Newspapers: Striking It Poor

Though Manhattan’s 16-week newspaper strike cost it some $5.000,000 in pre-Christmas revenues, the New York Times finished last year in the black, thus preserving a record of annual profits that stretches unbroken back to 1896. On revenues of $118 million, the Times netted $1,811.550, down from 1961 profits of $2,212,709. But because the strike continued through the end of March, the Times’s 1963 bookkeeping may well be sketched in bright red. Last week the Times announced that for the first quarter of this year, during which its 735,000-circulation New York edition did not publish a single copy,* it suffered a net loss of $4,136,000, even after $295,000 in dividends from Canada’s Spruce Falls Power & Paper Co., in which the Times owns 42% of the voting stock. It was the worst loss in the paper’s 152-year history. “Additional revenue must be obtained,” said Board Chairman Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Publisher Orvil E. Dryfoos, “to make up for our losses.” Which is no news to New Yorkers, who have been paying twice as much (10¢) for the Times ever since its reappearance last month. Some found the nickel boost too much to bear, and some discovered during the 114-day strike that they could live without the Times. The result: circulation last month was down 6.7% from April 1962.

‘— The Times’s Los Angeles-based Western edition (circ. 90,000) and its Paris-based international edition (33,873.) published throughout the strike. Though the paper released no profit estimates for the Western edition, it admitted that “expenses continue to exceed revenues” on the two-year-old Paris venture.