Failure on Fleet Street

London's Fleet Street, the home of most of Britain's national dailies and once the newspaper capital of the world, has fallen on hard times. Just how hard became apparent in March, when the tacky tabloid Daily Sketch (circ. 760,000) announced that it would cease publication. This month, the Sketch will be merged into the troubled Daily Mail (circ. 1,800,000), which turns tabloid this week in an effort to stay alive after 75 years as a standard-size sheet. As a result of the merger, 270 journalists and 1,400 production workers will lose their jobs, and that may be just the beginning. Most of the nine remaining dailies are losing money. Only three or four seem financially secure.

Rising production costs and competition from commercial television for advertising are only part of Fleet Street's problem. Thanks to a long tradition of ineffectual management, the newspapers' 40-odd labor unions are able to whipsaw British publishers with wildcat strikes or strike threats close to deadlines that amount to near blackmail. "The unions run our business," concedes Lord Thomson of Fleet, Britain's premier press lord, whose prestigious but money-losing Times is desperate for readers. Adds Thomson: "They even censor our papers."

All too true. Last December, production workers halted publication of the Evening Standard when its editor refused to remove a cartoon critical of British electrical workers who were staging a nationwide slowdown. Last year the Sunday Observer bowed to an ultimatum delivered midway in its press run and removed an anonymous letter criticizing union practices in the newspaper industry. It was, admitted Editor David Astor, "not a very courageous decision."

Management without much backbone has sometimes agreed to split with labor the salaries of workers laid off by technological progress. And some mechanical unions actually receive pay packets for nonexistent workers. Featherbedding on the papers is so blatant that some employees serve on a so-called "cinema shift": they check in, then go out to see a movie and return just in time to check out. The National Union of Journalists, which organizes editorial employees, cannot exert deadline pressure as effectively as the shop unions--and resents it. Says N.U.J. Official Donald Young: "The real problem is that weak-minded management has knuckled under to comparatively unskilled men."

Fight or Fold. Some of Fleet Street's newer and more modern-minded proprietors, such as Canadian-born Thomson and Rupert Murdoch (TIME, Jan. 12, 1970), are trying to hold the line on budgets and resist union demands. Despite the folding of the Sketch, labor shows no signs of surrendering any of its prerogatives, even at the risk of putting thousands more out of work. Of the "popular" papers, the conservative Daily Express (circ. 3,500,000) and the pro-Labor Daily Mirror (circ. 4,500,000) remain profitable, although both have been losing readers lately to Murdoch's gossipy, gimmicky new Sun (circ. 2,000,000). The new daily to be created from the Mail-Sketch merger is expected to have a hard time bucking that opposition.

The more serious Tory Daily Telegraph and the business-oriented Financial Times have good survival prospects, but three great names in British journalism are in danger of disappearing. Faced with strong competition from Thomson's Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph, the Astor-owned Observer is given only a marginal chance to survive, as is the daily Guardian, which this week celebrates its 150th anniversary. Despite frantic efforts to revitalize its formula, the venerable London Times ran $2,400,000 in the red last year, bringing Lord Thomson's total losses since he bought the paper to a reported $17 million. "There should be only four national newspapers in Britain today," he says. "It doesn't make sense to have more." Time seems certain to prove him right, and clearly His Lordship hopes the Times will be among the survivors. But unless he can steer it out of the sea of red ink soon, the flagship of Fleet Street just may not make it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.