Siege in Two Cities

For the fourth straight week, Detroit and Minneapolis were newspaperless cities. Separate strikes had silenced the Star and Tribune in Minneapolis, and the Free Press in Detroit. Out of sympathy, Detroit's other paper, the evening News, voluntarily signed off for the duration.

Behind the customary bread-and-butter issues lay disputes so stubborn that the siege in the two cities seemed unlikely to lift soon. In Detroit, the unions were crying "lockout" at the unstruck but silent News. In Minneapolis, the mailers' union held fast to their right, under challenge by the publishers, to tie newspapers into bundles before loading onto trucks.

Meantime, in Detroit, idled staffers from John S. Knight's Free Press migrated to other Knight papers in Akron, Charlotte, N.C., and Miami. In Minneapolis, a strike-born daily, the Minneapolis Herald (initial press run: 62,500), established by Minneapolis Adman Maurice McCaffrey, 48, gave news-hungry Minneapolitans twelve pages of local news lightly seasoned with national and international events.

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