The day the papers died

On April 24, 1966, unable to reach agreement on a new contract, unions struck three New York newspapers. The Herald Tribune,

More than a hundred years of history went down with them, and New York City - once the home of 11 dailies - now had only three, the Times, the News, and the Post.

Closing of big-city newspapers was not uncommon in those days. Newspapers had incubated in urban settings, been sold on street corners, and provided the principal source of news. Now readers had moved to the suburbs, white-collar jobs replaced blue-collar ones, and expensive home-delivery systems were necessary. The medium of television became the primary place to learn what was going on. Afternoon newspapers became particularly vulnerable to television's impact.

The trend would continue, augmented, as the years went on, by lifestyle changes, CNN, 24/7 news, and the Internet. It is no wonder that since the mid-1960s, dailies have dropped from 1,751 to 1,480, a loss of 271. The New York closings were followed by other big-city shutdowns: Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Boston.

Having even three papers in New York is an anomaly. Only forty-nine cities now have more than one paper and in sixteen of those markets, multiple papers are owned by the same company. In twelve others the Newspaper Preservation Act - created to maintain multiple journalistic voices in cities that no longer could support two competing dailies - allowed papers to combine business functions under so-called joint operating agreements.

The troubles newspapers would face hadn't fully sunk in by 1966. The Herald Tribune, once edited by Horace Greeley, had been the prime challenger to the larger-circulation New York Times. In its final years, under the direction of Jim Bellows (who later served as editor of the Washington Star and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, both of which ultimately shut down), the Tribune broke new ground in graphics and coverage under the rubric "Who says a good newspaper had to be dull?" It accepted the fact that readers were watching television and tried to bring them back with top writers such as Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Charles Portis, Lewis Lapham, and Richard Reeves. Bellows and Clay Felker started a new Sunday magazine, New York. It worked but the paper didn't. The Times's superior range and investment hastened the Trib's demise.

When the strike ended several months later the World Journal Tribune emerged, an odd, misshapen creature with good genes but tenuous life expectancy, drawing on the remains of the three closed publications. The "widget," as it was known, did not survive its incubation, and expired largely unmourned in 1967. Almost twenty years later, the powerful suburban daily Newsday started a New York edition that quickly raised the bar for local coverage. Circulation gains were steady but slow and after a ten-year run New York Newsday, too, was shut down. - N.H.