The Press: After 17 Months

On Chicago’s Michigan Avenue last week, a little band of pickets paced wearily back & forth in front of the Gothic tower of the Tribune. Red and black letters on their white canvas placards told the now familiar story: “On Strike Against the Chicago Tribune.” But after 17 months, the printers seemed as far as ever from winning the strike against the Trib and Chicago’s four other major dailies.

The publishers’ “final offer” of a $10-a-week wage boost was rejected three weeks ago by the A.F.L. International Typographical Union, which wanted a $16.50-a-week raise. The 1,500 printers were under no heavy pressure to settle; they got union benefits ranging up to $60 a week. (Some of the strikers had found work in job shops; others had shifted to newspapers in nearby cities.) The publishers were under no pressure to settle either. They had so well ironed out the mechanical wrinkles of printing by Vari-Typers and similar machines that the Chicago Daily News had reached an alltime circulation high (505.277). Fortnight ago, the Trib had turned out the fattest daily paper (84 pages) in its history. But if newspapers looked much the same as in pre-strike days, they did not read the same. By & large, stories were duller, staler and skimpier.

No College Try. There was small change from one edition to another. The slower VariType system (TIME, Feb. 16, 1948) had forced the papers to advance deadlines two hours, inevitably taking the edge off the news. Papers were turning more & more to roundups and canned features to make up for the news they skipped. The Trib’s Managing Editor J. Loy (“Pat”) Maloney thought it was not all loss. Said he: “We have told the background of the news better under strike conditions than [before].” And Daily News Managing Editor Everett Norlander detected another gain: “We’ve learned how to keep our copy short.” Stories had to be chopped well down, because larger VariType faces take more space than linotype.

Faced by these difficulties, reporters and editors were less inclined to give a last-minute story the old college try. Last week, Colonel Bertie McCormick’s Tribune and Marshall Field’s tabloid Sun-Times both settled for bulletins on a shake-up at Montgomery Ward’s (see BUSINESS) that might have filled a column in the same edition in the old days. Said Sun-Times City Editor Karin Walsh: “If we don’t hit it in one edition, we’ll get it in the next.” Even bulletins were made possible only by the Graphotype,*a machine perfected by the Trib (and copied by its rivals) since the start of the strike. Two weeks ago, when a disastrous midnight fire gutted a southern Illinois hospital, the Trib had a Graphotype bulletin in its One-Star Final in a scant 15 minutes.

No Two for One. At most newspapers, payroll savings had balanced both the increased engraving costs and the expense of installing Vari-Typers and similar equipment from International Business Machines. The Trib, which used to pay its 460 printers about $45,000 a week, now pays its 161 VariType operators only $10,000 a week. By putting more money and more thought than its rivals into developing the new process, the Trib had gotten the best results. In news coverage and news play, also, it was still Chicago’s liveliest sheet. Nevertheless, its circulation had slumped—from 1,010,000 at the strike’s outset to around 950,000 last week. Nobody knew just why. Best guess: now that there is little change in editions, many readers who had once bought an evening and a morning Trib are buying only one copy a day.

In Washington, A.F.L. pressmen and stereotypers won $6-a-week increases and two-year contracts after a strike that shut down all four daily papers for three days

(TIME, April 18). In an editorial on the settlement, the Washington Post offered readers a new definition of news: “News is that which has been missing from your life in the last 72 hours.”

*The Graphotype has a standard typewriter keyboard, and letters can be punched directly onto a metal plate heavy enough to stand up under the pressure of the stereotype machine that makes the “mats” or molds for the lead plates for the presses. This saves time by eliminating photoengraving used by Vari-Type.