The absorption: how Mishawaka's news became the Tribune's bureau

1913–2008 · the sister-city daily, then the building

The absorption was never a purchase; it was a gravity. Mishawaka's weeklies reported Mishawaka, but the town's daily news — its fires at night, its elections counted, its ball scores — came to be carried by South Bend's dailies as a matter of course, and this history's own government record rests on that coverage: the 1921 mayoral recount, the closest election in the city's record, is documented first-hand from the South Bend News-Times of November 27, 1921, because the News-Times was the paper covering Mishawaka's count. The News-Times' digitized run, 1913–1922, is today the chief searchable window into Mishawaka's daily life in those years. By 1962 the arrangement had a directory formula: Ayer's Mishawaka entry, after the Enterprise and the Countryman's Press, prints "Tribune — See South Bend." The Tribune's own course — the Schurz century, the sales of the next — is South Bend's record; what belongs here is the ending of the geometry. In 2007 Schurz Communications broke ground on East Douglas Road in Mishawaka for its new building, and the Tribune's own report of the groundbreaking said what the building would house: "three television channels, three radio stations, the Mishawaka bureau of the South Bend Tribune, and corporate offices for parent company Schurz Communications Inc." WSBT unveiled the all-digital facility on November 16, 2008, and De Kever's city history records the building as it opened: 85,000 square feet on East Douglas Road, headquarters for Schurz, office space for some Tribune editors and reporters, and studios for WSBT television and four radio stations. The valley's news was thereafter made, in large part, in Mishawaka — by a company named for the other city. The bureau had not moved into the town; the town had become the seat.

Sources

1. The government section of this history, resting on the South Bend News-Times of November 27, 1921, via Hoosier State Chronicles.
2. N. W. Ayer & Son's Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals (1962), the Mishawaka entry's cross-reference, read first-hand.
3. South Bend Tribune, report of the WSBT building groundbreaking, 2007, as archived in the Michiana business record.
4. WSBT-TV, the station's published history, on the November 16, 2008 unveiling; Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History, on the building's 2008 opening and occupancy.