Picture: THINKSTOCK
Picture: THINKSTOCK

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IT IS no secret that print media are under pressure from the internet and shrinking advertising budgets the world over. But nowhere more so than in the US, where once every small town had at least one local rag, and most cities boasted several competing publications.

Many hundreds of those have shut up shop in the past few years, bringing to an end an era with a rich history. While Times, Journal, Post, Reporter, News and Voice remain common as the names of surviving newspapers, many of those with more offbeat words in their titles — such as Crier, Bee, Pennysaver and Reflector — have disappeared.

Acquisitions and mergers have yielded some remarkable names too. When the Daily Reflector and Sun News merged, for instance, readers got the Daily News … and wags everywhere got a sun reflector.

In 1939, when two newspapers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, combined, the result was inadvertently perhaps a little close to the truth: the merger of the News and the Free Press produced News-Free Press.

When the Chicago Sun and Chicago Times, whose chief rival was the notoriously conservative Tribune, were merging, they sponsored a contest for a new name for the combined paper. One suggestion was The Truth — that way, newspaper sellers could ask customers if they wanted "The Tribune or the Truth?"

History records that the owners went with Chicago Sun-Times, but many locals remain convinced to this day that it was an opportunity missed.

Comedy of errors

NEWSPAPERS still make mistakes, of course they’re just easier to correct online. This is one of the Insider’s all-time favourites, which resulted in the following "correction" in the Canton Repository: "We apologise for last night’s error in stating that Mr Smith was a defective on our police force; actually, he’s a detective on our police farce."

Then there was the correction in a paper whose identity has been lost in the mists of time, which ran along these lines: "We apologise to Mr X for referring to him as a ‘bottle-scarred veteran’. We intended to describe him as a ‘battle-scared veteran’."

Quirky quote

"If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed." — Mark Twain (1835-1910).

• Do you have juicy gossip from the world of business or politics? Or just a quirky or funny story to tell? Send your scurrilous scuttlebutt to The Insider at [email protected] and it may just be published in Business Day and BDlive