News to Post: Drop Dead

By Jesse Birnbaum

) A tabloid is a newspaper designed for wrapping fish. Before folding in the flounder, some folks read it for prurient gossip about the filthy famous and filthier rich, political scandals, meat-ax murders, baby killers, horse-race results, used-car ads and, now and then, a scoop. It speaks with a cigarette behind its ear and a toothpick in the corner of its mouth. Its headlines are punchy and raunchy: HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR and BEST SEX I EVER HAD. Men read these papers mainly for sporting news. Women prefer tabloids, jokes Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News, "because women tend to have shorter arms."

Be that as it may, there was nothing arm's length about the raucous tabloid wars that erupted in New York City last week. On the one arm was the hard- driving Zuckerman, a millionaire real estate developer who also publishes the weekly newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report and the monthly Atlantic. On the other was another big-bucks businessman, Steven Hoffenberg, who has announced his intention to buy the News's competition, the failing New York Post. With the Post thus gasping for breath, Zuckerman leaped for its jugular and in a few days hired away its three top editors and three of its best columnists.

This prompted the Post, which doesn't have a dime to buy a banana from a pushcart, to lodge a lawsuit against the News. Hoffenberg charged that Zuckerman is a "vulture" and "body snatcher" who is trying to destroy the Post with his "crazy Kamikaze attack." The pages of both papers, meanwhile, barked daily accusations of impropriety and nasty innuendos about each other -- behaving, in other words, like tabloids. IT'S WAR! shrieked a Post banner. DAILY NEWS RAIDS THE POST!

The war actually began in January, shortly after Zuckerman bought the News for $36.3 million. Once the top tabloid in the U.S., with a circulation of 3 million (now 777,000), the paper had been crippled by a strike and a hemorrhaging of advertising revenues wrought largely by the recession. Zuckerman could not hope to go head to head against the steady New York Times, but he had to be concerned about two other dailies. One was the genteel, struggling New York Newsday, once described by a News editor as "a tabloid in a tutu." The other, to be sure, was the staggering, vulnerable Post. It was the first target.

Preparing for battle, Zuckerman swiftly chopped down the News' fatted staff, firing 185 newsroom and business employees (out of a total of 540) and at the same time demoralizing even those who were lucky enough to keep their job. Not the least infuriated by this treatment was the Post's star columnist Mike McAlary, who wrote a scorching piece about the "massacre," labeling Zuckerman "a filthy little dictator . . . a tyrant on the political make" who "borrows freely from the fascist handbook" and, furthermore, "knows less than nothing about writing ((and)) even less about newspapers."

McAlary's own paper was in even worse financial shape than the News. Press tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Post in 1976, lost about $150 million in a dozen years before caving in. The latest would-be savior was Peter Kalikow, like Zuckerman a real estate lord, who ran down the circulation (from 550,000 to about 438,000), threw his real estate holdings into bankruptcy and exacted a 20% pay cut from his staff before finally putting the paper up for sale. Answering the call was Hoffenberg, whose millions come from "financial services," in this case buying other business's bad debts at a discount and then hounding the debtors to pay up.

Zuckerman was not about to take this interloper -- and the threat of heightened competition -- standing up. His newshawks were soon reporting that Hoffenberg once employed a "Mafia leg buster," a commodities swindler and even the discredited former billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. Not only that, Hoffenberg had been involved in questionable business dealings that aroused the interest of federal and state securities regulators.

Never mind all that, says Hoffenberg, a self-styled "nice guy from Brooklyn," who explains that his troubles were merely "technical violations." In any case, he wants to make the Post a going business. He has already made good on his promise to reinstate half of Kalikow's salary cuts and hopes to bolster the bottom line by using his 1,000-member sales force as advertising salespeople. He won't interfere in editorial matters, he insists. "The creative side, that's not my job. I have enough to do on the publishing side," although he wants to write a weekly column "to promote my feelings about what America should be." He claims that morale at the Post has improved vastly since he stepped in. "It's like a family now," he says.

Some family. One Post columnist calls his new boss "Repo Man." Another newsman in that shop grouses, "We're sort of like a MASH unit. There's never been enough of anything. We don't know if ((Hoffenberg)) is for real. He talks * a good game. If it turns out to be bluster, we've all been duped."

Post columnist McAlary did not wait to be duped. To the astonishment of colleagues on both papers, he announced last week that he was going over to the News (for a reported $260,000). Speaking of Hoffenberg, McAlary said, "It's very hard to work for a publisher who, when you talk to him, is staring at the watch on your wrist and the rings on your fingers. I cover crooks. I don't work for them." But how, he was asked, could he work for Zuckerman after denouncing him so viciously? Easy, replied McAlary. "He's willing to look past it. So, he starts off a bigger guy than me."

The rest of the News staff may not feel so charitable. They are still smarting from the wholesale firings and worried about their own futures -- as well they might be, in the face of rumors that Zuckerman has been talking to a couple of Newsday staffers. Many News reporters also resent McAlary for his turnabout and take even less kindly to the appearance in the newsroom of the key editors from the competition.

So, now it's a war to the finish between two ego-driven businessmen, Mr. Bigger Guy, who enjoys the power and perks of publishing -- and to his credit harbors serious hopes of energizing his news coverage and style -- and Mr. Repo Man, who simply wants to play in the big time and tell America what it should be. Of the two papers, it is the Post, in the hands of an untried newcomer and shorn of several talented top journalists, that may not survive. That would leave New Yorkers with only one hometown tabloid to thrill them with headlines like GOTHAM BESIEGED BY KILLER COCKROACHES!

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Audit Bireau of Circulations}]CAPTION: Average paid circulation, Monday to Friday, for six months ending Sept. 30, 1992

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo and Sophfronia Scott Gregory/New York