The Press: Filling the Inkless Void

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Both sides in the New York brouhaha have budged barely a pica from their original position since negotiations began last March, and a federal mediator last week became so discouraged at the lack of progress that he suspended talks indefinitely. Few readers are willing to wager how long the dispute will last, though the City News is offering a $1,000 prize for the guess that proves most accurate. The three struck dailies are losing about $1.6 million a day in advertising and circulation revenues these slow summer weeks. One popular theory is that the papers may soften their demands after Labor Day, the start of the annual back-to-school advertising binge.

But the publishers do not seem to be in a compromising mood. Besides, even if the pressmen were to survive this skirmish, the papers would no doubt be laying for them next time, and papers in other cities might eventually join the war. The pressmen are in a sense the last casualties in the newspaper industry's long, wrenching and inevitable shift from benign, family-dominated management to the more bloodless, efficient and profit-minded imperatives that other industries adopted decades ago. The pressmen, meanwhile, will continue to resist—and grow old. The News's Frank Boylan endured the rigors of the pressroom for 13 years before making the rank of journeyman. By the time his two sons entered the trade a few years back, there were so many pressmen and so few jobs that it would have taken two decades to make journeyman. "There was very little future for them with all the newspaper closings, so I gave them a few words of wisdom," he said on the picket line last week. "They got out."