Why New Orleans and Not Mobile? Lessons from the Past About Newspaper Competition

Mobile's newspaper market in the early 1900s holds lessons for today.

Why didn’t a daily newspaper competitor move into the Mobile market after Newhouse Newspapers announced that The Mobile Press Register would cease daily publication in 2012?

After all, that is what happened in New Orleans. The Baton Rouge Advocate began publishing daily in New Orleans shortly after the Times Picayune went to three days a week. Many people wondered why Mobile didn’t have a similar white knight riding in.

An example from the past can help explain why.

When Mobile Register owner Frederick I. Thompson bought The Mobile Item in 1916 it gave him control of all the daily papers in the Port City.

Thompson had made many political enemies in Mobile because of his newspapers’ editorials. At one point, a number prominent citizens invited Frank P. Glass, one of the owners of The Montgomery Advertiser, to Mobile to talk about starting a newspaper in opposition to the Register. 

But when Glass told them that it would cost about $500,000 a year for three years before they started to receive any profits, they decided it was too expensive and dropped the idea.

In 1919, Mayor George E. Crawford spearheaded a secret drive to raise $100,000 from Mobile businessmen to start an opposition paper. In September, Shirley Olympius of the International News Service met at the Cawthon Hotel with Crawford and a number of other men to discuss the needed steps.

They immediately began subscribing to $1,000 stock shares for the venture. Crawford also contacted W. L. Maher, owner of the The Jackson Daily News and The Hattiesburg American in Mississippi, about investing in the project.

Maher became enthusiastic about the idea and decided to switch $25,000 he had raised for another newspaper to the Mobile venture. He also attempted to raise another $25,000 from investors in New Orleans. Despite Crawford’s success in finding a number of willing investors to oppose Thompson, he never completed the project.

Not until 10 years later did Thompson’s enemies successfully establish an opposition newspaper, The Mobile Press.

So starting an opposition newspaper requires:

• Willing investors. 
• Financial ability to go for some time without showing a profit. In other words, a lot of money.

In the case of modern-day New Orleans, the Crescent City has another advantage that Mobile does not. Baton Rouge is about 80 miles from New Orleans in the same state. No other daily paper existed in Alabama that close to Mobile.

The closest daily in Mississippi, The Mississippi Press in Pascagoula, was also owned by Newhouse. And it was highly unlikely that the Pensacola News Journal would try to enter the Mobile news market.

Do you have any other thoughts about why daily competition didn't spring up in Mobile as it did in New Orleans after the Newhouse switchover to digital?

Sullivan-Kilrain Fight First U.S. Sporting Event to Draw National Press Coverage

Sports news in The Mobile Register increased greatly after 1880. One sporting event on the Gulf Coast in 1889 drew nationwide attention.

No formal boxing titles existed in that era, but John L. Sullivan spent the summer of 1889 in New

Orleans preparing to defend his heavyweight championship against Jake Kilrain. Boxing matches were illegal

John L. Sullivan

and the fight proved to be the last bare-knuckle heavyweight championship title bout. The match was also significant because it was one of the first American sporting events to draw national press coverage.

The site for the fight was a closely guarded secret. Fans had to purchase train tickets to an unknown location.

The Register editorially condemned the match that everyone knew was about to take place as well as prize fighting in general. But when more than 3,000 visitors showed up in the lumbermill town of Richburg, Miss., which had a normal population of about 300, to watch the fight, the Register had arranged for telegraphic reports to be sent.

Jake Kilrain

A crowd began to gather in front of the Register’s bookkeeping room and the telegraph office at about 8 a.m. July 8 to hear news of the fight, which began about 10:30 a.m. Knots of men gathered along Royal Street for the four blocks from the Register office at St. Michael Street to Government Street.

The crowd grew in size as the hours passed and the men awaited news of the boxing match. Men flooded the Register staff with questions and every time a newspaper runner “poked his nose out of the office door, he was besieged by a throng of expectant waiters, and plied with all manner of interrogatives. . . ” One bettor tried to bribe a reporter with $25 for a tip on the fight’s outcome.

At 2 p.m. the crowd surged from the sidewalk into the Register’s bookkeeping room and almost took it over. The staff called police to clear the men out. As the afternoon wore on, the crowd again became rowdy as rumors passed that the Register was suppressing news of the match to use in an extra.

The crowd again surged into the bookkeeping room at 4:30 p.m. demanding to know the outcome of the fight. The editors, awaiting reports, held the evening edition four hours past deadline and finally went to press at 6 p.m. The newsboys took to the streets shouting “Yer’s y’extra, all about the prize fight,” which had gone on for 75 bloody rounds before Kilrain's manager threw in the towel.

Newspaper sales that night were the largest ever up to that time for the Register.