Competition and Consolidation: The Daily Record
The Daily Record building at 212 E. Liberty Street.
Albert Dix, publisher of the Wooster Daily Republican and later the Wooster Daily Record, came to Wooster in 1898.
Emmett Dix, the son of Albert Dix, became one of the most esteemed newspapermen in Ohio. In addition to publishing the Wooster Daily Record, he served as president of the Ohio Newspaper Association and of the Ohio Select List of Daily Newspapers.
This editorial greeted readers on January 26, 1920. It announced the merging of the Wooster Daily News with the Wooster Republican to form the Wooster Daily Record.
After 100 years of publishing in Wooster, the Dix family celebrated with a commemorative issue of the Daily Record. This seal stood at the top of the June 28, 1998 issue to recognize the 100th year after Albert and Emmet Dix bought the Wooster Republican.
Small-town newspapers faced fierce competition at the turn of the century. Albert and Emmett Dix, newspapermen from Hamilton, Ohio, entered the game in Wooster as the local papers navigated a precarious existence. Reeling from the Panic of 1893, one of the worst economic depressions the U.S. had ever seen, the father and son sought a new business start in Wooster. In 1898 they invested their life savings into the struggling Wooster Republican Printing Company, which published the Wooster Republican (a weekly) and the Wooster Daily Republican.1
The Dix family increased the Daily Republican’s circulation even as it competed with Wooster’s other daily, Calvin D. Myer’s Evening Journal. The Evening Journal was published in the same office as the Democratic Jacksonian, though it claimed to be non-partisan. The two publications battled for sales during the Spanish American War.2 The Daily Republican accused the the Evening Journal of faking cablegrams to build greater circulation. Myers left town shortly after the incident. The Evening Journal collapsed in 1906, and the Daily Republican acquired its circulation.3 The Dix family had won the round--they would face another opponent in the wake of the Evening Journal’s demise.
The Wayne County Democrat Company led by John Hoffman first published the Wooster Daily News on July 12, 1905. Even more trying than its struggle with the Evening Journal, the Daily Republican’s contest with the Daily News lasted for fifteen years. The papers hired away their opponent’s staff, constantly attempted to best each other in reporting news, and harbored general animosity--F.G. Daubel of the Daily News allegedly refused to acknowledge the Daily Republican’s existence. The end of the Daily News is fairly interesting. Daubel put the Daily News up for sale in 1919. Reluctant to alert his rivals of the sale, he signed the ad “D.G.F.,” his initials in reverse. Emmett Dix found the ad by luck, realized it was in fact the Daily News, and used intermediaries to close the transaction for him. The Dix family merged the Daily News and the Daily Republican to form the largest newspaper in the Wooster area.4 They called it the Wooster Daily Record.5
Five generations of the Dix family have captained Wooster’s newspapers since 1898. The Daily Record has covered the local events that defined Wooster in the 20th century, from the flood of 1969 to the downtown revival. In addition to distributing the area’s news, the Daily Record and members of the Dix family served as notable employers, freedom of the press advocates, and active members of the community. Today, Dix Communications (the media company that has evolved from the Dix family’s pursuits) operates seven daily newspapers.6
1 Paul Locher, “Wooster’s First Family of Print: Dixes Celebrate a Century of Publishing in Wooster.” The Daily Record. February 8, 1998.
2 Albert Dix, “Newspapers of Wayne County.” History of Wayne County, Ohio Vol. 1. (Indianapolis Ind: B. F. Bowen & Co., 1910) 317.
3 Locher, “Wooster’s First Family of Print.”
4 Ibid.
5 The newspaper dropped “Wooster” from the name in 1957 to encompass the paper’s growing circulation in Wayne and Holmes counties.
6 Dix Communications, accessed July 1, 2014, http://www.dixcom.com/markets/home.