Word: fleetly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...target of their wrath is Keith Rupert Murdoch, 54, the proprietor of Wapping and one of the world's most powerful press barons. Murdoch has acted audaciously in the past, but never before has he accomplished so much in a single bold stroke. For 50 years Fleet Street's print unions have exercised a viselike control over the national newspaper industry, blocking the introduction of new technology and shutting down the presses at will. Murdoch broke that costly stranglehold in one weekend last month. He abruptly fired nearly 6,000 striking printers and moved his London papers...
...also the beginning of the end for Fleet Street as the 200-year-old center of the British newspaper industry. Robert Maxwell, the mercurial publisher of the leftish Daily Mirror (circ. 3 million), plans to follow Murdoch to the east London docklands area by 1987. He has already persuaded the unions to allow him to lay off one-third of his company's 6,000 workers in exchange for severance benefits. The conservative Daily Telegraph (1.2 million), now controlled by Canadian Tycoon Conrad Black, hopes to finish its headquarters in east London by the fall. The liberal, thoughtful Guardian...
...completely new for Britain: an electronically reproduced daily paper with four-color pages. Founded by Eddy Shah, a successful purveyor of provincial giveaway newspapers, Today will be a 44-page tabloid heavy on domestic news and sports. By setting up his state-of-the-art plant three miles from Fleet Street, Shah skirted the printers entirely, and instead is negotiating a no-strike deal with his employees. Today's staff, including deliverers, numbers only 600, anorectic by the overstuffed standards of Fleet Street...
Murdoch needed little encouragement. Ever since the Australian-born publisher entered the London newspaper scene by purchasing the News of the World and the Sun in 1969, he has made no secret of his frustration with the unions' archaic practices and featherbedding. Over the years Fleet Street proprietors had yielded control of their print rooms to the unions, figuring that it was easier to grant another demand rather than endure a shutdown. Many printers work partial shifts but are paid a full week's wages; a few even receive two paychecks. Senior men can make up to $40,000, nearly...
Over the past four decades, three Royal Commissions have concluded that the unions are largely responsible for Fleet Street's chronic money woes. Terminal may be a better adjective: on gross revenues of nearly $2 billion last year, Britain's 17 major papers made about $34 million in profits, nearly all of it accounted for by Murdoch's racy Sun, the country's largest daily (circ. 4.1 million...