Filling the Inkless Void
As the strike that shut New York City’s three major dailies slid into
its third week, there was dancing in the streets. A pair of
high-stepping hoofers dressed in long gowns and sandwich boards were
tripping along the sidewalks of New York, together with their
dinner-jacketed producer, in an attempt to advertise a new and little
noticed revue. A Brooklyn department store, unable to take out the
usual full-page ads for its back-to-school sales, took to the skies
instead, hiring five computer-assisted planes to cough out messages in
white smoke. On Broadway, the Sept. 11 opening of Arthur Kopit’s new
play, Wings, was postponed until after the still uncertain reopening of
New York’s real-life version of The Front Page.
To fill the inkless void left by the closing of the Daily News, Post and
New York Times , three interim daily
tabloids were born of the strike. The trio, in order of appearance:
¶ The City News , launched by Christopher Hagedorn, who
publishes six local weeklies, bears a faint resemblance to the struck
News.
¶ The Daily Press , another News lookalike, was
started by Brothers Gary and Mark Stern, who have published strike
papers in Detroit and Baltimore.
¶ The Daily Metro is the inspiration of Frederick
Iseman. 25, a pre-strike assistant editor at the Times. The Metro is
being aided by the Post in various ways, principally with distribution.
The Times has provided distribution help on a smaller scale to the City
News. Rupert Murdoch, publisher of the struck Post, reportedly signed
an agreement to buy the Metro if Publisher Iseman ever wants to sell
it. Iseman insisted he has no such plans, but some of the city’s
numerous Murdoch-haters speculated that the Australian’s hidden motive
is to fold the ailing Post and use the strike paper as the basis for a
new, nonunion daily. More likely, both Murdoch and his allies at the
Times want merely to make sure that their distribution networks keep
busy and that New Yorkers retain the habit of reading local
newspapers—which many abandoned during the 114-day New York newspaper
strike of 1962-63.
For many New Yorkers, the dispute that led to this year’s walkout
remained only dimly understood. Though all ten of the city’s newspaper
unions are by now either officially on strike or honoring the picket
lines, the focus of the fracas is a once mighty, now waning band of
newsprint-hatted yeomen, the pressmen. Not to be confused with
printers, who set the type—and whose ranks have been thinned by
automation in recent years —pressmen are the strong-limbed fellows who
start, stop, replate, ink, wipe and otherwise keep the presses rolling.
Automation has not much altered their jobs. The presses roll twice as
fast as they did in 1923, when a strike set the manning levels and work
rules that pretty much prevail today, but the union has argued that
faster presses require more pressmen to prevent accidents and
breakdowns.
Both sides in the New York brouhaha have budged barely a pica from their
original position since negotiations began last March, and a federal
mediator last week became so discouraged at the lack of progress that
he suspended talks indefinitely. Few readers are willing to wager how
long the dispute will last, though the City News is offering a $1,000
prize for the guess that proves most accurate. The three struck dailies
are losing about $1.6 million a day in advertising and circulation
revenues these slow summer weeks. One popular theory is that the papers
may soften their demands after Labor Day, the start of the annual
back-to-school advertising binge.
But the publishers do not seem to be in a compromising mood. Besides,
even if the pressmen were to survive this skirmish, the papers would no
doubt be laying for them next time, and papers in other cities might
eventually join the war. The pressmen are in a sense the last
casualties in the newspaper industry’s long, wrenching and inevitable
shift from benign, family-dominated management to the more bloodless,
efficient and profit-minded imperatives that other industries adopted
decades ago. The pressmen, meanwhile, will continue to resist—and grow
old. The News’s Frank Boylan endured the rigors of the pressroom for
13 years before making the rank of journeyman. By the time his two sons
entered the trade a few years back, there were so many pressmen and so
few jobs that it would have taken two decades to make journeyman.
“There was very little future for them with all the newspaper closings,
so I gave them a few words of wisdom,” he said on the picket line last
week. “They got out.”
Next:Are Americans Being Zapped?
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