Press: Revolution on Fleet Street

On Gray's Inn Road in London, just north of Fleet Street, the modern office buildings that once housed the Times and the Sunday Times are nearly abandoned, their lobbies dark and locked. One mile away, in a seedy dock area called Wapping, deep in the shadow of the Tower of London, stands the imposing, boxlike building that is the new home of the two papers, as well as of the tabloids the Sun and the News of the World. Ringing the Wapping compound are surveillance cameras, fences 8 ft. high and thick coils of concertina wire studded with razor blades. The police allow only a few pickets to stand vigil at the gate, but some nights thousands of protesters show up to do battle with hundreds of bobbies, all the while screaming epithets at their onetime boss.

The target of their wrath is Keith Rupert Murdoch, 54, the proprietor of Wapping and one of the world's most powerful press barons. Murdoch has acted audaciously in the past, but never before has he accomplished so much in a single bold stroke. For 50 years Fleet Street's print unions have exercised a viselike control over the national newspaper industry, blocking the introduction of new technology and shutting down the presses at will. Murdoch broke that costly stranglehold in one weekend last month. He abruptly fired nearly 6,000 striking printers and moved his London papers to the $140 million computerized plant at Wapping, thus allowing him a fresh start to man the presses the way he saw fit. The maneuver not only opens the way for the country's other 13 major dailies and Sunday papers to join the technological revolution but delivers a stinging blow to the British union movement. Observes Andrew Knight, chief executive of the Daily Telegraph: "This is the year of Murdoch."

It is also the beginning of the end for Fleet Street as the 200-year-old center of the British newspaper industry. Robert Maxwell, the mercurial publisher of the leftish Daily Mirror (circ. 3 million), plans to follow Murdoch to the east London docklands area by 1987. He has already persuaded the unions to allow him to lay off one-third of his company's 6,000 workers in exchange for severance benefits. The conservative Daily Telegraph (1.2 million), now controlled by Canadian Tycoon Conrad Black, hopes to finish its headquarters in east London by the fall. The liberal, thoughtful Guardian (487,000) is building a new plant next to the Telegraph's, while the breezy, Tory-minded Daily Mail (1.8 million) should move into its offices on the Thames' south bank by 1988.

One paper that does not have to worry about the printers' unions is Today, which debuts next week. Today represents something completely new for Britain: an electronically reproduced daily paper with four-color pages. Founded by Eddy Shah, a successful purveyor of provincial giveaway newspapers, Today will be a 44-page tabloid heavy on domestic news and sports. By setting up his state-of-the-art plant three miles from Fleet Street, Shah skirted the printers entirely, and instead is negotiating a no-strike deal with his employees. Today's staff, including deliverers, numbers only 600, anorectic by the overstuffed standards of Fleet Street.