Living with the Scars

When asked how his paper was doing in circulation and advertising linage since the end of the strike, the business manager of a New York City daily replied with a single syllable: "Hah!" But it was no laughing matter. One long month-and-a-half after the chilling, 114-day newspaper shutdown, Manhattan's seven general dailies are still numb. By conservative reckoning their combined circulation is down 500,000 from a prestrike total of 5,700,000. Some estimates place the losses as high as 15%, or 855,000.

"Piggyback" Discount. At the big midtown newsstands, dealers are returning twice as many unsold papers as usual, and sales are off 12.5%. The fat Times is faring best, say the dealers, with a dropoff of only 5%--not bad considering the fact that it has doubled its newsstand price to 10-c-. As for the Herald Tribune, which also hiked its price by a nickel, circulation is off--but just how much will not be known until the Audit Bureau of Circulation releases its next official, semiannual report sometime after Sept. 30. "It has held up better than we anticipated," says Trib President Walter Thayer cautiously.

At the Post, Publisher Dorothy Schiff insists that, despite contrary reports from dealers, "things are just about the same as before the strike," when circulation was 327,679. But the Post, which hustled back into print 24 days before its competitors, had for a little while been luxuriating in a press run of some 750,000 copies a day.

What worries New York newspaper executives is the fact that circulation and advertising losses will be harder to recoup during the traditionally lean summer. "I would have picked a better 114 days for the strike," says Thayer drily. "Say June, July and August." The Trib has been offering "piggyback" discounts: cut-rate deals under which advertisers get a half-page in the daily Trib plus a half-page in the Sunday edition for what a full-page ad in the daily edition would cost. And adding pressure on the cost side is the Trib's plan for a big, expensive promotion campaign in connection with the revamping of its Sunday edition, scheduled for the fall.

Minus & Plus. But Thayer does profess to see a silver lining among all those thunderclouds. "Most advertisers," says he, "have said that any doubts they had about the value of newspaper advertising were dispelled by the strike." Perhaps. There are some advertisers, like Gimbels' Sales Promotion Director Carl Wagner, who confess that they are beginning "to think seriously about spending in other directions."

In any case, the Trib's ad linage in immediate-poststrike April spurted 10.6% ahead of the total for the previous April, the Times was up 6.4%, and the World-Telegram 5.4%. All were helped by the initial splurge of poststrike advertising, particularly by department stores that had delayed their traditional January white sales and spring clearances until the blackout was ended. Even so, there were more minus than plus signs. The Post was down 3.2%, the Mirror 5.3%, the Journal-American 7.9%, and the News 8.7%. One explanation for the mixed pattern: the advertisers are diverting their newspaper dollars to suburban papers and to those metropolitan dailies --such as the Times, Trib and Telegram --that have what they call "a reach into the suburbs."

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