The Press: The TTS Revolution

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"Cheap Tape." No one was more wary of TTS originally than Woodruff Randolph, president of the powerful International Typographical Union. But the I.T.U. now goes along with it, except for "cheap tape," i.e., syndicated features like Columnists Pearson, Winchell, the Alsops and 47 others, which Manhattan's Tape Production Corp. mails out in rolls of tape to more than 130 dailies for 50¢ a column. The union also still bitterly opposes the use of typists instead of compositors to set TTS copy, sarcastically calls it a "promising means of union-busting." Thus far, TTS has not created unemployment among I.T.U. members. Papers like the Boulder (Colo.) Camera have simply been able to expand their coverage, fatten up their pages and grow with the same printing staff they had before.

Said Business Manager Alfred Chapman Jr. of the Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer (circ. 21,971) and Ledger (26,589): "We are saving at least $85,000 a year . . . TTS circuits are the salvation of many papers because they can run more news at less cost. The average reader . . . can get a better paper. We took the money we saved by TTS and plowed it back into the editorial department. That's what TTS will do for the newspaper reader."

*TIME has been using its own more complicated TTS since 1940 to set identical type in plants in Philadelphia and Chicago (and later Los Angeles). Since then, more than 200 other magazines, weekly newspapers, book publishers and regional chains of dailies have started using TTS.

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