his profits in the first large scale newspaper offset press in Chicago, enabling him to build a sizable printing operation that helped the New York Times start its national edition. The investments and focus on his readers made Sagan a wealthy man, a status enhanced when he sold his company to the Pulitzer Company, the publisher of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and heirs to Joseph Pulitzer, who started the Pulitzer prizes. He kept the paper close to his heart, the Herald.

Over the past several years, he’s conducted numerous experiments to bolster the Herald’s finances. But none worked. Then he came up with the idea of the hybrid organization – the one that involved giving the Herald to his competitor.

“We have one organization printing two mastheads in contiguous geography,” he says, “which makes the possibilities of experimentation very possible.” The Herald has about 8,000 readers. Subscribers pay $40 per year to get the paper in print and online.” The South Side Weekly is a free non-profit with about 10,000 readers. Even though it’s a free paper, the Weekly asks readers to pay for the news they get. “And they are paying,” Sagan says, “not large numbers. But people are, in effect, saying even though I get this free, I’m going to pay you. The question is what kind of news will the Hyde Park community now pay for?

In Sagan’s mind, local communities have news that people are interested in. “Reader support is the wave of the future,” he says. “And then the question is how much reader support will you get if you are for-profit and how much will you get if are non-profit and how to those numbers play into what you can do in journalism? That’s what we need to find out. We have to get the answer.”

—James O’Shea