Well-read.

• Author: Williams, Kevin Lawrence
• Position: Indiana's newspapers

Indiana has more daily newspapers than all but five states.

Hoosiers can sip their morning coffee over a wider variety of newspapers than can residents of almost any other state. Only Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York and California have more daily newspapers than Indiana's 72. Indiana has 20 more daily newspapers than the more populous Michigan. And the state has managed to stay in the top 10 in terms of newspapers even though its population is half that of Ohio.

How has Indiana been able to ignore the national trends? Those in the business offer several reasons.

"Indiana has a lot of self-contained communities that still have an economic base sufficient to sustain a daily paper and, in some cases, two," says Richard Cardwell, general counsel of the Hoosier State Press Association.

Another reason Indiana has so many papers stems from old legislation requiring legal ads to be run in both Democratic and Republican newspapers. "The legislature required that the public ads and legal notices be placed in the leading newspaper of each party," says Caroline Dow, journalism coordinator at the University of Evansville. This kept many newspapers afloat and served to politically polarize newspapers so that each publication appealed to a different audience, which helped to sustain the tradition of many Indiana newspapers.

Perhaps Indiana's print tenacity is most evidenced in its number of "two-newspaper towns." Fort Wayne, Evansville, Indianapolis and Muncie all have a morning and an afternoon daily. None of these, however, is a totally independent entity. Evansville and Fort Wayne both have joint-operating agreements (JOAs), and Indianapolis and Muncie are combination papers--separate morning and evening publications owned by the same company. Still, even mighty Texas has only two cities with two dailies (Houston and El Paso).

A JOA is a Justice Department-approved merger of newspaper operations, allowing two separate newspapers to consolidate advertising and circulation functions while keeping their editorial functions separate and independent of each other. The JOA, a controversial solution for preserving two-newspaper towns, allows newspapers to cut costs by sharing expenses.

The man at the helm of print media in two of Indiana's two-newspaper towns is Frank Russell, CEO of Central Newspapers Inc. The Indianapolis-based company owns The Indianapolis Star, The Indianapolis News, The Muncie Star and The Muncie Evening Press.

The Muncie Star's...