Revolution on Fleet Street

By James Kelly

On Gray's Inn Road in London, just north of Fleet Street, the modern office buildings that once housed the Times and the Sunday Times are nearly abandoned, their lobbies dark and locked. One mile away, in a seedy dock area called Wapping, deep in the shadow of the Tower of London, stands the imposing, boxlike building that is the new home of the two papers, as well as of the tabloids the Sun and the News of the World. Ringing the Wapping compound are surveillance cameras, fences 8 ft. high and thick coils of concertina wire studded with razor blades. The police allow only a few pickets to stand vigil at the gate, but some nights thousands of protesters show up to do battle with hundreds of bobbies, all the while screaming epithets at their onetime boss.

The target of their wrath is Keith Rupert Murdoch, 54, the proprietor of Wapping and one of the world's most powerful press barons. Murdoch has acted audaciously in the past, but never before has he accomplished so much in a single bold stroke. For 50 years Fleet Street's print unions have exercised a viselike control over the national newspaper industry, blocking the introduction of new technology and shutting down the presses at will. Murdoch broke that costly stranglehold in one weekend last month. He abruptly fired nearly 6,000 striking printers and moved his London papers to the $140 million computerized plant at Wapping, thus allowing him a fresh start to man the presses the way he saw fit. The maneuver not only opens the way for the country's other 13 major dailies and Sunday papers to join the technological revolution but delivers a stinging blow to the British union movement. Observes Andrew Knight, chief executive of the Daily Telegraph: "This is the year of Murdoch."

It is also the beginning of the end for Fleet Street as the 200-year-old center of the British newspaper industry. Robert Maxwell, the mercurial publisher of the leftish Daily Mirror (circ. 3 million), plans to follow Murdoch to the east London docklands area by 1987. He has already persuaded the unions to allow him to lay off one-third of his company's 6,000 workers in exchange for severance benefits. The conservative Daily Telegraph (1.2 million), now controlled by Canadian Tycoon Conrad Black, hopes to finish its headquarters in east London by the fall. The liberal, thoughtful Guardian (487,000) is building a new plant next to the Telegraph's, while the breezy, Tory-minded Daily Mail (1.8 million) should move into its offices on the Thames' south bank by 1988.

One paper that does not have to worry about the printers' unions is Today, which debuts next week. Today represents something completely new for Britain: an electronically reproduced daily paper with four-color pages. Founded by Eddy Shah, a successful purveyor of provincial giveaway newspapers, Today will be a 44-page tabloid heavy on domestic news and sports. By setting up his state-of-the-art plant three miles from Fleet Street, Shah skirted the printers entirely, and instead is negotiating a no-strike deal with his employees. Today's staff, including deliverers, numbers only 600, anorectic by the overstuffed standards of Fleet Street.

Though Murdoch is leading Britain's newspaper revolution, Shah and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher created the climate for the rebellion. In the early 1980s, Thatcher's government passed two laws that severely clipped union powers. No longer could workers summon other unions to support a strike, nor did employees have to belong to a particular union in order to hold their jobs. Most important, the courts could levy heavy fines and freeze the assets of unions that flouted the new rules. Shah tested the laws in 1983, when several printers walked off their jobs at his plant in northern England; after a violent seven-month battle, Shah emerged victorious. When the National Coal Board used the same legal tools to break the yearlong miners' strike in early 1985, the stage was set for other employers to act.

Murdoch needed little encouragement. Ever since the Australian-born publisher entered the London newspaper scene by purchasing the News of the World and the Sun in 1969, he has made no secret of his frustration with the unions' archaic practices and featherbedding. Over the years Fleet Street proprietors had yielded control of their print rooms to the unions, figuring that it was easier to grant another demand rather than endure a shutdown. Many printers work partial shifts but are paid a full week's wages; a few even receive two paychecks. Senior men can make up to $40,000, nearly three times ! the average British worker's salary. Staffing levels are maintained that would never be tolerated at a U.S. newspaper. Four printers, for example, operate each press at Murdoch's San Antonio Express-News; similar machines at the Times' Gray's Inn plant had 18 workers assigned to them. Complained Murdoch: "I'd go into a plant where 500 workers were supposed to be on the job and couldn't find more than 60."

Over the past four decades, three Royal Commissions have concluded that the unions are largely responsible for Fleet Street's chronic money woes. Terminal may be a better adjective: on gross revenues of nearly $2 billion last year, Britain's 17 major papers made about $34 million in profits, nearly all of it accounted for by Murdoch's racy Sun, the country's largest daily (circ. 4.1 million).

Murdoch began building his Wapping plant in 1980. The following year he opened negotiations with the unions on accepting computer technology and reducing staff. Among other things, he insisted on a legally binding contract, a novelty for the print unions (agreements with British employers are traditionally bound by "trust and honor"). However, as London newspaper owners well know, those pacts do not halt costly stoppages. Last year the Fleet Street papers lost nearly 96 million copies in union disputes.

The printers not only balked at a legal contract but continued to resist the new technology. The old plants, for example, featured a button for stopping presses. The Wapping compound has no such device, but the union insisted that three men should be hired to supervise an imaginary button anyway. When talks broke down in late 1984, Murdoch secretly began laying plans to operate Wapping without the printers. The publisher's New York office contacted Atex, a leading U.S. manufacturer of newspaper computers, and ordered a $10 million system. The equipment was shipped in unmarked boxes to London, where a dozen U.S. specialists assembled the setup in a warehouse.

Meanwhile, Murdoch announced plans to print a new afternoon daily at Wapping, called the London Post, and began hiring 500 members of the electricians' union to run the plant. Though officials at News International, Murdoch's British company, insist that the paper is still a possibility, the Post scheme appears to have been a diversionary tactic.

Negotiations resumed in late 1985, but little progress was made between Murdoch and Brenda Dean, the head of the largest print union. In mid-January Murdoch inaugurated the Wapping plant by producing a special Sunday Times section (it hailed itself as "a landmark in British newspaper publishing"). Furious at this calculated taunt, the printers struck Murdoch's papers on Fleet Street, fully expecting to bring the proprietor to his knees.

They failed. Murdoch promptly fired the 6,000 strikers and within 24 hours moved his papers to Wapping. He persuaded virtually all of his 700 journalists to join him by offering them free private medical insurance and raises of $2,800 a year. He hired a trucking firm to deliver the papers. When the strikers tried to discourage fellow union members from distributing the papers, the courts fined them a total of $70,000 and seized the assets of Dean's group. News International officials claim that 90% of the papers' usual press run is being met, though union leaders contend the figure is closer to 50%. "I feel like a man who has been on a life sentence and has just been freed," said Murdoch. "I feel wonderful."

It is estimated that Murdoch will save $84 million a year by printing his papers at Wapping. News International officials are willing to discuss severance benefits with the strikers, but they insist that the printers' unions will never represent employees at Wapping. At the moment, the fired workers are in no mood to cease their noisy protests outside the plant. Says Dean: "Our members feel very strongly that the company acted deceitfully, pretending it was seeking negotiations when in fact it was setting up secret arrangements to ensure they were kept out."

The prospect of increased profits from his London papers comes at a critical time for Murdoch. Last year he doubled the size of his empire by buying seven Metromedia television stations ($2 billion), 20th Century-Fox ($575 million) and a stable of business magazines from Ziff-Davis ($350 million). To finance his purchases, Murdoch has borrowed about $480 million from banks and issued shares in Fox Television Stations, the first time stock in a Murdoch-controlled enterprise has been offered to the U.S. public. Despite Murdoch's heavy financial obligations, analysts who have followed his fortunes over the years trust his business acumen. "To buy News Corporation shares, you've always had to have a lot of confidence in Rupert Murdoch and his vision," says Jim Rayner, the New York representative of J.B. Were & Son, an Australian securities firm. "He has rarely put a foot wrong."

So far, at least, Murdoch has not made a misstep in quitting Fleet Street. Thatcher has praised him in the House of Commons, while opinion polls show little support for Dean and her followers. Unlike the miners, who attracted considerable sympathy during their strike, the printers are perceived by the public as overpaid and underworked. "Fleet Street is one of the great bastions of Luddism," observed a senior government official. "The print unions, which have rejected every attempt to adapt to the future, are now washed up on a very lonely shore."

The implications stretch beyond Wapping. As Murdoch proved by hiring electricians to replace the printers, the historic solidarity of the British union movement is cracking. Following Fleet Street's example, other recalcitrant unions, notably those representing teachers and autoworkers, may be forced to modify their demands. Some government officials even grandly predict international consequences. Said one: "If Fleet Street can move decisively with a minimum of fuss, British industry will clearly present a different image across the world."

For the moment, however, it is Murdoch's journalists who are the most impressed by Wapping. Crouched over typewriters just a month ago, they now sit in front of glowing screens, moving paragraphs around electronically, deleting clumsy sentences, calling up notes. The exclamations of wonderment among American journalists when computer terminals were introduced to U.S. newspapers a decade ago are now being heard for the first time at a London paper, and there can be no turning back. "The computers are wonderful," says George Brock, editor of the Times' op-ed page. "You wonder how you ever operated without them."

With reporting by Christopher Ogden/London