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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

Heiskell:

Hoyt and Gart never got on together. They tried every trick in the trade, but Murray was not a person to make friends, Hoyt did not have the stature to represent the paper as a publisher, and stature in terms of dealing with important people in Washington, selling advertising, doing all those things. So the paper limped along, gradually loosing position, from time to time picking up a little bit. The Post had a strike, so suddenly everything looked a lot better at the Star, but of course it was all illusory, and when the strike was over, there was the Post without any unions and there were we with unions. And finally we came, to the crunch, and made demands of the unions, essentially to reduce the manning--there was incredibly superfluous number of people lying around the shop. And we said that by--as I remember, I think it was by January 1, we either got the concessions from the unions, and if we got the concessions we would commit to investing a sizable amount of money over a period of years--I think it was 60 million over a period of five years. We got concessions out of--I think there were 11 unions--appalling thought, to negotiate with 11 unions in a small affair of that kind--but I believe there were. And we got concessions from most, if not all--I think all but one--when the deadline came along. But the one must have thought we were bluffing, because the deadline came and we did shut down for a day--because the next day that union--I guess it was the printers--agreed to the concessions and we started out again with a better cost structure. But the better cost structure was never matched by better revenues, and we were pouring money in at the rate of a million or so a month,





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