Trouble at PreWi

To most newspaper readers Press Wireless Inc. was not even a name before last week. Yet most of the news that flows in & out of the U.S. moves via "PreWi" (rhymes with peewee), a highly mechanized common carrier that calls itself "copy boy for the press of the world." PreWi was organized by a syndicate of newspapers 17 years ago, in protest against the oldline cable companies, whose stiff rates and habit of sidetracking low-rate press dispatches had annoyed publishers in World War I. PreWi now also carries radio-photos and voice broadcasts, had a mobile station working from a Normandy beachhead on D-day plus 7.

Last week PreWi got deeply involved in union trouble. The trouble began in New York where 46 employes, a sixth of Pre-Wi's staff, were laid off in a postwar economy retrenchment. (PreWi's traffic had slumped from its wartime peak of 430,000 words a day.) The C.I.O.'s American Communications Association promptly pulled the rest out on strike. Its contention: the company should have arbitrated the layoffs in advance.

To make its strike more effective, the union also slapped an "embargo" on eight other carriers (Mackay Radio, etc.) who were not involved in the strike, i.e., the union forbade any of its nonstriking workers to transmit overseas news to any newspaper or news agency.

This frank pressure play against Pre-Wi's 13 stockholders* was roundly denounced as "private censorship of news" by labor's faithful friend, the American Civil Liberties Union.

PreWi President A. Warren Norton, onetime Christian Science Monitor manager, put headphones on his executives and set them to manning the radio circuits, but PreWi was badly crippled. Expensive transocean telephone traffic soared as clients strove to keep the news coming from their correspondents overseas. Somehow a lot of news got through. At week's end, A.C.A. called off its embargo, agreed to return to work while the issue was arbitrated.

*The New York Times and Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune and Daily News, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, Rocky Mount (N.C.) Telegram, Editor & Publisher, A.P., U.P., I.N.S., North American Newspaper Alliance.

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