No News Is Bad News

You never miss the water till the well runs dry.

--British Poetaster Rowland Howard Wholesale street-corner thefts of St. Paul newspapers approached 1,500 copies every Sunday; every petty crook in town seemed anxious to make a killing by running the contraband across the Mississippi into Minneapolis. In Minneapolis itself, Mrs. Florence Kennan's butcher, as a favor to a good customer, slipped her a hot copy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press--wrapped to resemble a leg of lamb. Two people fainted in the crush of eager newspaper buyers around a downtown Minneapolis newsstand. Hyman P. Shinder's kiosk, the biggest in town, collected a crowd each Sunday dawn, even though Shinder's consignment of papers from Minneapolis' twin city does not arrive until 8. Every copy bought from Hyman for 20-c- had a resale value of nearly $1.

For Minneapolis, the well had run dry.

As the strike that silenced both the evening Star (circ. 294,496) and its morning companion the Tribune (229,837) wore into its tenth week, the city gasped for news as a thirsty man for drink. "You just can't find out what's going on," beefed Cab Driver Rudy Thrope. "A guy I know died and I didn't find out for a couple of days." "I get home now," said Hennepin County Assistant Attorney Theodore Rix, "sit down in the chair and turn on television. What's on? Captain Kangaroo." Said Mrs. Joel Redlin, summing up a whole city's grievance: "I miss my paper. I miss it, that's all." Better than Nothing. Efforts have been made to relieve the news drought. The struck papers themselves bought radio time for a daily newscast, and some radio stations have amplified their own news coverage; the daily list of the dead, and even editorials, are now broadcast regularly; TV station WTCN pleaded on the air for an end to the strike. Neither radio nor TV, said the station, could substitute for a city's papers. Suburban Newspapers Inc., which peddles five weekly papers throughout Minneapolis suburbs, raised its press run from 23,000 to the mechanical limit--29,000--and brought out a new Sunday edition. Two department stores, desperate at declining sales, teamed to produce a ten-page paper of shopping news that contains nothing but ads and TV program listings: it is consumed in 156,000 Minneapolis homes.

By far the most ambitious attempt to fill the void is the Minneapolis Daily Herald, introduced May 1 by Minneapolis Adman Maurice McCaffrey. Although the Herald has little visible merit, cribs freely from TV newscasts, lacks even a wire service, and drips with errors (its daylight-saving time announcement missed the changeover by 24 hours), McCaffrey claims a press run of 154,000.

"Well," said one Minneapolitan as he shelled out a dime for the Herald, "it's better than nothing." Benefits & Beneficiaries. Like most newspaper strikes, this one began with the standard labor-management debate over pay hikes, vacation and sick time, pensions and other fringe benefits. And like most strikes, it quickly degenerated into a stubborn argument over a trifle: the tying of newspapers into bundles before loading them into trucks--long a mailers' prerogative. The papers' management wants to eliminate tying entirely and pack the papers loose into the trucks.

The move would also eliminate 25 mailers, who have been promised jobs elsewhere in the plant. But the mailers flatly refuse, insist that they can hold out longer than the papers' strike-insurance. Last week Minnesota Governor Elmer L. Andersen and Minneapolis Mayor Arthur Naftalin met with union leaders in a vain attempt to break the deadlock.

However long Minneapolis' protracted newspaper strike lasts, it has already produced some unexpected benefits--and beneficiaries. Hundreds of high school valedictorians may be disappointed because their names and pictures will not get into the papers this year, but the city's drunken drivers have not complained in the least about eight straight weeks of anonymity. The University of Minnesota School of Journalism polled newspaper-hungry citizens on what they missed most, and got a response that should encourage papers everywhere: the funnies ran a poor seventh, far behind both the editorials and the ads; what Minneapolis missed most of all, the survey revealed, was "the news."

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