Strikebound Daily News’ Sales Lagging

As the strike against the New York Daily News by 2,500 union members enters the second week, the News’ elaborate strategy to deliver and sell the nation’s third-largest daily in the nation’s biggest union town seems to be losing some momentum.

The News’ management, aided by as many as 150 reporters who have crossed picket lines, is managing to write and print the paper, increasingly well, each day.

But after 20 months of scrupulous preparation--to the point of being able to alert replacement workers across the country by beepers--the News seems to have had little effective contingency for persuading the newsstands and smoke shops that peddle most of the paper’s 1.1 million copies each day to continue selling.

While the News was selling perhaps 500,000 papers a week ago, now it is selling 300,000 to 400,000, including about 100,000 copies that are really being given away, circulation executives from various papers said. Others say those estimates are high, by as much as double.

“If this were the New York Times (on strike), management already would have won,” because that paper is read by a white-collar audience and it is to a large extent home delivered, said the circulation director of another of the city’s dailies. “But this is a working-class paper sold on the street,” he said.

Before the strike, the Daily News sold 81% of its papers through 25,000 to 30,000 retail shops and newsstands around the city, most of them independently owned. At most newspapers around the country, newsstand and street sales are closer to 30% of circulation.

Daily News officials blame “criminal violence by union outlaws” for newsstand operators refusing to carry the paper. News spokeswoman Lisa Robinson said that, as of Monday, police had arrested 50 people in such incidents.

There is some evidence to support this. “I can’t take the paper, or they will kill me,” Ali Najeli, co-owner of the A&S; Stationery Store at 317 Seventh Ave. in Brooklyn, was quoted in one New York paper last week as saying. “At least in Beirut I could have a gun. Here, if I had a gun, the police would come and take me to jail.”

To the extent that the threat of violence is working against the News’ management, however, the paper’s much-publicized contention that the violence is widespread may even have intensified the threat.

The estimated 100 non-union drivers who have replaced 700 union drivers may not be enough, and some of them may not know their routes, circulation executives at other papers said.

In addition, the same union that used to deliver the Daily News to retailers also delivers the New York Times, the New York Post and other publications. So there is economic incentive, aside from threats of violence, for retailers to remain in the union’s good graces.

And some retailers may feel that more of their customers would be put off by their selling the News than would be grateful.

“The real question here is whether New York is still a union town,” said Don Nizen, vice circulation director of the rival New York Post, whose circulation has jumped 200,000 copies each day to 750,000 now and is running at its capacity of 128 pages. “Can you have a non-union paper in New York City, especially one aimed at the working class?”

Newspaper executives in the city say officials at the News had been trying all summer to prepare the newsstand operators for the strike. But at least one high-ranking newspaper executive in the city said the issue may have been a source of bitter conflict between officials of the News and executives of the paper’s parent, Tribune Co. of Chicago.

Management in Chicago felt that the paper was ready to absorb the strike, while Daily News Publisher James Hoge did not. If true, it is possible that this could prove a pivotal issue in the paper’s future.

“Jim Hoge has been trying to convince Chicago that the problem was going to be handling the newsstands, and he was very adamant about that,” the official said. “Chicago did not agree . . . believing that newsstand owners would sell it for their own economic interest.”

According to this executive, the disagreement between Hoge and Chicago was “part of the reason the new circulation director (of the News) was brought in” from a Tribune paper in Florida only a few weeks ago.

Now, even one News official privately admitted, “circulation got really shut down,” though he insisted that “it has snapped back in recent days.”

The strike began over a dispute between a manager and a member of the drivers union at the News’ Brooklyn printing plant Oct. 25. The unions have been working without a contract since March 31. In bargaining talks, management vowed to win the right to control work rules before it would commit $300 million to $500 million for plant modernization.

The News is now giving the paper away on many street corners, has launched a phone sales program to increase home delivery and has devoted space in its news pages to unashamedly pro-management rhetoric.

The banner and lead story of last Friday’s paper, for instance, was the tale of blind “news dealer Leo Imerti and his seeing-eye dog, Lars,” enduring threats and taunts: “Leo Imerti is afraid. He no longer sells the News. He is only one of scores of news vendors throughout the city, many of them old and disabled, who are confused and frightened, caught up in mayhem and unfamiliar violence as the striking unions wage war against the Daily News.”

Advertisers, many of whom are getting discounts, according to executives at competing papers, appear to be staying with the News. But they are also hedging their bets in other papers and on radio.

At New York Newsday, for instance, officials said advertising was up an average of 30 pages each weekday and 40 pages last Sunday. There has also been an increase in pre-printed inserts. Newsday is owned by Times Mirror Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

The New York Times also is up slightly in advertising, though spokeswoman Nancy Nielson said the News and Times have little duplication in advertisers or readers.

All three papers also are benefiting in circulation. Newsday reports that, last week, the circulation of its New York edition was up to between 340,000 and 350,000 a day. Its weekday circulation before the strike was 221,000. On Sunday, Newsday reported that its circulation was up to 330,000 from 155,000.

“Frankly, I am surprised the (News’) circulation effort has not been more successful,” Jerry Nachman, editor of the Post, said. “I don’t know whether that was a miscalculation, but it’s there.”