About Philadelphia Evening Bulletin

Philadelphia Evening Bulletin

The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, generally known as The Bulletin or The Philadelphia Bulletin, was a daily evening newspaper published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1847 to 1982. Founded by Alexander Cummings on April 17, 1847, as Cummings' Evening Telegraphic Bulletin, it was the largest-circulation newspaper in Philadelphia for 76 years and was once the largest evening newspaper in the United States. Its widely known slogan proclaimed that in Philadelphia, nearly everybody read The Bulletin.

The paper began in last place among Philadelphia's thirteen dailies and stayed there for the rest of the nineteenth century. Under William L. McLean, who bought it in 1895, cut its price in half, and expanded local coverage, it became the city's largest paper by 1905. It bought the Philadelphia Record in 1947, won Pulitzer Prizes in 1964 and 1965, and held its lead until a revived Philadelphia Inquirer passed it in 1980. Losing millions of dollars a month, it published its final edition on January 29, 1982.

Cummings' Evening Telegraphic Bulletin

Alexander Cummings first published the paper on April 17, 1847, as Cummings' Evening Telegraphic Bulletin. Its inaugural edition was credited with a first in American journalism: it published the first telegraph report in a United States newspaper, a dispatch from the Mexican War. The name itself advertised the new technology, promising readers news carried by wire rather than by mail or ship.

Cummings lost control of the Bulletin to stockholders in the 1850s. When he sold the business in 1860, James S. Chambers succeeded him as publisher. From 1859 until 1895 the paper was edited by Gibson Peacock. Throughout that long tenure the Bulletin remained last in circulation among Philadelphia's thirteen daily newspapers for the remainder of the nineteenth century — a modest, durable evening sheet in a crowded market dominated at different times by the Public Ledger and other morning papers.

That survival in last place mattered. The Bulletin did not disappear in the consolidations that killed many nineteenth-century titles, so when a new owner with a new formula arrived in 1895, there was a name, a plant, and an evening habit among readers on which to build.

William L. McLean and the One-Cent Turnaround

When Gibson Peacock died in 1895, businessman William L. McLean bought the newspaper. The last-place Bulletin then sold for two cents an issue. McLean cut the price in half to one cent and increased coverage of local news. By 1905 the paper was the city's largest.

McLean described the Bulletin's principle as that of a guest in the reader's home: it should behave as a guest, telling the news rather than shouting it. Time magazine later characterized its news columns as solid if unspectacular, with local affairs covered extensively but politely, and muckraking frowned upon. The contrast with Philadelphia's more crusading papers was deliberate. The Bulletin offered a household paper for the evening, comprehensive on local affairs and restrained in tone, and for more than three-quarters of a century Philadelphia households rewarded that formula with the city's largest circulation.

In 1912 the Bulletin was one of four newspapers — with the Chicago Daily News, The Boston Globe, and The New York Globe — that formed the Associated Newspapers syndicate, a cooperative that reflected the growing economics of shared features and services among large dailies.

The McLean Family, Radio, and Television

McLean's son Robert took over in 1931. Later in the 1930s the paper bought WPEN, one of Philadelphia's early radio stations. In 1946 it acquired a construction permit for Philadelphia's third television station. The Bulletin, like other large newspaper companies of the period, treated broadcasting not as a rival to be feared but as an extension of the same local news and advertising business.

That strategy reached its most complicated form in 1947, when the Bulletin bought out its morning competitor, The Philadelphia Record, after that paper went out of business following a drawn-out strike. The Bulletin incorporated features of the Record's Sunday edition into a new Sunday Bulletin. By 1947 it was the nation's biggest evening daily, with 761,000 readers.

Along with the Record, the Bulletin acquired rights to buy Philadelphia's third-oldest radio station, WCAU. In a complex deal it sold off WPEN and WCAU's FM sister station, changed WPEN-FM's call letters to WCAU-FM, and changed the call letters of its under-construction television station to WCAU-TV. The WCAU stations were sold to CBS in 1957.

An Understated Paper and Two Pulitzer Prizes

The Bulletin's understated brand of journalism was not synonymous with weak reporting. James V. Magee, Albert V. Gaudiosi, and Frederick Meyer won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting for an exposé of numbers racket operations with police collusion in South Philadelphia, which resulted in arrests and a cleanup of the police department. J. A. Livingston won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his reports on the growth of economic independence among Russia's Eastern European satellites and his analysis of their desire for a resumption of trade with the West.

Two Pulitzers in consecutive years, one for a local investigation that changed policing in the paper's own city and one for international economic reporting, showed the range a polite evening paper could cover. Its newsroom included sportswriters and columnists remembered nationally, among them Bill Conlin, Ray Didinger, and Claire Smith in its later decades.

Its headquarters at 1315–1325 Filbert Street in Center City, photographed as a landmark newspaper building in the early twentieth century, housed a paper that by the postwar decades employed thousands and entered more Philadelphia homes each evening than any competitor.

Suburbs, Television, and the Evening Paper's Problem

As readers and advertisers moved from the city to the suburbs, the Bulletin attempted to follow. It introduced regional editions for four suburban counties and leased a plant in southern New Jersey to print a state edition. Its reporters attended school and county meetings, but their efforts could not match the combined resources of the smaller suburban dailies that lived in those communities full time.

The Bulletin also faced the difficulty that plagued all big-city evening newspapers: late-afternoon traffic made distribution more costly than for morning papers, whose trucks moved before the rush. It faced still greater competition from television evening newscasts, which delivered the day's summary into the same living rooms, at the same hour, that the evening paper had once owned.

Its biggest problem, however, became the morning Inquirer. That paper had been on the verge of extinction before Eugene L. Roberts Jr. became its executive editor in 1972, while William Boyd Dickinson retired as the Bulletin's executive editor in 1973, and under Roberts the Inquirer won six consecutive Pulitzer Prizes and a national reputation for quality journalism. The Inquirer took the circulation lead in 1980. By 1982 it was receiving 60 percent of the city's newspaper advertising revenue, compared with the Bulletin's 24 percent. The Bulletin had launched a morning edition in 1978, but by then the momentum had shifted decisively.

Sale to the Charter Company

In 1980 the Bulletin was acquired by the Charter Company of Jacksonville, Florida, a conglomerate that spent most of the 1980s in various financial troubles. The McLean family's long ownership ended, and with it the continuity that had carried the paper from 1895 through its years of dominance.

In December 1981 Charter put the paper up for sale. The Bulletin continued publishing while speaking with prospective buyers. The interval between announcement and end — about seven weeks of public uncertainty — became one of the most remembered episodes in Philadelphia newspaper history, because the paper's readers organized to try to save it.

Save Our Bulletin and the Final Weeks

City residents organized a Save Our Bulletin campaign. On January 18, 1982, about 300 loyal supporters wearing S.O.B. buttons held a candlelight vigil in front of the paper's offices in subfreezing weather. Philadelphia Mayor William Green offered tax breaks and low-interest loans to help finance a purchase.

With no prospective buyers able to proceed, Charter attempted to give the newspaper away. No publisher, however, would assume the paper's $29.5 million in promissory notes and $12 million in severance costs to its 1,943 employees. Four groups of buyers came forward, but each found the paper's prospects too discouraging.

After losing $21.5 million in 1981, the Bulletin was dropping nearly $3 million per month when it published its final edition. Its owner concluded that the paper had been unable to generate the circulation and additional advertising revenue it needed to survive.

The Last Edition, January 29, 1982

The Bulletin published its final edition on January 29, 1982. Its headline announced a goodbye after 134 years and the silencing of a Philadelphia voice, and its famous slogan was altered by a single word of tense, from a claim that nearly everybody read The Bulletin to a statement that nearly everybody had read it. A front-page message from the publisher appeared below the fold saying, in substance, that it was over and that there was very little left to say except goodbye.

The closing left Philadelphia's newspaper field to the Inquirer and the Daily News and ended the evening tradition that the Bulletin had carried since the age of the telegraph dispatch from Mexico. A paper that had been the city's largest for 76 years did not lack readers in an absolute sense; it lacked enough readers, and enough advertising, at the cost structure of a metropolitan daily with almost 2,000 employees.

Archives, Revival, and Legacy

The Bulletin's internal news clippings files, approximately 500,000 pieces, its card indexes, and about three million photographs passed to the Temple University Libraries, where thousands of photographs were scanned and made available for online study and a limited sampling of clippings was placed online. The Free Library of Philadelphia held copies of the paper on microfilm. For researchers, the Temple collections preserved the working memory of Philadelphia's evening paper — the images and clippings its own staff had kept to write the next day's stories.

In 2004 Philadelphia investment banker Thomas G. Rice bought the Bulletin naming rights from the McLean family, and a new newspaper called The Bulletin began circulating on November 22, 2004. On June 1, 2009, that paper suspended print publication while continuing to post stories on its website; by early 2011 the website was offline as well. The revival shared the name but not the institution, and its failure confirmed how completely the original paper's world had passed.

The original Bulletin was remembered for a slogan that was, for most of a century, close to true; for a polite, guest-in-the-home philosophy that built the largest evening circulation in America; and for a final campaign in which readers with candles and buttons tried, unsuccessfully, to keep their paper alive in the winter of 1982.