Crain's Chicago Business - History

History

Crain's Chicago Business was launched in June 1978. The genesis of the newspaper came in 1977, when Crain Communications chief Rance Crain went to Houston to give a speech to the Houston Advertising Club. He spent an afternoon listening to the publisher of the Houston Business Journal explain how his publication was developed. "I figured if a business publication worked well in Houston, it would be twice as successful in Chicago," Rance Crain once said. Rance Crain was the newspaper's first editor-in-chief, while Art Mertz (1917–1993), a longtime sales manager at Crain Communications' Advertising Age magazine, served as the first publisher of Crain's. Rance Crain tapped Steve Yahn, a senior editor at Advertising Age, to develop the prototype, do the initial hiring, and get the paper going, effectively acting as the paper's first editor. "We wanted to call it Chicago Business, but another guy came out with a paper with a similar name ," Yahn said. "I told Rance he ought to put the Crain name on our publication to differentiate them, and he did."

Crain's originally had been planned to publish every other week, but with the demise of the Chicago Daily News newspaper going on that year, those creating Crain's decided to make it a weekly publication, using the end of the Daily News for marketing purposes and also drawing on editorial talent from the failed paper.