No News Is Bad News

What happens in a big U.S. city when all daily newspapers stop publishing? Last week Pittsburgh was finding out. When the Mailers' Union went on strike a fortnight ago--and the Drivers' Union refused to load papers -- Pittsburgh's Scripps-Howard's Press, Hearst's Sun-Telegraph, William Block's Post-Gazette were forced to close.

By the second week of the shutdown, Pittsburgh's 3,000 to 3,500 copies of out-of-town dailies made up the major supply of newspapers for a city which normally buys 800,000 papers a day. Early every morning, long lines queued up outside the city's newsstands to scramble for them. Since harried news vendors favored only regular customers, a lively grey market soon started. One surprised traveler, alighting at the railroad station with a Sunday New York Times, was handed 50-c- for his day-old newspaper. Metropolitan sales of Pittsburgh's Negro weekly, the Courier, shot up from 23,000 to 41,000, while the demand for newsmagazines far outran the supply.

Vacuum Fillers. Pittsburgh's seven radio stations stepped up their own news broadcasts to fill the vacuum left by the dailies. Station KQV even tried an obituary column of sorts by listing recent Pittsburgh deaths. But the stations could neither give the news as a newspaper ordinarily does nor handle the demands of merchants for spot commercials to replace their newspaper ads. One result: store sales dropped 10% to 50%.

Pittsburgh's dailies all protested with reason that they were the victims of an irresponsible union. The A.F.L. International Typographical Union agreed; last week it revoked the charter of its Pittsburgh Mailers' local for violating I.T.U.'s bargaining rules. The local had refused to sign a written contract, had turned down a 10/-an-hour wage increase (it demanded 13 1/2-c-) and rejected arbitration.

New Paper. The dailies had laid off all but a handful of their 3,400 nonstriking employees on a payless "furlough." As a result, one sportwriter went to work in an iron foundry and scores of others took temporary jobs to tide them over.

But Harold Dietrich, 50-year-old assistant news editor of the Sun-Telegraph, decided he would rather put out a newspaper. With the sponsorship of Pittsburgh's C.I.O. Newspaper Guild and craft unions, he turned a three-room downtown office into a newsroom and recruited some 20 furloughed newsmen to cover their old beats. This week, on the 14th day of the strike, Dietrich's crew ended Pittsburgh's news famine by turning out an eight-page, regular-sized daily, the Pittsburgh Daily Reporter, printed at the plant of labor-paper-publishing Western Newspaper Union. The Reporter's press run was 100,000 copies (at 5-c-). Enterprising Editor Dietrich promised his readers to go out of business as soon as he and his men got their old jobs back.

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