When the News Tickers Fell Silent

On ABC Baretta was solving a murder. A new pair of made-for-TV lovers (Italian and Jewish, natch) were trying to get it all together on CBS. Susan and Sam, an NBC comedy pilot, was getting a midsummer test flight. Then--phfft!--all over the U.S.

So heavy is the concentration of communications operations in midtown Manhattan that the New York blackout had an impact that was immediately felt throughout the nation--and the world as well. All three networks transmit their signals from New York by air waves to relay towers and satellites--or by cables--for pickups by affiliate stations across the country. The two major U.S. wire services, Associated Press and United Press International, feed news from New York headquarters to more than 16,000 U.S. and foreign newspapers, radio stations and TV news desks. Scores of New York-based syndicates, ranging from Dow Jones and King Features to Hearst and Fairchild, also transmit daily features (political columns, advice to the lovelorn, gardening tips and much, much more) by electronic impulse to thousands of clients. When the dynamos serving New York went dead, so--at least briefly--did a large portion of international communications.

Hard Hit. All three networks were back on the air within six to eleven minutes after they had been blacked out. At CBS and NBC, emergency power systems atop the Empire State Building were quickly activated. ABC, lacking such a system, had to switch its broadcast feed clear across the continent to Los Angeles. The networks were not as successful in letting their viewers know just what had happened. All finally came across with bulletins that broke into their regular programming after 10 p.m.

Newspapers across the country were particularly hard hit. The major snafu was in getting wire service copy. A.P. officials say that the blackout caused about a 1 1/2hr. delay in moving copy, but in a number of cities the wait was considerably longer. U.P.I, was not even that lucky. Without A.P.'s back-up system of regional computers, U.P.I, had to dictate its New York stories by phone. U.P.I, could not resume normal operations until 6 p.m. the next day.

With deadlines at hand and the normally clattering wire service tickers standing mute, editors all over the world had visions of gaping holes in their newspapers. In Houston, Post Night Editor Ernie Williams fretted: "I had only three paragraphs on the downing of the helicopter in Korea, and five graphs on the blackout. But how was I going to put giant heads on stories like that?" Fortunately for Williams, the A.P. wire started moving just at deadline, and he was able to flesh out his two top stories. For Cincinnati Post Sports Editor Tom Tuley, the biggest problem of the evening was getting the ball scores. He fared well by telephoning U.S. cities, but when he called Montreal, everybody at the other end kept saying "On ne parle pas anglais. "He finally called Pittsburgh for the Expo-Pirate figures.

Managing Editor Bill Brown of the Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer said that "we were all sitting here fat, dumb and pretty, and suddenly all the wire services went dead." After Brown's staff had called papers in Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia in search of information, the A.P. wirephoto machines started up again. Copy as well as pictures flowed over the machines. But the regular A.P. news tickers usually punch out magnetic tapes that many newspapers use to set type automatically. The wirephoto machine does not have the same capability, so the Enquirer and, no doubt, dozens of other papers, had to set some of their stories manually. At the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel-Star, Copy Editor Saul Daniels gleaned information by calling his parents in New York. His father put a transistor radio next to the telephone, and Sentinel-Star staffers took turns transcribing radio reports.

Considering their own predicament, New York's newspapers did not do badly either. Except for Rupert Murdoch's afternoon Post, which failed to publish on Thursday since it had neither power nor alternative plants, the dailies performed admirably. The first eight copies of the Times's normal nightly run of 850,000 had rolled off the presses Wednesday when the blackout hit. Times editors laid out a second Page One and Two, had plates made across the Hudson River at the Bergen County Record's plant and ran off a collector's item edition--with two completely different front pages--at their own facility in Carlstadt, N.J. The Daily News, having already printed 200,000 copies of two editions, prepared a new edition at the Newsday plant on Long Island. As always, the News superbly captured the tumult with its photographs--but so did the Times, which has been known to downplay pictures for prose.

Twinkly Eyes. Of course none of the newspapers or TV news operations would have been caught flatfooted had they had the services of a small, white-haired man with twinkly eyes who appeared in the city room of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Tuesday. The little man called himself simply Roge (pronounced Ro-jay), and was up from Salinas, Calif., to attend a magicians' convention. Roge, 52, a onetime newsman, offered to predict the headline of the paper's Thursday edition. He wrote out his prediction and sealed it within five envelopes. On Thursday, City Editor Stephen Green and Roge opened the envelopes. MASSIVE POWER BLACKOUT HITS NEW YORK CITY AREA, read Roge's headline. The Post-Intelligencer's Thursday headline? Precisely the same.

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