Red Ink in Italy

In Rome's most modern newspaper plant, the well-oiled whir of the new Czech presses could not drown the hollow clunk of the empty cash register. L'Unit`a, the free world's biggest Communist newspaper and second biggest daily in Italy (after Milan's conservative Corriere della Sera), was as deep in the red as in the Red.

Last week L'Unit`a folded its once-thriving editions in industrial Turin and Genoa, announced that its sole surviving regional edition in Milan will now serve all three cities--a feat comparable to making over a Pittsburgh daily for readers in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Beyond that, the paper was reduced to running a Page One jeremiad by Party Boss Palmiro Togliatti, imploring the faithful to dig deep in their pockets to save L'Unit`a from "extermination."

Money-losing (annual deficits more than $1,000,000) L'Unit`a's financial crisis was brought on by sharp cutbacks in its subsidies from Moscow and from the financially-pressed Italian Communist Party. But its most serious problem is shriveling circulation, now well below 300,000 from a 1953 peak of 1,574,000. So low has stodgy, 33-year-old L'Unit`a sunk in the eyes of its own staffers that meetings intended to rally support for a "stronger, better" paper in Turin and Genoa last week broke up amid angry attacks on the party bosses by sacked employees. Said one bitter laid-off newsman: "We're all sick to death of being told what to write and what to think." So, apparently, were a lot of L'Unit`a's ex-readers.

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