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Different views, staffs make it lively

Sunday, March 02, 2003

By Jerry Schwartz, The Associated Press

LANCASTER, Pa. -- In an age of 500-channel cable systems, in a time of 24-hour news networks and handheld wireless e-mail devices, Lancaster is a newspaper town.

But with a difference.

Where other, larger cities have one newspaper, Lancaster's 55,500 people have three, vestiges of a long-lost era when newspapers were identified by their politics: a conservative, Republican-leaning journal in the afternoon, a morning paper that sees itself as moderate and often endorses Democrats, and a nonpartisan Sunday paper.

That's not all. These three fiercely competitive and contradictory papers are owned by a single family -- the Steinmans, who have been in newspapers in Lancaster since 1866.

And one more thing: All three papers share the same offices, in some cases the same desks.

"It's a little weird, but we call it home," says Pete Mekeel, managing editor of the afternoon New Era. (Mekeel is nearly blind from retinitis pigmentosa; he lays out the front page and edits the entire paper in his head. But that's another story.)

Every morning, the New Era's staff filters in -- first, police reporter John Hoober at 5 a.m., then the editors, then other reporters, filling the 28 desks in the third-floor newsroom.

By 11 a.m., the press starts printing that day's edition of the afternoon paper; news staffers turn to the next day's stories.

At 2:45 p.m., they leave.

After 3 p.m., the Intelligencer Journal's troops arrive. They sit in chairs and work at terminals warmed by their competitors. Each desk has two sets of drawers -- New Era, Intelligencer Journal. They're carefully locked at shift change.

The Sunday News, which uses a separate office during the week, moves its sports staff into the newsroom desks on Saturday night.

This kind of cohabitation has its ups and downs. Friction between the staffs "has moderated over the years," says Ernie Schreiber, the New Era's editor.

Oh, there may have been times, in years past, when New Era staffers would carelessly leave notes from interviews on their desks, to be read by the Intelligencer Journal reporters.

Except that the interviews were bogus, concocted to "throw them on the wrong track," Schreiber said.

John Spidaliere, a city reporter for the New Era, said a veteran reporter once gave him some advice: When you're planning to cover a meeting, leave a copy of the agenda for a different meeting on your desk, to confuse the competition.

"We don't talk to those guys," said David Hennigan, editor of the Sunday News since 1984. "In fact, we don't socialize."

That's an exaggeration; some are friends, and some are even relatives.

But the papers do fight over the timing of news conferences -- hold them at 9 a.m., says the New Era; hold them at noon, says the Intelligencer Journal. They battle for comics -- the Intelligencer Journal has "Get Fuzzy" and "Dilbert," but the New Era has "Zits" and "Peanuts."

Until last year, staffers shared phone numbers as well as desks, and New Era reporters lived in fear that sources would return their calls after 3 p.m. and give stories to the Intelligencer Journal. Now each phone has a toggle switch, and two numbers.

Always -- despite their common, local ownership, and perhaps because of their cheek-by-jowl proximity -- the papers compete.

"I'd almost rather lose a finger than have the morning paper beat me on a story," said Dennis Fisher, the New Era's sports editor.

The papers' differences extend way back, to the 19th century's partisan press.

The Lancaster Intelligencer & Weekly Advertiser, first published in 1799, was stoutly Democratic -- a great supporter of Thomas Jefferson, and later a leading opponent of Abraham Lincoln (and, it was said, a "copperhead" opponent of the Civil War).

Andrew Jackson Steinman was Democrat to the bone, as his name would indicate. Son of a family that owned Lancaster's leading hardware store, Steinman came to the rescue of the struggling Intelligencer Journal (it had combined with another paper in 1834) in 1866.