Last Blood from a Pale Stone

Twice in the past four years, strikes have shut down and crippled New York newspapers. Last week another strike seemed certain. And this time the stakes were higher than ever. The newly formed World Journal Tribune, Inc., comprising three merged dailies, was in danger of capsizing just as it was being launched. And one of its members, the Herald Tribune, was in danger of going under for good.

The publishers had set April 25 as the date for the appearance of the new afternoon paper, the World Journal, but adamant labor unions caused them to postpone their plans indefinitely. Though New York's unions are among the strongest and best-paid in the U.S. newspaper business, they showed no signs of compromising their stiff demands. Informed that they would lose roughly 2,000 members as a result of the merger, they insisted on the highest possible severance pay and dismissal of employees on a basis of strict seniority. At one point, the Guild, which represents editorial employees, even demanded that all its members be kept on the payroll for a full year. Inevitably, negotiations bogged down; nor did the intervention of Mayor John Lindsay late in the week get them moving again.

Mean Appearance. Taking grim stock of the situation, Herald Tribune Publisher John Hay Whitney wrote an eloquent Page One indictment of the unions and a last-minute plea for cooperation. "In the past," he said, "management's side has always been modestly withheld for fear of offending the negotiators and labor has had its say effectively so that we always appeared either mean or incompetent and sometimes both." Whitney conceded that the publishers had much to answer for in the past. But the present problem, he went on, is "here and now when we are trying to make a new start and we find that we can't. The unions won't let us."

Could it be, Whitney wondered, that the unions have "concluded that they don't need us, that we are weak and not worth saving"? He did not deny that the Trib is financially weak indeed. "Maybe they think that in this pale stone," he wrote, "there is another drop to be squeezed out. There isn't. The newspapers of this city, for all the fact of the competition among them and the ancient work practices they are forced to follow, have the most expensive union contracts in the country."

Lively Companion. "I bought the Herald Tribune eight years ago because I believe deeply in the value of articulate, intelligent discussion of our world," wrote Whitney, almost as if he were expecting the imminent demise of his paper. "I wanted it to continue to be what I always thought it was: a lively companion to a wide circle of friends. I did not buy it to make myself wealthy or famous or powerful. You cannot buy the traditions and principles of this newspaper; you can only lend them a hand toward survival. That effort has not been completely successful."

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