Void in Manhattan

The New York Daily News settled with the printers' union for a 21% pay increase over three years. Would the World Journal Tribune go along? "All they can do is pay or shut down," said Printers Boss Bert Powers flatly. Last week the W.J.T. shut down.

W.J.T. President Matt Meyer bore out Powers' snap analysis. "Since the W.J.T. began publication in September of last year," he said, "we have contributed over $10 million to keep the paper alive. In addition to this, severance payments of $7,000,000 were made by the three predecessor papers to former employees. Our losses are presently running at the rate of $700,000 per month."

Meyer then sketched the brief, ruinous career of the merged Herald Tribune, Journal-American and World-Telegram & Sun. "We announced our intention a little over a year ago to merge our three newspapers into one new company to publish a morning, an afternoon and a Sunday newspaper. We were then struck for 140 days. Many of the more talented and essential employees of our three papers found other work."

The morning-paper idea was abandoned, said Meyer. And even when agreement was finally reached, "we could not select the people we needed. We could not place people in jobs where their special skills and talents were best suited. We were compelled to employ 500 more persons than were needed. In the first six months of our operation we had a total of 55 harassing disputes, of which 18 resulted in actual work stoppages, each precipitated by a union to prevent us from correcting inefficiencies, reducing overtime or reducing personnel. We are now asked to assume a new wage increase of 21% over three years and to continue operating under the restrictions of the present agreements. It cannot be done."

Shoestring Irony. While Meyer's indictment of the unions correctly spotlighted the immediate cause of the paper's demise, there were other reasons too. The top management triumvirate --Jock Whitney, Jack Howard and William Randolph Hearst Jr.--never worked together too well. Each man had his own ideas about newspapering, and proudly stuck to them. It was Whitney who first decided that he had had enough. He had been willing to lose money in his abortive attempt to turn the Herald Tribune into a lively daily newsmagazine. But he never felt especially close to the W.J.T. When Whitney refused to keep pouring in money, the other two publishers had little choice but to go along. "The irony," says a New York newspaper expert, "is that three of the richest publishers in the U.S. tried to run a business on a shoestring. To run a newspaper in New York, you've got to pay your people well, automate to the teeth and compete with the big-leaguers."

Even as death approached, the W.J.T. was not all that bad. Editorial costs had been cut back drastically, but circulation had risen to a comfortable 700,000. Much of the news seemed stale, but a few top performers continued to shine. Clay Felker's New York magazine delved zestfully into many levels of city life. Columnist Jimmy Breslin supplied some intriguing glimpses of Manhattan's lower depths. Suzy Knickerbocker gave high society a glossy polish along with a few smudges. Some of the critics were among the best in the business: Maurice Dolbier on books, Judith Crist on movies, Alan Rich on music, Dick Goldstein on pop culture. The paper, on the other hand, also carried a heavy load of bland and banal columnists.

Absolutely Hopeless? As the W.J.T. went under, other papers took action. The New York Times settled with the printers for the Daily News package of a 21% wage increase over three years. The News boosted its newsstand price by a penny to eight cents. The New York Post raised ad rates 20%, since it expected a 50% circulation gain.

Moreover, publishers took a hard look at the new void in the New York afternoon--on the face of it, a city of 8,000,000 should be able to support more than a second-rate tabloid like the Post. Some professed no interest. "No matter how much money you had," said Sam Newhouse, "it's absolutely hopeless to expect to run a sound paper --not just because of salary pressures, but also because of the restrictions labor puts on efficient operations." Joseph Pulitzer Jr. of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, whose grandfather had made the World famous, agreed that the city is highly "unpropitious" for a newspaper because of the "unreasonable and unstatesmanlike conduct of the labor unions." Said the Washington Post's Kay Graham: "I don't think anybody is going to want to take over. The W.J.T. was a promising and original new effort which hardly had time to vindicate the faith of its founders. It's devastating."

Gardner Cowles of Cowles Communications, however, thought that "somebody might very well try to start a standard evening newspaper"--though he was personally not interested. New York Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger by no means shut the door on the possibility of the Times moving into the afternoon field, either by printing 24 hours a day or by starting a new newspaper. "We are going to take a look at the situation," he said. "It would be foolish of us not to consider whether the afternoon newspaper field does not offer us a business opportunity and an opportunity for public service."

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