The Press: Pretty Much Routine

As the second edition rumbled off the presses at 12:10 a.m. Thursday morning last week, the New York Times radio room picked up a staccato message from the sealanes off Nantucket Island: POSITION 40.34 N, 69.45 W . . . INSPECTING OUR

DAMAGE. Flashed to the third-floor city room, the SOS was the first any Manhattan newspaper knew of the collision between the Italian liner Andrea Doria and the Swedish American Line's Stockholm (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). The Times stopped its presses, hustled to cover the story. In the next 36 hours it proved once again what newsmen have known ever since the sinking of the S. S. Titanic* in April 1912: the sedate, sometimes plodding New York Times can get up and gallop like a quarter horse on a fast-breaking disaster.

On the Street. Unlike the Titanic story, when Times editors, working with scattered wireless reports, scooped the world, there were no great news beats this time. At 12:34 a.m. Associated Press sent out the first bulletin, and the first radio bulletins followed soon after with the barest facts. By 2:30 a.m. every Manhattan morning paper—the Times, the Herald Tribune, the News, the Mirror—was on the street with bulletins and sketchy stories. The A.P. alone had 35 men on the story by 7 a.m., wirephotoed its first aerial pictures of the stricken ships by 8:35 a.m., fully 90 minutes before rival United Press. Before noon, on NBC and ABC, TV audiences saw movies of the Andrea Doria. At the peak, the afternoon World-Telegram and Sun had 61 men on the story, practically its whole cityside staff, devoted its entire final-edition front page to pictures of the listing Andrea Doria and the broken-nosed Stockholm wallowing in a glassy sea.

But no one could match the coverage of the Times. Routed out of bed shortly after midnight, Managing Editor Turner Catledge ran the show himself from his office in the corner of the city room. At first Catledge thought that all he needed was a small box, but as the plight of the Andrea Doria grew more desperate, he put all 15 men of his night staff to work, splashed on an eight-column, three-line, 48-point headline, second only to the 60-point head the conservative Times reserves for "declarations of war." As stories poured in from the foreign desk, the national desk, even the obituary desk, advertising was killed to make more room.

By 2:30 a.m., with 1,240 words on the disaster already in the paper, the Times really started moving. By 7:30 a.m., rolling out its fifth and final edition of the day, the Times had 5,000 words on it; six stories, besides a sharp, authoritative lead, were on the front page alone.

All through the night and on into the morning the Times waited for what it hoped would be an eyewitness report from Times Madrid Correspondent Camille Ci-anfarra, traveling aboard the Andrea Doria. "We ought to get some good cover age from Cianfarra," said Catledge. But the story never came. Sleeping in his cabin, Timesman Cianfarra, a veteran of more than 25 years, was killed instantly by the Stockholm's ice-crusher bow, along with his daughter.