Chicago to Get New Daily Business Paper in April

A new daily business publication will make its debut here April 7 to serve Chicago’s rapidly expanding financial community and to fill the gap left by the demise of afternoon newspaper editions.

Called the Daily Market Digest, the business tabloid is the brainchild of two brothers, real estate developers and restaurateurs who believe that the recent termination of the Chicago Sun-Times’ afternoon edition left a void.

“When they quit selling the final markets (edition) people went crazy,” said Mark A. Levy, president of the Levy Organization.

“You have the hottest stock market in history and people want to know about it,” added board Chairman Lawrence F. Levy.

Both the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times stopped publishing their afternoon editions with final stock market tables, citing the high costs and relatively low demand for the papers.

When the Sun-Times brought down the curtain on the afternoon newspaper Jan. 31, it was selling only about 22,000 copies daily, less than half the number it was selling five years ago.

The Tribune canceled its afternoon editions last August but now circulates up to 4,000 copies of a national edition containing final markets in the downtown area.

Initially, 20,000 copies of the Daily Market Digest will be printed for distribution in downtown Chicago and at O’Hare International Airport.

The Levys, who have six newsstands among their extensive downtown holdings, plan to sell the 25-cent paper in commuter train stations, hotels and lobbies of the city’s several financial exchanges as well as in the large office buildings that crowd the Loop business district.

Chicago is home to the Midwest Stock Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the Mercantile Exchange and the MidAmerica Exchange. It is the nation’s commodity and options trading center, and the Chicago Board Options Exchange is second only to the New York Stock Exchange in dollar volume.

Some banking and financial analysts have predicted that within five years, Chicago will exceed New York’s dollar volume in exchange transactions.

The Levy brothers think they will succeed where the big metropolitan papers failed because “our economics are totally different.”

For example, instead of fighting rush-hour expressway traffic to get papers to O’Hare, they plan to send a courier to the airport on the subway, which runs into the main terminal from downtown.

And in the afternoon, when restaurant business is slack, they will use staff from the nearly 20 restaurants that they own in the main business district to deliver and hawk their papers.

A 24-page prototype issue is now circulating among Chicago-area advertisers.

Currently, the Digest has an editorial staff of five and contracts with both the Associated Press and Reuters, according to the Levys. Printing will be done by the Southtown Economist Newspapers, a suburban chain that also prints the Midwest edition of the New York Times.

“We plan to give people 15 or 20 minutes worth of reading,” Lawrence Levy said. In addition to publishing daily market tables and quotes from the commodity markets, the paper will contain a daily news digest and some features, list the sale and lease prices for seats on Chicago exchanges and keep tabs on investment opportunities from art to antique automobiles.

On the theory that people who play the markets are gamblers, the Levys also plan a daily list of odds on major sporting events.

“This will be a paper for people who want to know what happened in the markets when they go home, not the next morning,” Lawrence Levy added. “People like us, who spend evenings working out (investing) strategies.

“You can get news from evening television,” he said, “but you can’t get the markets.”