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Pros & Amateurs. New Yorkers were fed a low-calorie diet of daily news from strange and familiar sources. The city's radio and television stations stepped up coverage, read excerpts from the columnists. On Sunday the Times and NBC sponsored an hourlong, live-television news show that carried Timesmen's reports from New York, Washington and Europe. The Spanish-language El Diario began running two pages of news in English, doubled its press run to 140,000, had to turn away advertising. The National Enquirer, weekly sex-and-gossip sheet, put out an extra issue with some news between the covers.
Amateur newsmen gallantly took to the field. Student editors of New York University's Square Journal put out a twelve-page edition using wire-service copy, and Harvard Crimson staffers rushed down from Cambridge with 8,000 copies of a "New York Edition." For their commuter trade, the New York Central mimeographed a neatly capsuled news summary ("Oldest daily railroad commuter newspaper in New York City"). Not to be outdone, the Long Island Rail Road and the Long Island Press displayed news bulletins in Pennsylvania Station. Schrafft's chain with 39 Manhattan restaurants, presented their customers with a news resumé along with their menus.
Newsmagazine sales rose by 40%, and vendors found they were selling out income tax guides, the Hobo News, and paperbound books from James M. Cain to Stendhal. Subscribers to the Wall Street Journal angrily reported that their copies were being stolen from in front of their office doors. No New Yorkers were more dismayed by the strike than the numbers-game players: the payoff number is currently derived from the total mutuel take at Maryland's Pimlico race course, a figure that conveniently is carried by the daily press.
In all New York last week only one spot greeted the newspaper strike with understandable equanimity: the Sanitation Department. Reported Commissioner Paul R. Screvane: "Litter collections are off 25%."
* The morning Times (circ. 633,106), Mirror (890,596), News (2,014,542), Herald Tribune (377,400); the afternoon Journal-American (580,006), World-Telegram and Sun (473,732), Post (351,439), Long Island Press (283,967), and Long Island Star-Journal (99,222).