When the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants played the 1962 NFL Championship game in a frigid Yankee Stadium on December 30, 1962, there was no newspaper coverage in New York City itself. Why? Well, this story should explain it. As a quick background for our younger readers, sixty years ago newspapers ruled the roost of news coverage. Radio was perhaps second, and the newer medium of television... you can read about that below. (Note: pictured above is the western edition of The New York Times’ coverage of the Packers’ second NFL title in a row — click on the image to read in much a larger size).
A little more than two hours after midnight on December 8, 1962, hundreds of printers walked away from their clattering Linotype machines and their rumbling presses and departed en masse from The New York Times’s block-long composing room, on West 43rd Street. Everything they deemed essential — typewriters, adding machines, a public-address system, manila folders stuffed with union documents — was packed into cardboard boxes and carted away to strike headquarters, in Greenwich Village. The printers, most of them second-generation Irish, Italian, and Jewish men in their 40s, belonged to Local No. 6 of the International Typographical Union (I.T.U.), a confederation better known by its historic nickname, “Big Six.” The Times was shut down, and within hours so was every other major newspaper in New York City.
One of the most dramatic and vexing strikes in American history was under way. The showdown of 1962-63 pitted around 17,000 newspaper employees — pressmen, photoengravers, paper handlers, reporters, elevator operators, office boys — against the owners and publishers of seven New York City newspapers, who were determined to curtail the influence of Big Six and nine other clamorous unions. Over the next 114 days, 600 million newspapers would go unprinted; newspaper-obsessed New Yorkers would be forced to navigate their metropolis without them.
At its core, the New York newspaper strike was a battle over technology. The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of computerized typesetting systems that would revolutionize the newspaper composing room. Newspapers that prohibited unions, such as the Los Angeles Times, rushed to install cutting-edge computers such as the RCA 301. Newspapers with union contracts, including those in New York City, faced tempestuous resistance from labor leaders, who could easily see that automation would cost jobs.
Today, new technology is shaken American newspapers as the internet drains away more and more advertising revenue. Cities with dailies may soon face a newspaper blackout much darker than what New York experienced a half-century ago. For a brief period, New York was a laboratory that demonstrated what can happen when newspapers vanish.
In March 8, 1963, at the Commodore Hotel, the stalemate was finally broken, thanks in large part to the indefatigable exertions of the mayor’s chief labor negotiator. A joint expiration date for the union contracts, a weekly wage increase of $12.63; a shorter workweek; and an open-ended pledge from the publishers that the unions would share in the financial savings from Teletypesetter machines — which the publishers got the right to install, a crucial early step in the modernization of composing rooms. The 1963 contract saddled the New York publishers with millions of dollars in new costs, and the Times and the Herald Tribune were immediately forced to raise their price from a nickel to a dime. The New York market never really recovered from the great strike. A couple of months after its conclusion, New York daily circulation was down 10 percent from pre-strike levels. Later in the year, Hearst’s New York Mirror expired, and eventually the New York Herald Tribune, the New York World Telegram & Sun, and the New York Journal-American joined the Mirror on the heap.
Print’s loss was television’s gain. During the 1962-63 strike, many newspaper readers shifted their loyalty to the television, permanently. Local TV news stations sensed an opportunity and grabbed it.
