Content area
Full text
This is the last breath of The Milwaukee Journal.
After today, after 112 years and 136 days, The Journal will exist no more.
In its place, on Sunday, comes a new newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, an amalgam of two old institutions that were sometimes admired, sometimes vilified, but also respected. The new entity no doubt will face the same attitudes.
The late Ray Kenney, who bridged the 4th St. gap and worked at different times as business editor of both the morning Sentinel and afternoon Journal, used to grouse about the way newspapers described their own demise.
They always say a newspaper died, he complained, where if it were any other business, it would be said to have collapsed, or folded, or merged, or simply gone out of business.
At the risk of offending a departed colleague, it will be recorded here that The Milwaukee Journal died today.
The reason that can be said is that, like human beings, all newspapers have personalities, complex and sometimes inscrutable, but always on display.
A lot of people have the notion that newspapers are simple things, like a club, that can be wielded easily and swung left or right to advance a political or other agenda.
The fact is they are collections of people with all manner of beliefs, values, ambitions and talents. It is that cohort, combined with the history and tradition left by earlier collectives, that determines a newspaper's personality.
In the case of The Journal, you can pick almost any adjective out of the dictionary and it will apply at some point in the newspaper's history.
It has been great, accomplished, courageous and innovative. It has also been careless, mendacious, second-rate and cowardly. Such is the nature of people, and such is the nature of newspapers.
But like other institutions that strive to serve the public and, in the American way, make a profit as well its guiding principles and its intentions always have been lofty, even if some of its people failed from time to time. Among the Best
For decades, The Journal was ranked among the finest newspapers in the nation. In 1960 and 1961, for example, three separate surveys ranked The Journal among the top five.
In 1960, a survey...