The British Daily?
THE PRESS DENIS PITTS
The teletechnicians went hack to work on Monday after a strike which gained them virtu- ally nothing and lost them some £90,000 in wages. The reason, quite simply, was that the other unions involved in television were not prepared to join with them; even though the bosses themselves were operating machines and keeping the networks going with a remarkable degree of skill.
Fleet Street, too, has its own strike. The blockmakers are out; and they, too, are getting very little support from their fellow unions. The newspapers are functioning with great efficiency; except that they have no new pictures to show. No one is suffering, it seems, except the lithographic workers themselves, 700 of whom have been dismissed.
Newspapers are managing without new pic- tures in the same way that ITN managed with- out film. The news happens anyway. The question which I am prompted to ask is how far the parallel between the television and newspaper disputes can be drawn.
In the event of a complete newspaper shut- down, could the managements bring the news- papers out themselves? Hush now, put the smelling salts down and give the poor fellow a fair hearing.
I have talked to several Fleet Street execu- tives this week and they have agreed that their senior editorial staff, the management and the printing overseers could produce an emergency national daily paper, albeit considerably reduced in size.
Most editorial executives spend enough of their lives working on the 'stone' (where the slugs of linotype, the headlines and the spaces for blocks are put together as a complete page) to be able to assemble a four- or even eight- page newspaper in the course of an afternoon and evening.
The results might occasionally be hilarious; but then so were some of the mistakes during the tele-dispute (I sat through an old film the other night and didn't realise until the next morning that they had put the reels in the wrong order) and the advertising would cer- tainly continue to come in in enough quan- tities to keep the unions thinking.
More knowledgeable readers will obviously question the validity of the argument with hard fact. Who, for instance, would operate the linotype machines? The answer is the overseers, who are drawn from all ranks of the industry and who have to know how to operate pretty well every machine in the building. And most newspapers have four or more of these. The same would apply to the foundries and even to the machine rooms.
Remember that I am talking about a news- paper which is considerably limited in size and quality. Dispatch would obviously be a major problem. Fleet Street van drivers would be the first to refuse to touch such a newspaper; and the railway unions would almost certainly black them (or would they?).
The biggest problem, would be the supply of newsprint: few newspapers carry a great reserve because it takes up too much storage space. The obvious answer would be for the various newspaper managements to get to-. gether and produce a joint newspaper, pooling the labour, the dispatch, the newsprint and the advertisement revenue.
The television companies did this during their strike and were doing quite well from the advertising. 1 don't know what such a joint newspaper should be called; or whether it would sell. But I am quite sure that any newspaper produced jointly by Hugh Cudlipp, Sir Max Aitken, Rothermere et al would be one of the most interesting reads since The British Weekly. I would buy it, if only for the racing tips.
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