Filling the Inkless Void

As the strike that shut New York City's three major dailies slid into its third week, there was dancing in the streets. A pair of high-stepping hoofers dressed in long gowns and sandwich boards were tripping along the sidewalks of New York, together with their dinner-jacketed producer, in an attempt to advertise a new and little noticed revue. A Brooklyn department store, unable to take out the usual full-page ads for its back-to-school sales, took to the skies instead, hiring five computer-assisted planes to cough out messages in white smoke. On Broadway, the Sept. 11 opening of Arthur Kopit's new play, Wings, was postponed until after the still uncertain reopening of New York's real-life version of The Front Page.

To fill the inkless void left by the closing of the Daily News, Post and New York Times (combined circulation: 3.4 million), three interim daily tabloids were born of the strike. The trio, in order of appearance:

P: The City News (circ. 425,000), launched by Christopher Hagedorn, who publishes six local weeklies, bears a faint resemblance to the struck News.

P: The Daily Press (circ. 320,000), another News lookalike, was started by Brothers Gary and Mark Stern, who have published strike papers in Detroit and Baltimore.

P: The Daily Metro (circ. 400,000) is the inspiration of Frederick Iseman. 25, a pre-strike assistant editor at the Times. The Metro is being aided by the Post in various ways, principally with distribution. The Times has provided distribution help on a smaller scale to the City News. Rupert Murdoch, publisher of the struck Post, reportedly signed an agreement to buy the Metro if Publisher Iseman ever wants to sell it. Iseman insisted he has no such plans, but some of the city's numerous Murdoch-haters speculated that the Australian's hidden motive is to fold the ailing Post and use the strike paper as the basis for a new, nonunion daily. More likely, both Murdoch and his allies at the Times want merely to make sure that their distribution networks keep busy and that New Yorkers retain the habit of reading local newspapers--which many abandoned during the 114-day New York newspaper strike of 1962-63.

For many New Yorkers, the dispute that led to this year's walkout remained only dimly understood. Though all ten of the city's newspaper unions are by now either officially on strike or honoring the picket lines, the focus of the fracas is a once mighty, now waning band of newsprint-hatted yeomen, the pressmen. Not to be confused with printers, who set the type--and whose ranks have been thinned by automation in recent years --pressmen are the strong-limbed fellows who start, stop, replate, ink, wipe and otherwise keep the presses rolling. Automation has not much altered their jobs. The presses roll twice as fast as they did in 1923, when a strike set the manning levels and work rules that pretty much prevail today, but the union has argued that faster presses require more pressmen to prevent accidents and breakdowns.

Not so, say the New York publishers. They complain that the 1923 requirements are outmoded, that the pressmen's salaries have risen far faster than the speed of the presses and that newspapers in 143 other cities have found it possible to get by with manning levels half of what they are in New York. The publishers have thus proposed reducing the number of pressroom jobs in the city from 1,593 to roughly 800. That would eventually save about $2 million a year each at the News and the Times, and about half that at the smaller Post.

Not that any of the papers are in danger of folding if they lose; only the Post is said to be losing money, but industry insiders doubt that Publisher Murdoch is about to abandon the paper, which he bought 21 months ago.

The pressmen are hardly underpaid. A journeyman's straight-time wage is $361 a week, but a truer average is more than $500 after overtime and a lucrative form of "double-dipping." Arcane work rules in the pressroom allow some workers to put in a few hours at one newspaper (for a full day's pay) and then dash over to work another shift at a competing daily. At the News, about half of the 600 regular pressmen last year made more than $25,000 even before any such moonlighting, and 19 of them topped $35,000.

To be sure, a working pressroom is no rest home. The noise is so intense that communication is often possible only by hand signals: the air is so thick with ink mist and other impurities that some pressmen wear long underwear in the dead of summer to protect their skin. Though many pressmen work only 6% hours a day and some as little as two hours, they insist that scrubbing off pressroom grime can take hours more. They also complain that the hulking, screeching presses take a fearful toll in lost fingers and other injuries. Medical studies are either incomplete or inconclusive, but some researchers suspect that pressmen suffer higher than normal rates of hearing loss, lung cancer and emphysema. New York's pressmen tend to be relatively old (average age: 47), minimally educated and entrenched in their calling. It currently takes more than 20 years of service to move from the entry-level rank of apprentice (or "flyboy" as pressmen call it) to journeyman.

Moreover, theirs is a vanishing breed.

After winning automation agreements that curbed other production unions, newspaper managements across the country are finally cracking down on the pressmen. The union has been forced to accept reduced manning in San Francisco and Atlanta, and its members have been replaced by nonunion pressmen in Dallas, Kansas City, Mo., and Madison, Wis. The Washington Post's success in expelling the pressmen's union after a 1975 dispute is believed to have encouraged the New York publishers.

Both sides in the New York brouhaha have budged barely a pica from their original position since negotiations began last March, and a federal mediator last week became so discouraged at the lack of progress that he suspended talks indefinitely. Few readers are willing to wager how long the dispute will last, though the City News is offering a $1,000 prize for the guess that proves most accurate. The three struck dailies are losing about $1.6 million a day in advertising and circulation revenues these slow summer weeks. One popular theory is that the papers may soften their demands after Labor Day, the start of the annual back-to-school advertising binge.

But the publishers do not seem to be in a compromising mood. Besides, even if the pressmen were to survive this skirmish, the papers would no doubt be laying for them next time, and papers in other cities might eventually join the war. The pressmen are in a sense the last casualties in the newspaper industry's long, wrenching and inevitable shift from benign, family-dominated management to the more bloodless, efficient and profit-minded imperatives that other industries adopted decades ago. The pressmen, meanwhile, will continue to resist--and grow old. The News's Frank Boylan endured the rigors of the pressroom for 13 years before making the rank of journeyman. By the time his two sons entered the trade a few years back, there were so many pressmen and so few jobs that it would have taken two decades to make journeyman. "There was very little future for them with all the newspaper closings, so I gave them a few words of wisdom," he said on the picket line last week. "They got out."

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