The Press: 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:

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

¶ 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.

¶ 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.