What the Herald’s Death Means : Publishing: Many metropolitan areas are supporting more newspapers than ever. A lot of them are weeklies covering the suburbs.

At first glance, the death of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner might seem an old story: another signal that American cities can no longer support two newspapers.

It sometimes seems that reading is going out of fashion and that newspapering is a dying industry.

But the answer, a growing number of newspaper publishers believe, is more subtle.

In part, second urban dailies like the Herald Examiner have been supplanted by growing suburban papers, a change that reflects the shift in American life from classic suburbs oriented toward central cities to suburbs that are more distinct regions themselves.

So, while New York City once had nine dailies, the New York metropolitan region now has 23. While Los Angeles once had five newspapers, the region now has 13, many of them growing.

And while the percentage of Americans who subscribe to daily newspapers is certainly smaller than it was 30 years ago, some newspaper professionals are coming to believe that many Americans now rely on a combination of television and local weekly newspapers.

Indeed, earlier this year, Ingersoll Publications launched a new daily in St. Louis, a tabloid called the Sun, that will combine advertising strength with Ingersoll’s 43 weeklies surrounding the city.

Similarly, the Chicago Sun-Times recently purchased two major groups of weeklies that ring Chicago, and it now sells advertising packages in combination with those papers. (The Herald Examiner tried a similar strategy in the early ‘80s.)

“The biggest part of the story is not that a city won’t support two newspapers,” said Craig Ammerman, a newspaper consultant and former editor of the defunct Philadelphia Bulletin, “but that the region that used to support two, three or four is now supporting 15 or 20.”

One reason is that the definition of cities has changed.

“People say Hartford, Conn., has been a one-newspaper town since the Hartford Times folded,” leaving only the Courant, said John Morton, a newspaper analyst with Morton Research in Washington. “But the name Hartford no longer adequately describes the Hartford newspaper market,” which includes Hartford and Middlesex counties.

This is not uniformly true across the country. “I think you will find wide variation from market to market,” said Donald E. Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, whose metropolitan region remains largely focused around central Washington.

Yet in many cities, one of the reasons that second metropolitan papers such as the Herald Examiner have died is that advertisers had more choices about where to spend their ad dollars, analysts said.

“Retail advertisers in particular followed the population to the suburbs and became less identified with downtown and the civic problems of the cities themselves,” said Leo Bogart, author of “Press and Public” and a senior fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies.

In that sense, suburban competitors “probably had as much to do with the death of the Herald Examiner as the Los Angeles Times did,” said James N. Rosse, provost of Stanford University and a professor of economics who specializes in newspapers. Another of the Herald’s competitors, the Daily News, based in the San Fernando Valley, did not even exist as a daily paper until 1975.

Now, competition within suburban areas has become extraordinary. At his own home in the Bay Area, Rosse can subscribe to eight daily newspapers, including three national dailies and papers from San Jose, San Francisco and Palo Alto. He also can subscribe to a slick weekly aimed at affluent readers.

Some publishers even have started to doubt the conventional view, now decades old, that newspaper readership is declining.

“What people are doing is equating newspaper readership with daily newspaper circulation,” said Sam McKeel, the respected former publisher of the successful Philadelphia Inquirer and now chief executive of the Chicago Sun-Times.

But those numbers may be deceptive.

It is true that daily newspaper circulation has not kept pace with the nation’s growth in population. Daily circulation has grown by only 2.5 million since 1965, while the U.S. population has increased by more than 52 million.

And certainly a major reason is that people have turned to the many other sources for information, particularly television.

But one body of thought growing among newspaper publishers is that even those who rely heavily on television “get the details of where they live and where they vote from local newspapers,” including weeklies, which are not counted in the traditional measures of newspaper readership.

Indeed, while circulation growth of dailies has been modest, circulation of weeklies has more than doubled since 1965.

“These (weekly) suburban papers are getting very important,” argued McKeel, whose own group of 60 community newspapers ringing Chicago are magazine-like in thickness.

“There has been a fairly significant shift away from daily to community newspapers that are less than daily frequency, and this readership isn’t measured,” said Morton.

Some believe that this move toward community and suburban publications may only increase, as the urban landscape shifts further from traditional suburbs toward groups of distinct satellite cities within a metropolitan area.

“As the growth in the suburbs continues, an increasing percentage (of people) have no tie to the city; they don’t go there,” said Ammerman.

“The next crisis may be what will the big metropolitan papers do, if advertisers say to them, ‘We only want to buy the circulation of yours that is in the city,’ ” Ammerman said. “What if the suburban circulation is so good that they don’t want to pay for that double coverage. I think that worries the hell out of some of those metro papers.”

“That means we need to evolve and to change,” said David Lawrence, publisher and chairman of the Miami Herald, whose paper is faced with the development of a distinct regional area in a neighboring county to the north.

The Herald also found its own city increasingly divided by ethnicity. “We have a huge number of people of Hispanic heritage, some of them most comfortable in a language other than English,” Lawrence said.

The Herald now has a sister publication, El Nuevo Herald, that is closer to being a separate publication than merely a Spanish translation of the Herald.

In Los Angeles, similarly, the growth of the Latino population is a factor in the newspaper industry. The city now has two Spanish language papers, and while the Herald Examiner was suffering, the older of these, La Opinion, was growing rapidly. Circulation has swelled to more than 100,000 this year from 40,000 in 1980.