Beginnings Leo Lerner (1907–1965) founded his namesake chain in 1926 with the
Lincoln-Belmont Booster, turning it from a
shopper to a complete
newspaper. From 1924-28, Lerner worked in editorial positions on the
Morton Grove News, the
North Side Sunday Citizen and the
Lincoln Belmont Booster. He then became a partner of
A. O. Caplan in the management of the sixteen Myers Newspapers, with a combined circulation of 219,000. During
World War II, Lerner instructed his staff to concentrate on local news with the statement "a fistfight on Clark Street is more important to our readers than a war in Europe." By 1958, Lerner was president of a growing group of newspapers, including the Myers Publishing Co., the Lincoln Belmont Publishing Co., the Times Home Newspapers (J. L. Johnson Publishing Co.) and the Neighbor Press of Chicago.
Decline The 49-year-old Louis Lerner died of cancer in 1984. The following year, the Lerner family sold the chain to
Pulitzer Publishing, publishers of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When it bought the chain of 52 weeklies for $9.1 million, Pulitzer hoped to win readers and advertising dollars from the
Chicago Tribune and
Chicago Sun-Times in the same way that the Suburban Journal weeklies were weakening the
Post-Dispatch. Pulitzer planned to increase Lerner's combined circulation of about 300,000 to compete in the Chicago newspaper market, but the recession of the early 1990s eroded the chain's advertising base, over half of which was help-wanted classified ads, and the chain was unsuccessful in winning automotive and real estate ads away from the dailies. Sunstates, an investment firm led by Clyde Engle, was in the business of buying moribund companies to enact complex financial operations. Under Sunstates, which owned a mixed bag of companies such as an insurance firm, a chocolate factory, a furniture factory and an apple orchard, but had never before operated newspapers. The Lerner chain's business continued to erode while Sunstates managers constrained journalists to keep 9-to-5 hours as a cost saving measure. In 2000, in a surreptitious arrangement that came to be known as the "Lerner Exchange," Sunstates sold the chain to a company fronted by Canadian press baron
Conrad Black, who quickly resold it to
Hollinger International. This and other illegal maneuvers by Black and sidekick
David Radler,
Sun-Times publisher, ultimately led to their conviction on fraud charges when they were found to have looted millions from the company. Amid Hollinger's reorganization after the scandal, Lerner Newspapers was merged into its longtime suburban rival,
Pioneer Press, in 2005. Pioneer management discontinued the Lerner name and canceled all of Lerner's suburban editions. Pioneer continued to print a handful of City of Chicago newspapers with the old nameplates — the
Booster, News-Star, Skyline and
Times — converting them from
broadsheet to
tabloid, until January 2008, when the company announced it was pulling out of urban publishing entirely. At the last moment, the
Booster, News-Star and
Skyline titles were sold to the
Wednesday Journal, another Chicago-area weekly group. In March 2009, the
Wednesday Journal announced that it was dropping the
News-Star and the
Booster, along with the
Bucktown/
Wicker Park edition of the
Chicago Journal (into which a
Booster edition had been merged). Although reduced to operating from his home,
Ron Roenigk, the publisher of
Inside Publications, said he would be buying the two former Lerner nameplates, largely to get their legal advertising. The Skyline, Inside Booster and News Star were still published as weekly
North Side of Chicago print editions, by
Inside Publications, since 2009 as of 2024. ==Editions==