The ensuing months severely damaged New York’s newspaper business. The city essentially faced a print news blackout, and by the end of January, The Times operated at a monthly deficit of $1.5 million, according to Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones in their book “The Trust.”
The strike would permanently cripple The Herald Tribune, The Journal-American and The World-Telegram and Sun, which would merge into The World Journal Tribune in 1966 to survive. Nevertheless, it folded the next year.
The Times continued to produce material on a much smaller scale through the Western Edition, published in Los Angeles, and a limited number were shipped to New York. Nonstriking journalists continued to report through WQXR, The Times’s radio station, and “The New York Times on the Air,” produced by NBC.
On April 1, the day after the strike ended, The Times published a step-by-step account on the front page.
The Strike of 1978
In another pressmen’s strike that affected The Times, The New York Post and The Daily News, this stoppage caused an 88-day disruption in the paper’s publication. The strike came after the publishers of the three newspapers imposed new pressroom work rules following an impasse with the pressman’s union in talks on a new contract. Other unions, including those representing paper handlers and mechanists, also struck, and eventually 11,000 newspaper employees across the city were either on strike or off payroll to support the strikes of other unions.
A critical issue in the pressmen’s strike involved publishers’ demands to eliminate workers they considered unnecessary. In turn, the unions accused the publishers of trying to break them, as The Washington Post had done to its pressmen in 1975 by hiring nonunion workers.
In October, a now-revered parody, “Not The New York Times,” appeared on newsstands. It was long-rumored but only recently confirmed that several out-of-work Times journalists contributed. Many other Times workers were employed, temporarily, at The Daily Metro, a publication that arose to fill the news void.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
