A Lesson in Economics

Last summer, when Detroit's pressmen walked off the city's two papers, the Free Press and the News, one of the more interested observers was a 23-year-old graduate student in economics at Detroit's Wayne State University. Michael Gordon Dworkin's journalistic experience was meager; in years past he had logged a little time on Wayne State's student paper, the Daily Collegian. But he did not lack for nerve. If the shutdown lasted long enough, he decided, an interim daily might make its publisher some real money. On the strength of his decision. Student Dworkin went into the newspaper business.

Paying Off. Instead of looking for experienced partners, who might have dissuaded him. Detroit's journalistic entrepreneur talked three buddies into joining him. Instead of appealing for funds to bankers, who would probably have turned him down, he appealed to Irving Hershman, a softhearted cousin with means. Jimmy Hoffa's perennially hungry teamsters helped out by agreeing to deliver Dworkin's nonexistent daily on a cash-and-carry basis. Detroit's job printers, who first sneered at Dworkin's proffered business, soon accepted it gratefully. From abruptly laid-off newspaper salesmen, the neophyte publisher put together a willing business staff. And finally, when all else was in place, he got the professional talent he desperately needed: unemployed editorial staffers from the Free Press.

Just ten days after the Free Press and

News were struck, the Detroit Daily Press hit the streets. It was at the time scarcely worth its price of 100; it was a tangle of printer's errors, garbled copy, unscannable headlines and whole pages run upside down. Unable to subscribe to a domestic wire service, the Daily Press limped along with a British import, Reuters Ltd., and the Dow-Jones ticker. It cribbed unabashedly from radio newscasts, engraved photos snapped directly from the TV tube.

But within three days of its birth, the Daily Press had retired Cousin Irving's loan. And as Detroit's longest newspaper shutdown wore on, the paper developed professional competence. In time, the editorial payroll included more than 100 hands, most of them borrowed from the silenced Free Press.

Correspondents all over the country sent in copy, at space rates. A moonlighting Washington newsman supplied a Capital column, whimsically bylined G. Schenk Gott ("God's gift" in idiomatic German). The Daily Press sent a man to follow Republican Presidential Candidate Goldwater about the country, another staffer to cover the Ecumenical Conference in the Vatican. When the Warren Commission report became available. Dworkin flew a reporter to Washington for a copy, published 13,000 words of summary text.

Scolding Its Readers. Editorially, Dworkin's Daily Press lined up with the majority and backed the Democrats. It also opposed pay raises for Wayne County (Detroit) elective officials, and it fought a referendum issue granting Detroit homeowners the right not to sell their property to anyone they considered undesirable. When the referendum passed anyway, the Daily Press scolded voters roundly.

Before the city's newspaper shutdown finally ended after a record 134 days. Publisher Dworkin had boosted his reporters' bony salaries to Guild scale, [ and had himself grown surprisingly prosperous. Last week Dworkin and his four partners had a $500,000 profit to show for their experience. The short-term publisher put the Daily Press's final issue to bed without regrets.

But as an afterthought, he filed suit for $7,500,000 in damages against UPI, the Free Press and the News, charging that all three had conspired to keep him from buying the UPI service. With that. Mike Dworkin, having learned a lesson or two in journalism as well as economics, went back to school.

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