The Lerner papers focused on community news and local issues, including a widely read police blotter, but also featured localized sections devoted to arts and entertainment, food, lifestyles and high-school and neighborhood sports, like "hyper-local" versions of daily newspapers.
At one time, the chain had its own printing plant at its headquarters in the Rogers Park, Chicago, neighborhood[3] and a network of satellite offices across the city and its suburbs.
Leo Lerner (1907–1965) founded his namesake chain in 1926 with the Lincoln-Belmont Booster, turning it from a shopper to a real newspaper.
From 1924-28, Lerner worked in editorial positions on the Morton Grove News, the North Side Sunday Citizen and the Lincoln Belmont Booster. He then became a partner of A. O. Caplan in the management of the 16 Myers Newspapers, with a combined circulation of 219,000.[4]
During World War II, Lerner inspired his staff to concentrate on local news with such statements as, "A fistfight on Clark Street is more important to our readers than a war in Europe."[5]
By 1958, Lerner was president of a growing group of newspapers, including the Myers Publishing Co., the Lincoln Belmont Publishing Co., the Times Home Newspapers (J. L. Johnson Publishing Co.) and the Neighbor Press of Chicago.[4]
Lerner's son Louis A. Lerner served as assistant to the publisher of Lerner Home Newspapers and an account executive for Times Home Newspapers from 1959 to 1962. He became executive vice president of Lerner Home Newspapers in 1962 and publisher in 1969.[6]
Decline and fall
The 49-year-old Louis Lerner died of cancer in 1984.[7] The following year, the Lerner family sold the chain to Pulitzer Publishing, publishers of the St. LouisPost-Dispatch.[8] When it bought the chain of 52 weeklies for $9.1 million, Pulitzer hoped to win readers and advertising dollars from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times in the same way that the Suburban Journal weeklies were weakening the Post-Dispatch. Pulitzer planned to increase Lerner's combined circulation of about 300,000 to compete in the Chicago newspaper market, but the recession of the early 1990s eroded the chain's advertising base, over half of which was help-wanted classified ads, and the chain was unsuccessful in winning automotive and real estate ads away from the dailies.[9]
The sole weekly group in Pulitzer's stable, Lerner was left to founder. Pulitzer closed and merged many of its editions, until only 15 were left. Circulation had plummeted from 300,000 in 1985 to 100,000 by 1992. In 1992, Pulitzer was on the brink of shutting down the Lerner papers but, at the last minute, with final editions set in type, sold the chain's assets to Sunstates Corp. for a reported $4 million.[9]
Sunstates, an investment firm led by Clyde Engle, was in the business of buying moribund companies for tricky financial operations.[10] Under Sunstates, which owned a mixed bag of companies such as an insurance firm,[11] a chocolate factory,[12] a furniture factory[13] and an apple orchard,[14] but had never before run newspapers, the Lerner chain continued to erode while Sunstates managers constrained journalists to keep 9-to-5 hours.
In 2000, in a surreptitious arrangement that came to be known as the "Lerner Exchange,"[15] Sunstates sold the chain to a company fronted by Canadian press baron Conrad Black, who resold it to Hollinger International. This and other illegal maneuvers by Black and sidekick David Radler, Sun-Times publisher, ultimately led to their conviction on fraud charges when they were found to have looted millions from the company.[16]
Amid Hollinger reorganization (ultimately to the Sun-Times Media Group) in the wake of the scandal, the company merged Lerner Newspapers into its longtime suburban rival, Pioneer Press, in 2005. Pioneer management quickly dropped the now-embarrassing Lerner name and killed all Lerner's suburban editions. Pioneer continued to print a handful of city of Chicago newspapers with the old 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.[17][18]
In March 2009, the Wednesday Journal announced that it was dropping the News-Star and the Booster, along with the Bucktown/Wicker Park edition of the Chicago Journal (into which a Booster edition had been merged).[19] Although reduced to operating from his home, Ron Roenigk, the publisher of Inside Publications, said he would be buying the two former Lerner nameplates, largely to get their legal advertising.[20]
The Skyline, Inside Booster and News Star are still published weekly as paper, but not online, editions, on Chicago's North Side by Inside Publications, since 2009 as of 2024.[21]
Editions
Booster
Leo Lerner launched his empire with the 1926 purchase of the Lincoln-Belmont Booster. In 2005, Pioneer Press sold The Booster to the Wednesday Journal, which resold it in 2008 to Inside Publications. Inside Publications merged the Booster with its primary publication (Inside). The new publication retained the Booster's numbering and some of its syndicated columns while incorporating some of Inside's traditional features.
Longtime Chicago columnist (Chicago Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune) Mike Royko had his start at the Lincoln-Belmont Booster.[22]
Citizen
Founded as the Ravenswood Citizen, and dating back until at least 1905, the Citizen was acquired by Lerner in the late 1920s and folded into other editions in 1930.[2]
Pulitzer shut down most of the Life editions in the 1980s. When Pioneer Press folded the papers in 2005, editions covered Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, Niles and Skokie.
News-Star
Beginning as separate News and Star editions, later combined, the News-Star (also called the News and Star Budget[23]) covered the Far North Side. In 2005, Pioneer Press sold the nameplate to the Wednesday Journal, which resold it in 2008 to Inside Publications.
Lesley Sussman, now an author and journalist in New York City, was for many years editor of the Uptown and Edgewater News.
Skyline
Launched by Lerner in the 1960s, the Skyline covered the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, the Loop and the Near North Side, with an emphasis on society gossip. The Skyline was the only Lerner paper not to cover school sports. In 2005, Pioneer Press sold the nameplate to the Wednesday Journal, which continues to publish it, covering the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, Old Town and River North.[19]
Queer Eye's Allen was a Skyline reporter.
Wednesday's Journal sold the Skyline to Inside Publications in 2013 where it is still being published weekly.
At the time Pioneer Press took over and folded the papers in 2005, the Times covered Edison Park, Jefferson Park, Norwood Park and Portage Park in the city and the suburban communities of Elmwood Park, Harwood Heights, Norridge and River Grove.
In the mid-1990s, Sunstates reused the Voice name for a small, short-lived group of north suburban tabloids, launched as shoppers, and then expanded into regular editions covering community news and features, with longtime Chicago journalist Leah A. Zeldes as managing editor. The tabloids covered Glenview, Northbrook and Park Ridge.[23]
Journalists
Prominent journalists who worked for Lerner Newspapers include:
^iBN SportsArchived September 24, 2010, at the Wayback Machine "Al Bernstein began his career in the 1970s with Lerner Newspapers in Chicago and eventually became a managing editor."
^Lerner and Labor: A Decomposing Relationship "The latest issue of the Lincoln-Belmont Booster tossed in our yard carried three front-page articles, one of them the weekly column 'Pat's People.' Patrick Butler wrote them all."
^Chicago Jewish HistoryArchived June 18, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, June 2005, "The Urban Nature Lover": "Leonard Dubkin was probably best known to Chicago readers for his informative but folksy 'Birds and Bees' columns in the Lerner Newspapers, which appeared from the late '50s until his death in 1972."
^ObituaryArchived 2011-07-08 at the Wayback Machine "Schwartz kept his name and his opinions before the public through a weekly column for the Lerner Newspapers...."
