Jack Shafer: Learning from the 1962-63 New York newspaper strike
What would life without newspapers be like?...
No conversation about newspapers' dismal present is complete without some anguished mention of how democracy will go off the rails unless the press is there to set it straight. (See last week's Senate hearings, chaired by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., for an example.) But even though the 1962-63 strike upended New York, neither the dozen newspaper accounts I've read about the strike nor the histories or memoirs from the era that I've pulled down from my shelf make it sound as though democracy and governance disappeared when the New York dailies' lights went out.
Instead, journalists and publishers improvised, and readers, parched for news, features, entertainment, and advertising, experimented with finding new sources. Giving up the daily newspaper habit proved easy for many New Yorkers, Gay Talese writes in his book The Kingdom and the Power: They "watched more television, or read more news magazines more thoroughly, or books, or discovered that New York seemed a more normal and placid place without the daily barrage of blazing headlines from Hearst, the rumored gangland shooting in the News, the threatening international strife in the Times."
According to the New York Times story published after the strike (subscription required), circulation of the Brooklyn Daily, which was not on strike, jumped from 50,000 to 390,000. In-city circulation of TV Guide rose by 350,000 and that of Time magazine by 31,000, or about 10 percent. Out-of-town newspapers like the Philadelphia Bulletin became a hot item. At that time, 750 copies of the Bulletin per day would ordinarily move on newsstands, but during the strike, 7,000 sold. According to Time magazine, the National Enquirer increased its city press run of 300,000 by 1 million.
Times-starved readers had friends mail them the Western edition of the New York Times, which was printed during the strike, writes Talese, and for comic effect, The New Yorker noted that the library of the New York University School of Medicine was now stocking its newspaper rack with copies of the Christian Science Monitor....
Read entire article at Slate
No conversation about newspapers' dismal present is complete without some anguished mention of how democracy will go off the rails unless the press is there to set it straight. (See last week's Senate hearings, chaired by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., for an example.) But even though the 1962-63 strike upended New York, neither the dozen newspaper accounts I've read about the strike nor the histories or memoirs from the era that I've pulled down from my shelf make it sound as though democracy and governance disappeared when the New York dailies' lights went out.
Instead, journalists and publishers improvised, and readers, parched for news, features, entertainment, and advertising, experimented with finding new sources. Giving up the daily newspaper habit proved easy for many New Yorkers, Gay Talese writes in his book The Kingdom and the Power: They "watched more television, or read more news magazines more thoroughly, or books, or discovered that New York seemed a more normal and placid place without the daily barrage of blazing headlines from Hearst, the rumored gangland shooting in the News, the threatening international strife in the Times."
According to the New York Times story published after the strike (subscription required), circulation of the Brooklyn Daily, which was not on strike, jumped from 50,000 to 390,000. In-city circulation of TV Guide rose by 350,000 and that of Time magazine by 31,000, or about 10 percent. Out-of-town newspapers like the Philadelphia Bulletin became a hot item. At that time, 750 copies of the Bulletin per day would ordinarily move on newsstands, but during the strike, 7,000 sold. According to Time magazine, the National Enquirer increased its city press run of 300,000 by 1 million.
Times-starved readers had friends mail them the Western edition of the New York Times, which was printed during the strike, writes Talese, and for comic effect, The New Yorker noted that the library of the New York University School of Medicine was now stocking its newspaper rack with copies of the Christian Science Monitor....