Vacuum in St. Louis

Transit strikes, blizzards and brownouts can make urban life an ordeal, but nothing hurts a city in quite so many subtle ways as a newspaper strike. St. Louis, bereft of the morning Globe-Democrat and the afternoon Post-Dispatch for five weeks, was painfully counting new losses with each passing day.

The stoppage's most tangible effect has been a slowdown in the city's social life and economy. Organizations from the Boy Scouts to the Elks are having trouble publicizing meeting dates. Movie attendance has dropped off by a third since theater listings were blacked out. An auction house canceled several sessions. Good jobs in eastern Missouri are going begging for prospects because there are no classified ads, and one large employment agency reported a 20% decrease in applications. Real estate brokers are getting fewer weekend browsers. News of births, marriages and deaths is hard to find. Retail businesses, caught without a window for their ads, have experienced a dramatic drop in trade. "It's murder," complains one shopper downtown. "You can't tell where the sales are."

Like Locusts. The biggest loss for St. Louis, though, is the news itself. Whether a reader is interested in sports or stocks, Watergate or the city council, he has been having trouble keeping abreast. The Globe-Democrat and the Post-Dispatch have a combined circulation of over 600,000. The supply of alternative information sources falls far short of demand.

The unsatisfied appetite for news during the strike is reflected by a locust-like attack on anything printed. Newsmagazines, the Wall Street Journal and other national publications sell out within hours of hitting the stands. On a recent Sunday morning at a suburban newsstand, readers lined up in the rain to buy out-of-town papers. They brought folding chairs for the long wait; enterprising teen-agers hawked coffee and doughnuts. When 1,100 copies of the New York Times went on sale, they were snapped up in less than an hour. Five hundred Chicago papers, sold by scalpers at more than twice the regular price, were gone in less than 30 minutes. When nothing else remained, one desperate man bought a week-old Chicago Tribune. "I don't care," he told the newsdealer. "I'll read anything."

To reduce the news vacuum in St. Louis, as well as supplement their weekly maximum of $65 in strike benefits, some of the unemployed journalists have pooled resources to publish a strike paper. St. Louis Today made its debut the third week of the strike, but the thrice-weekly tabloid, lacking Associated Press and United Press International service, has done little to relieve the news shortage. The 40 volunteers, working out of a vacant classroom where school desks substitute for work tables, have offered readers stories on Amtrack and the Gainesville Eight instead of concentrating on local news. The paper has been further handicapped by the nationwide shortage of newsprint, which has limited the press run to 50,000.

Radio Comics. The St. Louis Argus, a well-established black weekly, has ventured beyond black-oriented coverage and discovered a new audience in white neighborhoods. Circulation has tripled, to 100,000, and ad revenue is up 60%. An eleven-paper chain of suburban weeklies, reporting a threefold increase in ad income, has started to publish twice a week. CBS TV affiliate KMOX has expanded news coverage by 30 minutes at noon. KMOX radio has beefed up its news staff with a dozen out-of-work newsmen and offers Stan Musial reading the comic strips on its a.m. report.

But even Stan the Man can't give St. Louis the one thing it really wants --an end to the strike. Nor, it seems, can negotiators for the striking Teamsters union and the papers. The main issue is automation--a new multimillion-dollar Post-Dispatch printing plant has made obsolete the jobs of some of the 32 Teamsters who load papers on and off delivery trucks. Last week the Globe-Democrat went to court to seek a settlement, and Mayor John Poelker said he would step in to mediate the strike. Meanwhile the readers wait.

"You don't know how much you miss the papers," says St. Louis Cab Driver Mecklin Wilson, "until they're gone."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.