Ready to Roll

New York's dailies due back

Around the Hot Stove League, there are those who maintain that the Yankees would not be baseball's champions if New York City's newspapers had been publishing since last August. The town's hyperthyroid sportswriters, so the theory goes, would have stirred up another feud between Thurman Munson and Reggie Jackson, or some other duo of dueling Yanks, that might have cost the team its title. The Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Islanders and Rangers will not get the chance to test that hypothesis. If all goes as expected, the city's strike-silenced dailies will all be back in print this week for the first time in three months.

The Pressmen's Union, which walked off the job Aug. 9 after the publishers posted new work rules, agreed to accept a six-year contract that will give members an 18% raise over the first three years (amounting to $68 per worker per week), guarantee jobs for all 1,508 regular members and reduce manning levels through attrition. Ten other unions idled by the strike were expected to return to work as well. Indeed, a major breakthrough in the talks came last week when heads of the other unions gathered to hear a report on the status of negotiations from Labor Lawyer Theodore Kheel, who used his role as a consultant to the unions to become unofficial mediator in the lengthy dispute. At that meeting, the union leaders announced they were prepared to go back to work without the pressmen if their leader, William J. Kennedy, did not become more agreeable at the bargaining table. As Kheel told TIME, "The other unions acted as an informal arbitrator."

The pressmen accepted lower manning levels (eleven men per press instead of twelve) and agreed to submit the issue of reduced support crews to arbitration. Those cuts are expected to save the News and Times each about $4 million a year, the Post about $2 million. The Post had resumed publication last month after Publisher Rupert Murdoch agreed to accept any terms eventually worked out between the unions and the other rival papers, a copycat clause that earned Murdoch the nickname "Mr. Me Too" among negotiators. "Both sides came out smelling like a rose," according to Kheel. Yet the strike cost the papers as much as $150 million in advertising and circulation revenues.*

What is more, the newspapers and their home town may never be the same. Most local businesses weathered the strike nicely by shifting their advertising dollars into weekly newspapers, spot television and radio, magazines and billboards; some of those dollars may never return to the dailies. Thousands of New Yorkers began reading the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's slickly professional News World or the Gannett Co.'s strike-born suburban daily Today and may stay with them. Others may do without newspapers altogether, as happened after the 114-day strike of 1962-63, when some 400,000 New Yorkers lost the newspaper habit.

This time the News is particularly vulnerable. Publisher W.H. ("Tex") James doubts that the strike has cost the paper 5% of its circulation (1.9 million) and hopes any prodigals will eventually return. But the News was losing circulation before the strike, and it now faces competition from Murdoch's newly announced 100 Daily Sun, which is expected to appear within two weeks. Though not nearly as racy as Murdoch's London Sun, the new morning tabloid will be aimed squarely at News readers.

The returning papers plan some modest changes. The Sunday News will carry an expanded sports section, a new TV magazine and a women's supplement called You, as well as a slicked-up Wednesday food section, Good Living. The Times will introduce a Tuesday insert on science, education and medicine news.

A number of idled journalists have drifted elsewhere. News Albany Bureau Chief Michael Patterson has become Governor Hugh Carey's campaign press secretary, for instance, while Times Correspondent James Woolen has gone to Esquire. And some reporters who ran the four interim strike papers say they will miss the freedom of being their own boss. "It was a case where the lunatics had been allowed to take over the asylum," sighs News Political Writer Frank Lombardi, who helped produce the City News, which folded last week. "Now it's time to be lunatics again."

* The Times meanwhile settled a sex discrimination suit by agreeing last month to pay female employees nearly $350,000 and promising to hire and promote substantial numbers of women.

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