Fleet Street Under Pressure
Snt,—Having spent some time studying the printing industry in the United States, I would confirm Mr Bangsbcrg's assessment (Letters, December 30), that the newspaper unions' restrictive practices have in- deed boomeranged on their members, in the reduction in employment in New York.
Despite an apparent contraction in the metropolitan newspaper market, there is a considerable increase in the circulation and actual number of provincial news- papers in the United States. There are some 13,000 of these, of which 4,800, or just over one third, are printed by web offset—the very process by which Lord Thomson seeks to start production at Hemel Hempstead.
In the so far successful rearguard actions fought by the unions at Hemel Hempstead, the unions would not appear to be denying the natural growth of pro- vincial newspapers, but employment to their own members and journalists and, most important of all, news coverage, which may be more acceptable in the provincial newspaper of the future, than the national dailies losing ground to television coverage.
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