Stride Toward Settlement

With the announcement that the New York Newspaper Guild and the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers' Union had reached agreement "in principle" with the publishers of the World Journal Tribune last week, New York's two-month-old newspaper strike seemed to have taken a long stride toward settlement. But there was many an acrimonious argument left to be resolved. And the Guild negotiators were obviously in no hurry to call a general meeting where Guildsmen would ratify the "package" that had been so laboriously worked out.

Nor were the publishers of the city's merged newspapers of a mind to prod the Guild along. For as soon as the package is ratified, the strike will be officially over. The publishers will then be locked in a legal battle with the Printing Pressmen, who insist that their only contracts are with papers that no longer exist. As long as they lack a new contract with the World Journal Tribune, they say, they will not work. That argument is already being contested in the courts, but legal action was suspended while Guild picket lines kept the Pressmen from working, contract or no. Once the picket lines disappear, the publishers may well find themselves back in court--and another such delay is just about the last thing they want.

Extravagant Charade. The Pressmen, on the other hand, have what amounts to a built-in reason for a slowdown. Their new president, William Kennedy, took office just last week; and since he must run for re-election in only a year, he has every reason to put on at least as tough a front as his predecessor at the bargaining table. As expected, Kennedy presented the publishers with a new list of extravagant demands; as expected, the publishers insisted that the demands were impossible to live with. That charade was expected to last a week.

The Mailers, too, are still in a wrangle with the publishers, who are willing enough to put all the union members on the payroll initially, but are adamant about the right to fire some of them if advertising and circulation of the new papers do not come up to expectation. Still, everyone agrees that the biggest hurdle was the Guild strike, and that has been all but settled. Pay, fringe benefits, Guild security have all been worked out. And the publishers have agreed to find jobs for 990 Guildsmen--94 more than they originally wanted. Some 500 Guild members have taken their severance pay and retired voluntarily in the dreary months since the strike started, so only 290 out of the combined staffs of 1,780 will be dismissed.

Big-League Draft. The resulting roster, however, left the New York Herald Tribune perilously short of staffers. To replace them, Trib editors had to fill the ranks with reporters from the afternoon paper. "It was the greatest draft since the big-league baseball teams were raided for men to make up the Mets," said World Journal Editor Frank Conniff, who sat down with Trib editors to parcel out the players. Hardly recognizing the names of some of the staffers they were acquiring, Trib editors simply had to take their chances.

Then, along with the afternoon World Journal and the Sunday World Journal and Tribune, they began to make reportorial assignments, understandably anxious to get papers on the streets. The summer doldrums are at hand, and advertising revenue is likely to be slim; but any urge to wait until fall, when business is brisker, is more than overbalanced by a sure knowledge that the longer the merged papers are absent from the newsstands, the more likely their readers are to get out of the habit of buying them.

At the Trib, though, as editors while away the days at their new downtown offices, there is a pervading apprehension behind the occasional water-pistol fights, and the grousing about the scarcity of good restaurants and friendly bars in the neighborhood. The World Journal, after all, has only the New York Post to face as competition. The thin, undernourished Trib must try to survive against the robust Times and News. Strike's end or no, its future is still dim indeed.

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