Death of a Daily

When a big-city daily dies, what happens to its staff? One day last fall, the question was made painfully pertinent to the 157 editorial hands of Hearst's Detroit Times, which had just sold out to its healthier afternoon rival, the News (TIME, Nov. 21). Stunned by last-minute dismissal notices--some of them delivered by wire at 3 a.m.--the unemployed reporters, deskmen, photographers and copy boys turned unhappily to the job of finding another job. Last week, in a survey prepared for the journalism department of Wayne State University in Detroit, ex-Timesman Donald A. Morris, 26, reported how they made out.

Judged purely by the statistics, the fired Times staffers did reasonably well. Seven months after dismissal, only 37 of the 157 were still jobless. But the results of Morris' survey also suggest that, in a time of high and rising newspaper mortality,* unemployed newsmen are something of a drug on the market.

None of the 13 surviving Hearst papers in the U.S. found room for a single Times casualty. Detroit's two other dailies, the evening News (circ. 733,583) and the morning Free Press (573,273), were able to absorb only 29. Another 23 managed to stay in journalism by migrating, mostly to smaller papers, among them the Fresno, Calif., Bee (circ. 111,812) and the Rochester, Mich., Clarion, a weekly of 4,900 circulation.

Of those who left journalism, Morris notes, all but 15 found jobs in "related fields." The largest segment (23) turned to public relations. Crime Writer Ray Girardin is now Chief Probation Officer for Detroit's Recorder's Court. Reporter Al Leaderman, an incorrigible $2 speculator at Detroit's Hazel Park race track, is now on the other side of the mutuel window, taking bets. Night Police Reporter Fred Manardo works as an investigator for the National Bank of Detroit. Morris himself managed to land agilely on both feet. He went back to Wayne State University as a journalism student, was hired as a university pressagent.

* Eight metropolitan dailies, with a combined circulation of 1,250,000, have folded in the last three years.

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