Scoop at Sea

It all began as sea-breezy fun and a good-natured rivalry between two newspapers in the same city. For weeks the biggest story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer concerned one of its own em ployees. The paper kept its readers posted almost daily on the progress of Copy Editor Robert Manry, 48, who set out last June 1 from Falmouth, Mass., for Falmouth, England, aboard the frail 131-ft. sloop Tinkerbelle. Manry dutifully reported news of his crossing to the Plain Dealer via passing ships; once he sent a bundle of letters to his wife, and the Plain Dealer published those too. As all Cleveland concentrated on the adventures of its seagoing copy editor, the city's other paper, Scripps-Howard's Cleveland Press, was left high and dry. It could only run occasional, routine items about the voyage; when an editor asked if the Press could run some of Mrs. Manry's letters from her husband, the Plain Dealer told her to refuse. In preparation for Manry's arrival, the Plain Dealer decided to make the most of its scoop. It sent three staffers, plus Manry's wife and two children, to England to greet him. Last week one of the reporters hired a plane to fly over Tinkerbelle, and his story was headlined: "Hello Bob! See you soon." The Plain Dealer saw Bob sooner than it expected, and in the last place it wanted to see him: in the pages of the Press. There, in a long interview, the voyager told all: how he had been washed overboard six times, dodged sharks and dolphin in his small craft, suffered hallucinations of ghosts. The Press also ran color photos of the newsman-sailor, tanned, bearded and red-eyed. The trip had turned into a clear scoop for the Press, and the paper savored its revenge. The turnabout, however, had been engineered not by the Press, but by Cleveland TV station WEWS, which had also dispatched a team of newsmen to England. They had avoided the swarm of competitors waiting at Falmouth and had set out to sea from Penzance in a $500-a-day fishing trawler. When they were 265 miles out, they spotted Manry, who invited them aboard. They interviewed him for three and a half hours on sound film, then telephoned the gist of their interview to Cleveland from the trawler. WEWS, also owned by Scripps-Howard, operates independently of the Press, but it agreed to pass on the interview. All the WEWS that was fit to print appeared in the Press even before the film clips went on the air. Dismayed as it is by its rival's coup, the Plain Dealer is still pushing ahead with plans for covering Manry's arrival, and has arranged to send his family out in a boat to meet him. Trouble is, by week's end he had not been sighted for a few days; even the R.A.F. had not spotted him in heavy fog.

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