Familiar challenges that had confronted the nation's daily newspapers to varying degrees since the end of World War II intensified in the early and middle 1960s. The media marketplace was changing rapidly: Mergers and closings continued in the largest cities, where newspapers were most susceptible to the multiple pressures of steadily rising costs, shifting readership, and rapid technological change. Chain ownership grew exponentially. Meanwhile, newspapers' most aggressive competitor--television--competed with newspapers in both familiar and surprising ways. Television advertising continued to cut into newspaper profits, and television news earned newfound credibility following its blanket coverage of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. All of these long-term trends had been building for years, even decades, but by 1965 they held center stage in a newspaper industry confronted by rapid change on multiple fronts. While the industry remained prosperous overall, the challenges and changes confronting daily newspapers--both as businesses and as journalistic institutions--threatened profits and clouded publishers' optimism about newspapers' future. The accelerating pace of change convinced many publishers and critics that newspapers had been far too slow to adapt as these trends were building in the years following World War II.

Despite these trends, the surface statistics of newspapers' overall health appeared good. "The newspaper business in these United States today is growing, healthy and prosperous," proclaimed an Editor & Publisher editorial in 1965.⁽¹⁾ In the number of newspapers in operation, their circulation, and their advertising revenues, the newspaper industry appeared healthy and stable indeed. In 1965, according to the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA), 1,751 daily newspapers were published in the United States, two more than had been published in 1945. Daily newspaper circulation reached 60,357,563 in 1965, an increase of 25 percent over 1945 and only slightly less than the all-time high circulation set in 1964.⁽²⁾

"In 1963, by all measurable standards, newspapers were doing better than ever," declared Lloyd Wendt, editor of the Chicago American, in 1964. The vital statistics, Wendt declared, were a rebuff to critics who pointed to recent mergers and closures as evidence of an industry in trouble. "There are more jobs in newspapers today than ever before," he said. "More highly educated persons are employed in newspapers than ever before. More space is devoted to news and interpretation."⁽³⁾ Robert U. Brown, publisher of Editor & Publisher and an outspoken and enthusiastic optimist on the subject of the industry's prospects, flatly dismissed what he called the "myth" of newspaper decline. "The No. 1 problem of journalism today," Brown said in a 1965 lecture to fellow journalists, "is the lack of information or the amount of misinformation about the newspaper business." The founding of new dailies had more than offset the closings of some newspapers, Brown pointed out, and readership was up substantially since 1945. "In spite of the number of large papers that have suspended, the number of copies sold per day has increased by more than 12 million or about 25 percent in those twenty years," he declared.⁽⁴⁾

Government and trade association statistics, for the most part, substantiated this bright picture of the newspaper industry. By 1966, newsprint sales in the United States--always a good barometer of newspaper health--reached an all-time high of 9.12 million tons, more than twice the usage of 1945. Even more encouraging, in 1966 newspapers continued their long-standing lead over all other media in advertising expenditures, with $4.9 billion in revenues, a healthy 29.5 percent of every dollar spent on advertising.

-1960s. Newspaper publishers across the country spent more than $130 million on plant improvements in 1966 alone.⁽⁵⁾

Newspapers' collective health was apparent in their physical size, which had continued to grow during this period. While the average daily newspaper of more than 100,000 circulation in 1945 had published twenty-two pages, by 1965 the average newspaper published fifty pages, an increase of 127 percent. Even though advertising content had increased at a faster pace than had editorial content, the latter nonetheless rose from an average of 12.3 pages in 1946 to 19.7 pages in 1965, an increase of 60 percent. Moreover, newsprint consumption for newspapers under 100,000 circulation indicated that total pages and editorial content had increased at an even higher rate than that of their big-city counterparts.⁽⁶⁾

But many inside and outside the industry regarded the same statistics not with hope but with alarm. "Spokesmen for the newspaper industry quote figures that appear to make newspapering a healthy, wealthy, and growing business," a writer for Television Magazine noted in 1962. "Other observers of the industry, not quite so close to the forest, see dry rot setting in." Optimistic newspaper publishers, the writer correctly observed, often preferred to overlook the industry's most pressing problems: Newspaper circulation had failed to keep pace with population growth since 1945. Consolidations and mergers were killing dozens of newspapers each year. And rising costs, strikes, and suburbanization were challenging all newspapers, particularly large metropolitan journals.⁽⁷⁾

In fact, even the most optimistic publishers were mindful of these vast challenges facing the newspaper industry. Though most newspapers remained profitable, overall the industry was feeling the effects of rising competition and escalating costs. Meanwhile, the face of the industry was changing. Suburban newspapers prospered while dailies in large metropolitan cities--where costs were highest and competition stiffest--suffered. Dozens of metropolitan publishers went bankrupt each year at the same time suburban publishers were getting rich.⁽⁸⁾ The only constant across the industry was the intense changes and challenges confronting all newspapers in a host of areas.

In circulation growth, newspapers had held their own since World War II but nothing more. While newspapers' total daily circulation had steadily increased after the war, the growth was only enough to match increases in overall adult population and lagged far behind total population growth. Adult population (aged 21 to 64) had increased 18.4 percent between 1946 and 1965 while total newspaper circulation had increased just 18.5 percent. (Newspaper publishers had long argued that newspaper circulation should be measured against adult population, not total population, because the booming younger population was not yet old enough to read newspapers.⁽⁹⁾) While newspaper circulation had remained even with population growth, circulation per household had declined in the twenty years following World War II. About 1.29 newspapers were sold per household in 1945, compared to 1.05 in 1965.⁽¹⁰⁾

But while overall circulation growth had been listless, it was booming for suburban newspapers. Since World War II, the nation's suburbs had been growing much faster than its large cities, and newspapers' circulation trends had reflected these population shifts.⁽¹¹⁾ Kenneth R. Byerly, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, studied circulation trends in the postwar years and concluded in 1965 that newspapers were not fading but instead were getting closer and closer to their readership. "The smaller the city of publication," Editor & Publisher concluded in reporting Byerly's study, "the faster the rate of circulation growth--this is the daily newspaper trend until city population falls below 10,000." Byerly found that between 1945 and 1964, the largest metropolitan dailies--those in cities of more than one million--had lost 14.4 percent in circulation while dailies in medium-sized cities (500,000 to one million in population) had remained virtually unchanged. But in cities of fewer than 250,000 population, circulation had increased 28.6 percent in the nineteen-year period; and in towns of fewer than 50,000, circulation had increased by 32.1 percent. Suburban dailies had blossomed in the metropolitan areas surrounding the nation's ten largest cities, increasing their circulation by 80.5 percent, while the large dailies based in the ten cities had increased a minuscule 1.9 percent.⁽¹²⁾

Bernard Kilgore of the Wall Street Journal said in 1963 that newspapers were at the mercy of population changes far beyond their control. "Newspapers must serve communities," he said in a speech at Ohio State University. "When the changes are radical they sometimes startle us. In the newspaper sense of the word, the biggest cities have tended to break apart." As a result, Kilgore said, metropolitan newspapers were weakening and many were closing, while suburban newspapers were prospering and multiplying. "New communities have been born," Kilgore said. "New newspapers have been founded to serve them. I doubt anything newspaper people could have done would change these basic trends."⁽¹³⁾

The weakening of the nation's metropolitan newspapers weighed heavily on publishers' minds in the early 1960s. As Kilgore had observed, the large metros across the country were confronted with an acceleration of trends well underway since the late 1940s: Readers were moving to the suburbs, along with many of the large retailers that were the newspapers' largest advertisers. In their new communities readers turned to any of the numerous weeklies and dailies that had sprung up in suburbia. To hold onto these readers, metropolitan newspapers launched expensive zoned editions and metropolitan sections, but often to no avail.⁽¹⁴⁾ At the same time that the metros were losing their core readership and some of their best advertisers, they faced rising expenses, both in higher distribution costs required for a more widely dispersed readership and in higher wages. In addition, labor disputes intensified in the early 1960s as unions and management tangled over the introduction of new technologies. Nationally, the newspaper industry experienced just ten strikes in both 1960 and 1961, but strikes jumped to twenty-seven in 1962, twenty-five in 1963, twenty-four in 1964, and twelve in 1965.⁽¹⁵⁾

Confronted with rising costs, more than 400 newspapers merged or closed in the twenty years following World War II, although the total number of daily newspapers in the United States remained constant because of the founding of new, mostly suburban, dailies. The failing newspapers were often the least profitable daily journals in competitive metropolitan markets. Among the most prominent casualties in the early 1960s were many large, well-established newspapers: The Cleveland News, the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, and the Detroit Times all closed in 1960; the Los Angeles Evening Mirror folded and the Los Angeles Examiner was merged into a competitor in 1962; the year-old Arizona Journal and the New York Mirror both died in 1963; and the Houston Press closed in 1964, the largest newspaper loss of the year. In 1965, the two corporations owning the three San Francisco newspapers merged into one company and split the newspaper market between the two surviving dailies, which remained editorially independent.⁽¹⁶⁾

Many of the newspapers that closed in this period had been established in the years after the war; particularly vulnerable were those that had been established in competitive markets. The Jackson State Times, for example, had been founded in 1955 in Jackson, Miss., to compete against the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News, both owned by a prominent local family, the Hedermans. The newspaper lasted only until 1962, when rising costs and a shortage of operating capital forced the newspaper to shut down. "[T]he more trouble the paper seemed to have, the more pressure mounted to cut back, cut back, cut back," recalled Norman Bradley, the State Times' founding editor.⁽¹⁷⁾ New dailies in competitive markets faced nearly insurmountable odds in cities both large and small. In Georgia, the Atlanta Times was founded in 1964 but closed after just fourteen months of operation; in Portland, Oregon, the Reporter began publication in 1961 but suspended in 1964; and in Phoenix, the Arizona Journal closed in 1964 after just three years of existence.⁽¹⁸⁾

Most significant among the suspensions was the closure of a handful of the largest newspapers in Los Angeles in 1962 and in San Francisco in 1965. The mergers and closures in these two metropolitan areas symbolized the financial precariousness of the nation's largest newspapers and fueled public concern about increasing monopoly in the newspaper industry. In Los Angeles in early 1962, the Times-Mirror Company decided to suspend the Los Angeles Evening Mirror at virtually the same time that the Hearst newspaper group announced the closing of the morning Los Angeles Examiner. The closings left just two newspapers in the nation's second largest city, Times-Mirror's Los Angeles Times in the morning and Hearst's Los Angeles Herald Examiner in the afternoon. The Mirror and the Examiner had each suffered as readers had moved to the suburbs, where thirty dailies thrived in the towns and small cities surrounding Los Angeles.⁽¹⁹⁾ Norman Chandler, publisher of the Times and the Mirror, testified before Congress in 1963 that the Mirror had lost $25.7 million between its founding in 1948 and its closing. Both papers, he said, had been hurt by rising competition from television stations, suburban and community newspapers, and radio stations. Chandler said that he and the Hearst interests had each closed their newspapers after receiving assurance of Justice Department clearance. But he said that while he had consulted with Hearst representatives before the closings, there were "no agreements restricting competition between the two companies."⁽²⁰⁾

The joint operating agreement reached between the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner in September 1965 was another milestone of metropolitan consolidations in the newspaper industry in the mid-1960s. Under the agreement, reached between the Chronicle Publishing Company and the Hearst chain, owners of the Chronicle and the Examiner, respectively, the two newspapers merged their business operations but maintained separate editorial staffs. The Chronicle was printed in the morning and the Examiner and News Call Bulletin in the afternoon in a single publishing plant, and the Sunday editions of the two newspapers were combined into the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle. The Hearst afternoon newspaper was created by the combination of the old morning Examiner, which had competed with the Chronicle, and the old News Call Bulletin in the afternoon. Charles Thieriot, editor and publisher of the Chronicle, wrote in 1969 that the merged operation was the natural result of increased competition and rising costs. "By 1964," Thieriot recalled, "it was a foregone conclusion that either Chronicle or Hearst would have to cease publication in San Francisco." The two publishing companies notified the U.S. Justice Department of their negotiations, and the agreement was signed after department representatives said they would not pursue antitrust actions against the two companies.⁽²¹⁾

Joint operating agreements had become more common after World War II as publishers sought ways to cut costs. In the agreements, as in San Francisco, publishers of two previously independent newspapers--usually a morning daily and an afternoon daily--combined the business operations of their publications but kept the editorial operations separate. In this way publishers could profit from the efficiency of combined printing plants while maintaining two distinct editorial voices in the community. After World War II, such agreements were signed between newspapers in Madison, Wis., in 1948; in Fort Wayne, Ind., Bristol, Tenn., Birmingham, Ala., and Lincoln, Neb., in 1950; in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Shreveport, La., in 1953; in Franklin, Pa., in 1956; in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1957; in Charleston, W. Va., in 1958; in Columbus, Ohio, in 1959; in St. Louis, Mo., in 1959; in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1961; and in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1962.⁽²²⁾ The proliferation of the agreements prompted a U.S. Justice Department investigation, which resulted in a lawsuit in 1965 challenging the practices as an infringement upon free trade. The Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the Justice Department and ruled that the agreements violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, prompting a drive among publishers to legalize the agreements. The drive finally bore fruit with Congressional approval of the Newspaper Preservation Act in 1970.⁽²³⁾

Newspaper executives maintained that the closings, consolidations, and joint operating agreements were part of a long-term trend toward consolidation in the newspaper industry. The economic realities of modern newspaper publishing, argued American Press Institute director J. Montgomery Curtis in 1963, meant that most cities could support only one newspaper. "The sad fact is that high quality and even good management is no longer enough for newspaper survival," Curtis wrote. "In many cities, even some large ones, the advertising and circulation income potential is sufficient to support only one newspaper."⁽²⁴⁾

Indeed, the steady elimination of competition in city after city was part of a long-term trend within the newspaper industry dating back to the 1920s. As a result, by the mid- and late 1960s, only a handful of American cities had competing newspapers under separate ownership. "To be specific," Raymond B. Nixon, the industry's leading authority on newspaper consolidation, reported in 1969, "only forty-five of the 1,500 daily newspaper cities in the United States had two or more locally competing dailies at the beginning of 1968." That meant that only 3 percent of all cities with daily newspapers had true competition. By contrast, 117 cities--8.3 percent of all cities with dailies--had had competing newspapers in 1945. Mergers and closings had accelerated after World War II, Nixon said, as publishers sought economies of scale to fight rising costs and competition from suburban newspapers and television. Between 1945 and 1965, 421 newspapers merged or closed, while 409 daily newspapers were founded in the same period. "There has come to be more competition for the reader's time and money, as well as for the advertiser's dollar," Nixon observed.⁽²⁶⁾

Congress was concerned enough about the pattern of newspaper closings to conduct hearings. The investigation of newspaper closings was mounted by Representative Emanuel Celler, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. In 1962, he announced that the committee would gather facts about newspaper closings and investigate concentration of ownership within both the newspaper and broadcast industries. The newspaper consolidations in Los Angeles had prompted Celler to undertake the investigation. "The decline of daily newspaper competition in our cities is a subject of long-standing concern," he declared in 1962. Through the 1950s and the early 1960s, he said, "the parade of newspaper mergers and closings has continued unabated."⁽²⁷⁾ Hearings began in early 1963 and included lengthy testimony from American Newspaper Publishers Association representatives.

Central to the ANPA's argument throughout the hearings was that downsizing within the newspaper industry reflected long-term economic trends, not an effort by the nation's publishers to pursue monopoly. The ANPA also argued that the ownership of American daily newspapers remained widely dispersed. Even in the face of consolidations and mergers within the industry, the ANPA maintained, the concurrent proliferation of television and radio stations in the 1950s and 1960s had ensured a diversity of voices among the media. The ANPA quoted a study by Princeton University researcher Jesse Markham showing that in 1963 Americans had access to a myriad of media voices. "After allowances are made for joint and multiple ownership," Markham concluded, "the number of independent entities engaged in disseminating news over the air or through daily newspapers amounts to 4,993, comprising 1,211 daily newspapers, 2,957 standard broadcast (AM) radio stations, 485 FM radio stations, and 340 TV ownership interests."⁽²⁸⁾ Stanford Smith, the ANPA's general manager, told Congress not to assume that the failures of some newspapers had caused a decline of competition or in the diversity of media voices. "This broad base of ownership," Smith said, "hardly indicates cause for concern over any form of centralized control of the press in the United States." The ANPA opposed as unconstitutional any government action to curb newspaper mergers, to limit newspaper ownership of broadcast stations, or to restrict the growth of newspaper chains.⁽²⁹⁾

The Celler hearings rattled newspaper executives but did not result in any proposals from the judiciary committee for government action. Stewart R. MacDonald, the manager of the ANPA's Newspaper Information Service, called the Celler hearings "one of the most searching inquiries into the newspapers of America in the history of Congress." MacDonald's hyperbole reflected publishers' deep interest in the hearings and their desire to answer Congressional and public concern about newspaper consolidations and closures. So many publishers requested summaries of the ANPA's arguments that the organization compiled a summary of the organization's presentation, in news story form, and distributed it to member newspapers. After the hearings, the ANPA collected all association testimony into a 374-page book, Newspapers 1963, that it mailed to all member publishers.⁽³⁰⁾

The Justice Department was concerned about the pattern of newspaper closings and consolidations and filed suit several times in the 1950s and 1960s to ensure that publishers, in their zeal to cut costs, were not using anticompetitive practices. In 1964, for example, the Justice Department sued the Lima (Ohio) News for acquiring a competing newspaper. The lawsuit ended with a consent decree. In 1965, the department sued to force the Los Angeles Times to sell the recently acquired San Bernardino Sun after finding that the acquisition had violated antitrust laws because of the Time's and Sun's overlapping circulation areas.⁽³¹⁾ In 1964, the department also successfully sued to block the E.W. Scripps Company from acquiring the morning Cincinnati Enquirer because the company also owned the Cincinnati Post and Times-Star.⁽³²⁾

As newspaper closings had accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s, so had chain ownership. While the overall number of daily newspapers had remained largely unchanged from 1945 to 1965, the number of newspapers owned by chains had doubled in the same period, from 368 in 1945--21 percent of all dailies--to 750 in 1965, or 43 percent. "Across the nation," the Wall Street Journal reported in December 1965, "newspaper chains--two or more dailies under common ownership in separate cities--couldn't be in finer fettle."⁽³³⁾ Most of the growth in chain ownership came in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a trend encouraged by the growing consolidation in the newspaper industry. Chains were attracted to monopoly markets, which were growing in number and which offered high profits without the risks of competition. "If you own a newspaper in a one-newspaper market, and if you give it competent management, little misfortune can befall you," observed Gardner Cowles, the chairman of the Cowles Communications newspaper chain, in 1965. "You can sleep well."⁽³⁴⁾

Several factors encouraged the growth of chains, or "groups," the name preferred within the industry. For one thing, tax laws allowed publishing companies to avoid taxes on any accumulated earnings that were used to buy related businesses. Chains could therefore avoid some taxes by using their profits to buy other newspapers. For another, high personal income and inheritance taxes encouraged the patriarchs of newspaper families to sell to chains. As veteran newspaper publisher J. David Stern observed after his retirement, newspaper owners usually paid taxes twice--once on dividends and again in personal income taxes. By selling out to a chain or to the opposition, as Stern had done with his old Philadelphia Record back in 1947, a newspaper owner could avoid inheritance taxes altogether and pay only capital gains taxes on the sale. Sellers thus ensured a healthier income for themselves and a more substantial estate for their heirs. "With such absurd tax laws it is a wonder there are not more mergers of newspapers and other businesses," Stern wrote in 1962. Accordingly, he concluded, the tax laws were largely to blame for the recent proliferation of newspaper chains.⁽³⁵⁾

The largest chains in the mid-1960s, in terms of circulation, were the seven newspapers operated by the Chicago Tribune Company, with 26 million circulation; Hearst, with nine papers and 18 million; Newhouse, with eighteen papers and 18 million; Scripps-Howard, with seventeen papers and 17 million; Knight, with six papers and 9 million; and Gannett, with twenty-five papers and 7 million. Editor & Publisher magazine recorded 930 sales of newspapers, many of them to chains, between 1945 and 1966.⁽³⁶⁾ Two chains with typical growth in the 1950s and 1960s were Knight Newspapers and Ridder Publications. Knight, the owner of the Miami Herald and Akron (Ohio) Beacon-Journal, bought the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer in 1955, the Charlotte (N.C.) News in 1959, and the Tallahassee Democrat in 1965. Ridder Publications purchased the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury & News and the Long Beach (Calif.) Independent and Press-Telegram in 1952, the Pasadena (Calif.) Star-News in 1956, and the Gary (Ind.) Post-Tribune in 1966.⁽³⁷⁾

Within the industry, publishers staunchly defended chain ownership, largely on the grounds that corporate owners often permitted their editors great freedom to manage their own affairs and that chains often improved a local paper after acquiring it. Paul Miller, president of the Gannett chain, praised chains in 1965 as benefiting newspapers overall. "It is my firm conviction," he said, "that a newspaper group, properly motivated and managed, has all the advantages of single ownership, plus some that are beyond the scope of all but the most successful individual newspapers."⁽³⁸⁾ Al Neuharth, general manager of Gannett's Rochester (N.Y.) Times-Union, said in 1963 that only "impractical theorists" and "prejudiced politicians" opposed chains. The growth in corporate ownership, he claimed, was due simply to economics and had improved more newspapers than not. "The era of a chain owner using his chain for selfish political or personal motives is gone," he declared. "Let's forget it. And we will not turn the clock back on this era of weak competitive newspapers giving way to strong monopolies. Let's welcome it."⁽³⁹⁾

But many within the industry did not welcome the growth of chains. In 1957, John S. Knight, himself the owner of a group of newspapers, had deplored the growth of corporate ownership, a phenomenon he, like Stern, blamed on stiff inheritance taxes. Knight said he doubted whether newspapers could remain aggressive and individualistic under chain ownership. "The danger," Knight said, "is that newspapers under public ownership will be too conformist in their thinking, and their managements more attentive to the stockholders than to the public interest."⁽⁴⁰⁾

At the same time that chain ownership was expanding, other national trends buffeting newspapers lead to the most prolonged, costly newspaper strike of the postwar years, the New York City strike of 1962-1963. To publishers, the strike represented the convergence of the myriad problems facing the nation's newspapers: The financial ill health of many of the largest journals, the myriad complications of new technologies sweeping through the industry, and growing labor-management antagonisms in the face of industry change. The mammoth 114-day length of the strike--one of the nation's most prolonged and costliest newspaper strikes--served only to prove to publishers the extent to which the industry had few answers to meet these continuing and complex problems.

The genesis of the strike was the high wage demands of the International Typographical Union (ITU), which was seeking, in its negotiations with the New York publishers, to regain its leading role among the national newspaper unions.⁽⁴¹⁾ For years, the American Newspaper Guild, the union of editorial employees, had set the standard for industrywide contracts in New York because its contracts had expired a few weeks earlier than those of the printers and typesetters, which were put in the position of following the Guild's lead in contract negotiations. In response, the ITU's New York local, known as the Big Six, and its outspoken leader, Bertram A. Powers, were determined to reinstate the ITU as the pre-eminent craft union while reclaiming for union members wage increases that Powers said had declined precipitously under Guild leadership. In ITU negotiations with the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Journal-American and the New York World Telegram & Sun, the union had demanded $38 a week in increased pay and benefits, an offer four times higher than what the employers had offered.⁽⁴²⁾ "We have a lot to catch up," Powers said, noting that the union had fallen behind in wage settlements in recent years, "and the union is ready to do it now."⁽⁴³⁾ Publishers maintained that the union wage demands were far in excess of what their newspapers could afford and would threaten the very existence of several of the newspapers.

While a demand for substantially improved wages played a large part in the strike, equally significant was the growing concern within union ranks about automation. The publishers, facing rising costs and a combination of economic forces unique to metropolitan newspaper publishing, wanted the benefits of the technological innovations to combat their multiple financial problems. Accordingly, publishers had sought the right to take advantage of advances in Teletypesetter technology to set all stock exchange and financial tables into type using the machines. In exchange, publishers offered the typesetters a guarantee that no workers would lose their jobs as a result of the introduction of the new technology. But publishers balked at the union's demand that a portion of any savings from the innovation should be used for a special fund to pay for retraining, retirement benefits, and unemployment payments for displaced workers. Other issues of contention in the strike were the union's demands for a shorter work week (from just over thirty-six hours to thirty-five hours) and for a common contract expiration date for all newspaper union contracts.

The strike began December 8, 1962, and dragged on for almost four months with little progress represented either in continued contract negotiations or in any of the myriad third-party efforts to end the strike. In addition to the four newspapers initially involved in the contract dispute, four other newspapers--the New York Mirror, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Post, and the Long Island Star Journal--closed down by agreement among the New York-area publishers, which negotiated jointly with the newspaper craft unions through their organization, the Publishers Association. By the time the newspaper strike ended on March 31, 1963, following mediation by New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, the two sides had finally agreed on a contract that substantially scaled back the union's wage demands but granted concessions on automation issues. The final contract allowed $12.63 a week in wage increases and higher benefits over two years, reduced the work week to thirty-five hours, and allowed the use of Teletypesetters for stock tables. In return for their use of greater automation, publishers agreed not to lay off any employees and to pay for worker retraining.⁽⁴⁴⁾

What was the effect of the strike? Observers agreed that the contract was significant because it finally allowed the use of automation already widely in use at other newspapers across the country. However, the agreement limited the publishers' savings from the technologies by preventing them from laying off any workers. The wage increases, even scaled back from levels the union had demanded, nonetheless strapped many of the publishers. None of the major dailies--except for the New York Times and the New York Daily News--were consistently profitable even before the strike; most were supported by their publishers using revenues from other enterprises.⁽⁴⁵⁾ The strike itself had cost the publishers millions of dollars, cutting off all advertising receipts in the busy pre-Christmas season. The long-term effects of the strike upon publishers were apparent even in the earliest days after the settlement and threatened to force the demise of some of the weaker newspapers. Indeed, the 880,000-circulation New York Mirror closed October 16, 1963, and the Hearst Corporation, owner of the newspaper, blamed the strike for the thirty-nine-year-old journal's demise. "Costs have risen far in excess of revenues and have created substantial deficits over an extended period of time," the company announced at the time of the Mirror's closing. "The recent prolonged newspaper strike aggravated the already serious problems of the Mirror."⁽⁴⁶⁾ Other closings and mergers in New York would follow later in the 1960s.

The strike was devastating to the newspapers affected. During the work stoppage, the struck newspapers lost an estimated $108 million in advertising and circulation revenues. The 19,000 employees affected by the strike lost $50.4 million in wages and benefits. The newspapers missed publishing an estimated 5.7 million copies. The total economic cost of the strike, including losses to business, labor, and government, were estimated by the New York Times at between $190 million and $250 million.⁽⁴⁷⁾ For months after the strikers returned to work, the newspapers struggled to regain advertising and circulation, which for most of the dailies dipped dramatically from pre-strike levels. The seven major New York newspapers lost 10 percent of their weekday circulation after the strike, or about 500,000 copies a day.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Such circulation losses were typical of the other lengthy, expensive strikes that shook metropolitan journalism in the early 1960s, including the 117-day Minneapolis strike in 1962, the 129-day Cleveland strike of 1962-1963, and the 134-day Detroit strike in 1964. These strikes were important both individually and collectively. Individual strikes, as in New York, often provided the final crippling blow to the weakest journals in a city. And the strikes as a whole emphasized the declining state of metropolitan journalism, providing a symbol of both publishers' and unions' failure to come to grips with the vast change transforming the newspaper industry. "It is now rather commonplace [to have strikes in newspapers]," said Herbert Kamm of the New York World-Telegram & Sun in 1965, "and it seems to me that we are going through a period of flux now that will not be resolved quite easily."⁽⁴⁹⁾

The strikes also highlighted the extent of union unrest about computer automation, which made its first inroads into the nation's daily newspapers in the early 1960s. Computers, like offset printing, had long promised benefits to newspaper publishing but did not gain wide acceptance among publishers until the early 1960s, adding to the upheaval within the industry. The push toward computer automation was accelerated, of course, by publishers' continuous desire to offset rising costs, particularly the labor-intensive costs of newspaper typesetting and printing. "The importance of that--to all of us--needs no underlining," observed Charles L. Bennett of the Oklahoma City Oklahoman and Times in 1964. "This way lies survival."⁽⁵⁰⁾ A panel of editors at the 1964 Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) meeting agreed that levels of automation were increasing all across the country. "Automation of newspaper production is here," said Ted Durein of the Monterey (Calif.) Peninsula-Herald at the discussion, "and growing fast."⁽⁵¹⁾

For newspaper publishers, automation and computers showed promise in several areas. The new electronic technology was most immediately useful as a supplement to the Teletypesetting operation. Computers were programmed to accept Teletypesetter tape and produce a new tape that would set "justified" type--to produce copy with flush margins on both sides. Computers were also used in photocomposition, which, when paired with the growing use of offset presses, could simplify production and eliminate the need for typesetting by typographers. The first newspapers to use computers were the Los Angeles Times and the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post-Times. Both newspapers began experiments with computerized typesetting in late 1962. At the Los Angeles Times, reporters typed their news articles on electric typewriters that also produced a strip of perforated tape. After the news story was edited, a typist produced a second tape, and both were fed into an RCA 301 computer to produce a final perforated tape--including proper justification and all editing changes--ready for automated typesetting machines. The Times, the Post-Times, and other newspapers also used computers to aid in bookkeeping, to set classified advertisements into type, to lay out display advertisements, to automate mail rooms, and to keep records in the circulation department.⁽⁵²⁾

Computer use by newspapers grew quickly in the early and middle 1960s. In 1962, only a handful of dailies had used computers. But thirty-eight newspapers were using computers in typesetting in 1964, eighty-nine in 1965, and 184 in 1966. The computer industry catered to newspapers by manufacturing more and better machines specifically made for publishers. By the mid-1960s, IBM, RCA, National Cash Register, American Type Founders, and numerous other companies were making machines specifically for typesetting in newspapers.⁽⁵³⁾

Computers promised, eventually at least, to revolutionize all phases of newspapering, not just the industry's production methods. "I have never seen an industry that is going to be more completely changed in the next decade as the result of automation, nor one which today realizes it less," management consultant John Diebold told the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 1963. Diebold predicted that computers would transform all editorial operations of newspapers within a decade. "Automation is going to change totally the way in which a newspaper is edited," Diebold said, "[including] the environment in which you work, the tools that you use, and, as well, the kind of editorial product that you produce."⁽⁵⁴⁾ Florida newspaperman John H. Perry Jr., publisher of the Palm Beach Post-Times, also predicted a production revolution. "I can visualize a composing room of the future," he said in 1963, "that will automatically compose a page in the newspaper starting from a typewritten page to a finished page without any human hands touching it until it is finished and ready for the press."⁽⁵⁵⁾

In newspaper circles, talk of computers was everywhere. "Everywhere you go in the newspaper business today," remarked Editor & Publisher's Robert U. Brown in 1964, "someone is talking about computers and their possible application to or effect on the newspaper of the future." Editor & Publisher, Quill, and the other journalism trade journals were overrun in the mid-1960s with articles about computers in the newspaper industry. Many editors and publishers were smitten with computers' potential to transform the editorial operation, and interest in the new technologies ran high.⁽⁵⁶⁾ The ASNE convention of 1963 and the APME gathering of 1964 each devoted an entire session to the promise of computers in the newsroom and production room.⁽⁵⁷⁾ In 1965, more than 200 editors and publishers visited the Orlando Sentinel-Star and other south Florida newspapers to see how the newspapers were benefiting from automation. The Sentinel-Star, the Miami Herald and the West Palm Beach Post and Times were each using computers to process Teletypesetter tape for justification. The Sentinel-Star was also using computers to sort advertisements, set them in type, and do circulation bookkeeping. "If all that works out," Martin Andersen, the Sentinel-Star's publisher, told the visiting publishers, "we can see a tremendous savings, but we don't expect to eliminate any people. We've been buying labor-saving equipment for fifteen years and haven't eliminated anybody as a result of it yet. But we expect a saving which will come through attrition."⁽⁵⁸⁾

In Orlando, New York, and elsewhere, labor relations were unsettled by the coming of automation. Miami Herald president James L. Knight said in 1965 that in "the unbelievably short time that computers have been around" they had shaken the newspaper industry to its foundations. "Management cannot grasp the implications of what this monster does, or of what it is capable of doing," Knight said. "Labor, on the other hand, is really distressed. The average man in the shop regards the thing with curiosity and perhaps with some suspicion, but his big union chief is getting apoplectic."⁽⁵⁹⁾

Newspaper publishers and the craft unions strongly disagreed about automation. Publishers wanted to move faster; unions wanted automation introduced more slowly. The typographical unions did not oppose automation outright but instead sought to limit its use so as to minimize its effect upon union workers. "We are not opposed to automation in the composing room," Powers of the New York ITU said in 1964. "The question is how and when."⁽⁶⁰⁾ Elmer Brown, the ITU national president, opposed publishers' efforts to reduce the work force through attrition as automation increased, fearing that this would decimate the craft unions. "We feel that our many years of devoted service to the industry entitle us to continued employment in the industry we helped to build," he said in 1965.⁽⁶¹⁾ Publishers, for their part, said that the unions' insistence on extra money for retraining and retirement programs negated automation's cost-savings. "[T]heir insistence on language that restricts maximum use of such equipment and demands for excessive manning at high scales negate full economic advantage to be obtained by its use," the ANPA Labor Relations Committee concluded in a 1965 report. "Worse, the restrictive language can make economic use of new equipment unfeasible and thus indirectly tie publishers to old and outmoded processes." The committee said that unions were overreacting to automation, which remained in its earliest stages. "We have not had true automation as yet," the report said. "We have had a limited degree of improved mechanization."⁽⁶²⁾

The coming of computers coincided with the growing use of offset presses in the early 1960s. Several developments, most notably the increased efficiency of web offset presses, accelerated the trend toward offset that had begun at weeklies and at small dailies in the 1950s. "Every time we make a survey of offset papers, our figures become outdated before we're through," commented Charles H. Tingley of the ANPA in 1963.⁽⁶³⁾ By 1967, more than one-third of all weekly newspapers and 290 daily newspapers were using offset. The process had great potential to cut publishers' printing costs when paired with computers and other emerging technologies such as photocomposition. "The advent of web offset in the late fifties as a practical newspaper printing process opened an era of a completely new and exciting production system," a government report found in 1967. "Coupled with cold type, computers, photocomposition, and a host of electronic space age systems, web offset and the industry are facing an expanding future."⁽⁶⁴⁾ John R. Thistlethwaite, whose Opelousas (La.) Daily World in 1939 had been the first daily newspaper to switch to offset, noted in 1965 that the process had undergone multiple improvements in recent years. "Offset was a vastly more tedious and exacting process a quarter-century ago than is the case today," he said.⁽⁶⁵⁾

Editor & Publisher's editors said in 1965 that publishers were exhibiting "a tidal wave of enthusiasm" for the offset process. Demand for new offset presses was high, and press manufacturers around the country stepped up their production. The newer offset presses were fast and efficient enough to print even larger weekly and daily newspapers. Grit, the national weekly rural newspaper with a circulation of one million, switched to offset production in 1963. In 1964, the Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal, a 60,000-circulation daily, switched to offset, the largest daily to make the switch up to that time.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Offset presses could be operated by unskilled, non-union labor, a feature that appealed to cost-conscious publishers. As the Wall Street Journal observed in 1963, "Because offset lends itself to a typewriter-clip-and-paste preparation of newspaper pages by relatively unskilled labor, the offset publisher can greatly reduce or even eliminate his dependence on high-salaried printers and press plate casting operators."⁽⁶⁷⁾ Another advantage was that the process resulted in sharper, cleaner reproduction of type and pictures. When the Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal switched to offset in late 1964, readers were pleased. "Reaction of readers was overwhelmingly favorable," said Journal editor William J. Waters. "Most agreed the newspaper was sharper, pictures were reproduced with much greater clarity, and the type was more readable."⁽⁶⁸⁾

Just as offset presses and computer technology gained wider acceptance in the early 1960s, so too did another challenge to newspapers--television news. The increasing credibility of television news in the 1960s stood in marked contrast to the 1950s, when publishers and editors had dismissed the electronic medium as posing little competition to the printed word, either for advertising or in news-gathering. While television had certainly been a threat to advertising revenues, its threat had been minimized because of the booming economy and the resultant boom in advertising spending. Similarly, television's threat to newspapers' long-standing supremacy in news-gathering had been minimal. Television's coverage of special events such as political conventions had, in fact, seemed to benefit newspaper circulation rather than to hurt it.⁽⁶⁹⁾

But in the 1960s, television news began to mature. Local news came into its own. National news coverage expanded with the lengthening in 1963 of the national television network newscasts from fifteen to thirty minutes a day. And the special events coverage unique to the 1960s seemed to enhance television's reputation as a serious public affairs medium. Specifically, television's coverage of the 1960 presidential debates, of America's growing space program, and of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 all highlighted television's growing importance as a source of information. Of all of these, it was television's coverage of the Kennedy assassination that most enhanced television's credibility.

"Never before in history had such momentous news traveled so far so fast," Time magazine noted of television's coverage in the days following the assassination. "Never before had so many people stood almost immediate witness to a world-shaking event. . . . Each moment of the unfolding story flashed before millions of eyes."⁽⁷⁰⁾ The three major television networks each turned over their broadcast time to full-time coverage of the assassination's aftermath. Each network devoted from sixty to seventy hours to the events, including the presidential funeral and the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. Networks spent an estimated $32 million in direct expenses and lost advertising on the coverage. A.C. Nielsen Company estimated that virtually every home with a television set watched some of the assassination coverage. It was, Broadcasting magazine reported, "the most people, the most hours, the biggest losses and the most raw emotion that broadcasting had ever known."⁽⁷¹⁾

Even television's critics had to admit that the medium had been transformed into an even more powerful national force. Newton N. Minow, who as Federal Communications Commission chairman had derided television programming as a "vast wasteland" just two years earlier, now commended the medium. "Through calm, dignified, and steady devotion to the sad task at hand, television enabled the country to witness the example of a family of valor and the enduring strength of our democratic institutions," Minow wrote in a letter to Time magazine. "At a time of critical national transition, television grew up."⁽⁷²⁾ Others, including print journalists, saw the assassination coverage as the maturing moment of television. "From a frivolous and often inane jester and an urgent, wheedling hawker," wrote New York Herald Tribune critic John Horn, "TV was transformed instantly to a swift recorder of stunning deeds and sorrowful rites, to electronic transportation that took all of America to the scenes of infamy and miscarriage of justice in Dallas and of melancholy pomp and circumstance in Washington."⁽⁷³⁾

Print journalists were mindful of television's impact during and after the coverage of the assassination. Most editors interviewed by the ASNE Bulletin after the tragedy agreed that they had carefully taken television's coverage into account when planning their own. "We were all up against terrific competition from television," said Charles S. Gallagher of the Lynn (Mass.) Daily Item in December 1963. "How could anything we printed, for instance, carry the solar plexus impact of the video presentation of Oswald's murder?" Thomas Winship of the Boston Globe said that the newspapers' chronological accounts of each day's news "seemed almost superfluous to us in the light of the magnificent saturation TV coverage, which everybody watched." Newspaper editors were put in the position of monitoring television and reacting to and expanding upon its coverage. "We gave display to some incidents observed but not explained on TV," said Henry MacLeod of the Seattle Times. "We also ran background pieces to amplify what TV showed. Monitoring TV's work helped us give continuity to our coverage."⁽⁷⁴⁾

Even before the assassination, news coverage had taken on more importance for both the national broadcast networks and for local television stations. Two of the national networks--CBS and NBC--expanded their news broadcasts from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes a night in fall 1963. At the same time, local television stations began to emphasize news coverage for the first time; many followed the networks' lead by expanding local newscasts to thirty minutes.⁽⁷⁵⁾ "All across the country this season, viewers are seeing more television news than ever before in the brief history of the industry," observed television news director Murray Seeger of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964. "The word has spread from station to station--the thirty-minute format for local news is `in' and the old ten-and-fifteen minute shows are `out.'" Local television news was growing, Seeger said, but remained inexperienced, much like cub newspaper reporters in their first six months on the job. "The stations are just beginning to learn their way around and discover their abilities," he said.⁽⁷⁶⁾

Taken together, the enhanced credibility of television and television news made the electronic medium a greater threat to newspapers. "We have reached a point," said Robert Roesler of the New Orleans (La.) Times-Picayune in 1962, "where the television personality, the actor who delivers the news, is suddenly looked upon as a peer." And while print journalists disagreed about whether television was partially to blame for newspapers' listless circulation growth, they nonetheless agreed that newspaper editors had been slow to update their editorial content in response to the electronic medium. "I do not think that editors as a whole are responding, in the fashion they should, to this competition," said Fletcher Knebel, Washington correspondent for the Cowles publications, in 1962. John Denson of the New York Herald Tribune complained the same year that many newspapers were writing news much the same way they had in 1915. "I am sorry to say that people in our business have not shown enough imagination to find any real answers to a competitive situation," Denson told an ASNE gathering. "They have been able to find monopoly, economic answers only."⁽⁷⁷⁾

Television's increased credibility in news was apparent in a poll conducted by Elmo Roper and Associates in 1964. The poll found that, for the first time, more respondents had named television as their major source of news than had named newspapers. Television executives trumpeted the results of the poll, a scientific survey of 1,500 adults. The poll had asked the question: "Where do you get most of your news about what's going on in the world today?" Of the respondents, who were allowed to give more than one answer to the question, 55 percent named television, and 53 percent named newspapers. Newspaper executives downplayed the results and dismissed television's lead in the poll as statistically insignificant. Editor & Publisher's editors, displaying little knowledge of scientific polling methods, even doubted whether a poll of such a small sample could be generalized to the entire population.⁽⁷⁸⁾

By 1965, the mounting problems of television, rising costs, and new technologies convinced many publishers and editors that the newspaper industry had too long ignored these trends while they were building. Newspapers seemed to be changing much too slowly to meet these multiple challenges, although the industry as a whole remained profitable. "The most important fact about newspapers today," the Wall Street Journal's Bernard Kilgore said in 1963, "is that this industry is trying to adjust itself to a journalistic revolution."⁽⁷⁹⁾ This "revolution" was evident in the technological change, rising competition, and escalating costs facing newspapers. Economic pressures, the New York Times' Turner Catledge observed in 1965, "seem to be descending upon the newspaper business in a sort of increasing volume."⁽⁸⁰⁾ Worst of all, newspapers were losing their primacy as the most important news medium, believed longtime newspaper editor Harry Ashmore, formerly of the Arkansas Gazette. "Their economic base," Ashmore said in 1962, "is complicated by their own inability, I think, to roll with the punch, to improve their methods." He said that newspapers had displayed little imagination in adapting to changing conditions. "And now, I think," the editor concluded, "it's late in the day, and I think the bell is tolling all right."⁽⁸¹⁾

1. "Newspaper Failures, Successes," Editor & Publisher, 18 September 1965, 6.

2. American Newspaper Publishers Association statistics, in Newspaper Association of America files, Reston, Va. Hereafter cited as NAA files.

3. Lloyd Wendt, "What's Right with the Newspaper Business," Quill, April 1964, 12.

4. "Cites Growth in Daily Press," Kansas City Times, 11 December 1965, clipping in files of Freedom of Information Center, University of Missouri, Columbia, hereafter cited as FOI Center files.

5. World Newsprint Supply-Demand: Outlook Through 1969, Report of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House Report 970, Ninetieth Congress, First Session (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967), 13-19. The committee's annual reports included not only summaries of newsprint supplies but also detailed statistics on business trends in the newspaper industry compiled by the Business and Defense Services Administration. In 1949, before television's rapid rise, newspapers had received 37 percent of all national advertising.

6. World Newsprint Supply-Demand: Outlook Through 1968, Report of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House Report 2196, Eighty-ninth Congress, Second Session (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), 8; Daily Newspapers in 1966--Highlights of a Record Year, American Newspaper Publishers Association pamphlet, April 1967. For the optimistic view of newspaper industry trends in the mid-1960s, see Jon Udell, "The Economic Future of the Newspaper Business," ANPA Bulletin, 30 April 1965, 44; and "Newspaper Growth," Editor & Publisher, 6 March 1965, 6.

7. Morris J. Gelman, "Newspapers," Television Magazine, November 1962, 56-59.

8. Many newspapers were, in fact, doing quite well. Editor & Publisher reported in 1966 that an anonymous "average" daily newspaper of 50,000 circulation made a net profit of 11.3 percent of income in the previous year. (Robert U. Brown, "Net of $453,400 Is 11.3 Percent of Income," Editor & Publisher, 16 April 1966, 11, 47.) The generally prosperous state of the newspaper industry, despite the financial troubles of many metropolitan newspapers, was a near-constant theme of articles about the industry in the 1960s. See Phillip Corwin, "Start the Presses," Barron's, 12 September 1966, 11-12; "Newspapers' Death Held Exaggerated," Forbes, 1 October 1969, 30-40; and Frank B. Gilbreth, "Who Says Newspapers Are Going Broke?" Saturday Review, 11 December 1965, 74-76.

9. Daily Newspapers in 1966; See also "Circulation vs. Population," Editor & Publisher, 15 December 1962, 6; Harold Riesz, "Why Newspaper Circulations Have Not Kept Pace With U.S. Population Growth," ibid., 6 February 1960, 16.

10. Bureau of the Census and ANPA statistics, quoted in Benjamin M. Compaine, Papers and Profits: A Special Report on the Newspaper Business (New York: Knowledge Industry Publications, 1973), 9. A useful unpublished summary of business trends in the newspaper industry during the postwar period is Compaine's study, "The Daily Newspaper Industry in the United States (1977): An Analysis of Trends in Production, Technology, Competition and Ownership, Economic Structure, Circulation, Advertising, Newsprint, and Labor," Ph.D. dissertation, Temple University, 1977.

11. See Chapter 7 of this dissertation for a detailed discussion of the growth of suburbia and its effects upon newspapers after World War II.

12. Byerly's study is quoted at length in "Big Gains Recorded For Smaller Dailies," Editor & Publisher, 13 March 1965, 40.

13. Bernard Kilgore, "Journalism--The New Look," Editor & Publisher, 23 February 1963, 7.

14. See Chapter 7 of this dissertation. Zoned editions and special suburban editions had spread rapidly in the 1950s and continued to do so into the 1960s. The challenge of the booming suburban newspaper market was a frequent topic of discussion in trade journals and at editors' conferences in the postwar years. See, for example, Carroll W. Parcher, "Anatomy of the Suburban Newspaper Phenomenon," ASNE Bulletin, 1 April 1964, 4-5; Miles E. Sines, "How California's Suburban Dailies Joust or Join," ibid., 6-7; Roy L. Burton, "New Hope for Suburban Newspapers," National Publisher, March 1964, 15; and "Prosperity Improves Suburban News," Publisher's Auxiliary, 7 November 1964, 17.

15. World Newsprint Supply-Demand: Outlook Through 1969, 15; Sylvia Porter, "Soaring Costs a Cloud on Newspapers' Future," Kansas City Star, 8 October 1962, clipping in FOI Center files. Rising labor costs and materials were the major portion of publishers' increased cost of doing business. By the last half of the 1950s, newsprint prices had stabilized. Newsprint held steady at $135 a ton from 1957 to 1966 and even dropped in price briefly in 1964 and 1965. Nevertheless, publishers complained that paper prices, though stable, had more than doubled since the end of World War II, when newsprint had cost $63 a ton. ("Newsprint Prices," ANPA Newsprint Bulletin, 27 February 1962, 1.)

16. "U.S. Dailies Suspended, Merged, Or Gone Weekly," listing compiled from ANPA and Editor & Publisher statistics, reprinted in Newspaper Preservation Act: Hearings Before Antitrust Subcommittee, Ninety-first Congress, First Session, September 10, 24, 25, and October 1, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 215.

17. Oral history interview with Norman Bradley, 2 June 1976, Mississippi Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi. Bradley worked only briefly with the State Times before leaving to work for the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times. For an account of the State Times, see James T. Sellers, "A History of the Jackson State Times: An Agent of Change in a Closed Society," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern Mississippi, 1992.

18. Editor & Publisher International Year Book for 1961-1965.

19. Bruce Bliven, "Two Newspapers in Search of a City," Reporter, 26 April 1962, 22-23. The afternoon Examiner, in particular, had been hurt by the rush to the suburbs and the declining use of mass transportation; commuters had little time or opportunity to read an afternoon journal. As Bliven put it, "[N]ot even Los Angeles drivers are foolhardy enough to drive the freeways with one hand on the wheel while holding a paper in the other."

20. Quoted in "Probers Hear Los Angeles Times Chief," 16 March 1963, newspaper clipping reprinted in Newspaper Preservation Act, 327-328; "Chandler Defends Suspension of Two Los Angeles Newspapers," New York Times, 16 March 1963, 4.

21. Charles Thieriot to Emanuel Celler, 8 September 1969, reprinted in Newspaper Preservation Act, 178-179.

22. Newspaper Preservation Act, 81.

23. "17 Antitrust Cases Filed Against Papers Since 1890," Washington Post, 2 August 1977, D7, D10; Citizen Publishing Company v. United States, 394 U.S. 131 (1969). The Justice Department lawsuit centered on the joint operating agreement in force in Tucson, Arizona.

24. J. Montgomery Curtis to Turner Catledge, 21 February 1963, in Turner Catledge Papers, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Starkville, Mississippi. Hereafter cited as Catledge papers.

25. "Statement of Arthur B. Hanson," in Newspaper Preservation Act, 141.

26. "Statement of Raymond B. Nixon," in ibid., 118-129. The total number of daily newspapers remained stable in the United States in the late 1960s, holding steady at 1,751 in 1965, 1,754 in 1966, 1,749 in 1967, and 1,752 in 1968. For this reason Nixon's summary of changes between 1945 and 1968 are equally applicable to the 1945-1965 period. Nixon's figures for the number of newspapers founded after World War II include newspapers converted from weekly to daily publication.

27. Celler address before the Overseas Press Club, 27 September 1962, reprinted in Emanuel Celler, "The Concentration of Ownership and the Decline of Competition in the News Media," Antitrust Bulletin 8 (March-April 1963): 175-185.

28. Quoted in photocopied summary of ANPA presentation before Congress, 1 April 1963, in NAA files.

29. Ibid.

30. "Remarks of Stewart R. MacDonald on Celler Hearings Before National Newspaper Promotion Association Convention, May 5-8, 1963," photocopied report in NAA files; Newspapers 1963: A Presentation by the American Newspaper Publishers Association Before the Antitrust Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, 1963 (New York: American Newspaper Publishers Association), 1963.

31. "17 Antitrust Cases Filed Against Papers Since 1890," Washington Post, 2 August 1977, D7, D10. The Times had acquired the Sun in 1964.

32. "New Worry in Government: Not Enough Newspapers?" U.S. News & World Report, 15 June 1964, 111-112.

33. A. Kent MacDougall, "Newspaper Chains Buy More Dailies, Prosper in Monopoly Situations," Wall Street Journal, 15 December 1965, 1, 8.

34. Ibid., 1.

35. J. David Stern, Memoirs of a Maverick Publisher (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), 12-13.

36. Jerome H. Walker, "Weekly Circulation Totals Show How the Groups Stand," Editor & Publisher, 9 April 1966, 9-10.

37. Knight-Ridder Factbook (Miami: Knight-Ridder Newspapers, 1974), 2-3. The Knight and Ridder chains merged in 1974.

38. "Miller Sees Strength in Press `Chain,'" Editor & Publisher, 1 May 1965, 39.

39. Al Neuharth, "I Belong to a Chain Gang and I'm Proud of It," ASNE Bulletin, 1 July 1963, 3-4.

40. Robert U. Brown, "Newspapers are Threatened by Increased Costs--Knight," Editor & Publisher, 16 November 1957, 9.

41. Much of the material for this section is taken from the definitive account of the New York City newspaper strike, A.H. Raskin's "The Strike: A Step-by-Step Account," New York Times, 1 April 1963, 1, 22-24. Raskin, a Times' editorial writer and a veteran labor reporter, was accorded generous access to both labor leaders and publishers in researching his piece, which consumed two pages of the Times in its first issue after the strike's end. The editors of the Columbia Journalism Review were so impressed with Raskin's work they reprinted his article verbatim in the spring 1963 issue, pp. 13-27. Though widely hailed within the industry, Raskin's 20,000-word effort failed to win newspapering's highest accolade when the Times' editors inexplicably failed to enter it in the year's Pulitzer Prize competition. A second useful account of the strike is Nancy Baker, "New York Newspaper Strike," Freedom of Information Publication No. 104, July 1963, in FOI Center files.

42. Raskin, "The Strike," 1, 22. The Guild, founded in 1933, had grown in size and influence after World War II, increasing from 17,155 members with 190 contracts in 1945 to 30,888 members and 225 contracts in 1965. (Sam Kuczun, "History of the American Newspaper Guild," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1970, 363.)

43. Quoted in Baker, "New York Newspaper Strike."

44. Raskin, "The Strike," 24; "After a Three-Month Shutdown--What Striking Printers Got," U.S. News & World Report, 18 March 1963, 98.

45. T.A. Wise, "The Crisis on New York's Newspaper Row," Fortune, October 1964, 110-113, 228-236.

46. Quoted in George Barrett, "The Mirror is Closed by Hearst Corporation; Some of Assets Are Sold to The News," New York Times, 16 October 1963, 1, 30. Rising costs constituted only one of the Mirror's many problems. The tabloid was "tawdry even by Hearst standards," Reporter magazine observed. "The Mirror," noted Iowa newspaper publisher Gardner Cowles after its passing, "was essentially entertainment, and the entertainment business has moved to TV." (Quoted in "No Tears," Reporter, 7 November 1963, 20.) More importantly, the Mirror had lost much of its advertising business to its tabloid rival, the New York Daily News, which enjoyed the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country.

47. Sheldon Binn, "114-Day Newspaper Strike Ends as Engravers Ratify Contract; Loss in Excess of $190,000,000," New York Times, 1 April 1963, 1, 20.

48. Peter Kihss, "Papers Have Suffered Heavy Losses Since End of Blackout," New York Times, 16 October 1963, 31; "The Road Back," Time, 13 September 1963, 58.

49. Transcript of "Open End" television program, WPIX-TV, New York, 16 May 1965, Catledge papers.

50. APME Red Book, 1964, 42.

51. Ibid., 37.

52. Roy R. Wimmer, "Aspects of Computer Automation in the N