The Press: The Claw

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Half a century ago, rough and ready U.S. journalism boiled with such competition that Bostonians could take their daily pick of twelve daily English-language papers, Chicagoans of ten, New Yorkers of 20. By 1916, the alltime peak year, no less than 2,461 dailies were in business. By last week, when the American Newspaper Publishers Association met for its annual convention in New York, the total number of U.S. dailies had dropped to about 1,750. And in only 76 U.S. communities were there dailies in competition.

What has happened to the U.S. daily was a top subject at the A.N.P.A. convention. The general answer was easily come by: in the postwar period newspaper profits, caught in a narrowing gap between out-of-this-world costs and this-worldly revenue increases, have gone down by as much as 50%, thereby driving scores of papers out of competitive existence.

Barely Black. Newsprint, which can account for 50% of a paper's budget, has soared from $41 a ton in 1933 to $135. The Linotype machine that sold for $8,000 twenty years ago costs $20,000 today. Technological gains in efficiency are largely neutralized by the fact that powerful shop unions prevent management from cutting payrolls, even though only half as many men may actually be needed to tend the new equipment. Union "make-work" practices such as "bogus"—the needless resetting of ads originally received in mat or plate form—waste millions of dollars a year. And labor costs have maintained a consistent spiral: in New York a Linotypist's wage has climbed from $77.70 in 1945 to $128 a week—and the International Typographical Union is currently demanding $30 a week more.

Even dailies of medium circulation, least pinched by the cost-income claw, are finding it increasingly tough to stay in the black ink. In a study of a "typical" daily of 50,000 circulation. Editor & Publisher found revenue up 25.61% in the last decade, costs up 39.57%—and net profit down 58.24% (see chart).

Reducing Diet. To stay afloat, newspapers have tried everything from diversification (the Charlotte Observer turned a tidy profit last year by leasing its truck fleet) to dieting (the Los Angeles Times has shrunk 5 in. in width, estimates that each ½-in. trim saves $500,000 a year in paper costs). Last year the Milwaukee Journal, minding its pennies, canceled its annual employees' picnic (savings: $12,000), rerouted its newsprint cars (savings: $1,500), and with other items amounting to as little as $250 a year managed to save an overall $450,000.

Some papers have shaved overhead by forming cost-cutting business alliances. Tulsa's morning World and evening Tribune, spirited editorial rivals, share the same shop. Papers in three Georgia cities have combined as the Georgia Group, whose ad salesmen sell space at a reduced group rate. In a single plant in Clarksville, Tenn., Publisher James Charlet prints nine papers. In a recent, dramatic example, New York's chain-publishing S. I. Newhouse sold plant and property of his strikebound St. Louis Globe-Democrat to the thriving St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which will print the Globe on contract.