The Press: When the News Tickers Fell Silent

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Managing Editor Bill Brown of the Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer said that "we were all sitting here fat, dumb and pretty, and suddenly all the wire services went dead." After Brown's staff had called papers in Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia in search of information, the A.P. wirephoto machines started up again. Copy as well as pictures flowed over the machines. But the regular A.P. news tickers usually punch out magnetic tapes that many newspapers use to set type automatically. The wirephoto machine does not have the same capability, so the Enquirer and, no doubt, dozens of other papers, had to set some of their stories manually. At the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel-Star, Copy Editor Saul Daniels gleaned information by calling his parents in New York. His father put a transistor radio next to the telephone, and Sentinel-Star staffers took turns transcribing radio reports.

Considering their own predicament, New York's newspapers did not do badly either. Except for Rupert Murdoch's afternoon Post, which failed to publish on Thursday since it had neither power nor alternative plants, the dailies performed admirably. The first eight copies of the Times's normal nightly run of 850,000 had rolled off the presses Wednesday when the blackout hit. Times editors laid out a second Page One and Two, had plates made across the Hudson River at the Bergen County Record's plant and ran off a collector's item edition—with two completely different front pages—at their own facility in Carlstadt, N.J. The Daily News, having already printed 200,000 copies of two editions, prepared a new edition at the Newsday plant on Long Island. As always, the News superbly captured the tumult with its photographs—but so did the Times, which has been known to downplay pictures for prose.

Twinkly Eyes. Of course none of the newspapers or TV news operations would have been caught flatfooted had they had the services of a small, white-haired man with twinkly eyes who appeared in the city room of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Tuesday. The little man called himself simply Roge (pronounced Ro-jay), and was up from Salinas, Calif., to attend a magicians' convention. Roge, 52, a onetime newsman, offered to predict the headline of the paper's Thursday edition. He wrote out his prediction and sealed it within five envelopes. On Thursday, City Editor Stephen Green and Roge opened the envelopes. MASSIVE POWER BLACKOUT HITS NEW YORK CITY AREA, read Roge's headline. The Post-Intelligencer's Thursday headline? Precisely the same.