The Road Back

It is a journalistic axiom that newspapers never fully recover from the effects of a prolonged strike. Their readers give increasing attention to magazines, radio and TV--and begin looking at papers still publishing along the perimeter of the strike zone. Some customers lose the newspaper-reading habit for good. Thus it was no surprise when New York's 114-day newspaper strike finally ended last spring, that its effects began to be felt almost at once.

Because of their sheer number, Manhattan's seven dailies are particularly vulnerable to strike damage. There are simply not enough readers to support them all; only two of the seven, the Times and the Daily News, consistently make money. And by publishers' standards, the timing of New York's strike could not have been worse. Only a few months after the papers got back into print, they faced the summer doldrums, that slack vacation period when both circulation and advertising fall as shops close, Broadway burns dimly, and cliff dwellers by the thousands quit the town.

More Ways than One. By now, New York's newspaper publishers are understandably laconic; they would rather not give out circulation and ad revenue figures. But available evidence suggests that, nearly six months after the strike's end, Manhattan's dailies are still paying for it in more ways than one.

Overall daily circulation dipped 10%, to 5,000,000 just after the strike ended, and there it has stayed. Sunday circulation, from a prestrike 6,700,000, has fallen 500,000 to 6,200,000. The Times, which together with the Herald Tribune, raised its copy price to a dime, has dropped 70,000 daily circulation, to 636,000. But the News, which stayed at a nickel, has lost 100,000 daily and nearly 200,000 Sunday. All three afternoon papers, which were already selling for a dime, suffered circulation losses --from the Post's 4% to the World-Telegram's 11%. And although total advertising linage is slowly climbing back to the prestrike level, only two of the seven papers--the Times and the Herald Tribune--are reaping the rewards; the other five have lost ground.

Neither Easy nor Short. As they wonder where the readers went, most observers conjure up the figure of the commuter. Ivan Veit, business manager of the Times, subscribes to the widely shared view that what the papers lost was "multiple readers"--people who bought two or more papers daily, one for the ride to work and another for the trip home. Newsstand sales, off some 10%, suggest that Veit may be right. Francis M. Flynn, president and publisher of the Daily News, thinks that commuters have rediscovered homegrown substitutes: "I hear that people are reading suburban papers more and liking them better."

To gather the departed readers back into the fold, New York's dailies are trying everything. Hearst's evening Journal-American has announced a $2,000,000 expansion program--most of which, according to the paper's commuter train ads, will go into a new Sunday magazine and a TV program guide. The Daily News is bidding for new readers, presumably bilingual, over the city's Spanish-language radio stations. The New York Herald Tribune is busy preparing new supplements for its Sunday edition. But no one expects the road back to be short or easy. Says Tribune President Walter Thayer: "It wouldn't surprise me if it took about a year for the circulation of all seven papers to return to the prestrike level."

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