Financially, the paper is quite healthy. The papers timberlands, mining is, pulp and paper operations, book, magazine, cated-box, and greeting-card divisions, film, radio, television, and cable panies, and data-processing and satellite-unications groups are all flourishing, with over-all return on ied capital increasing at about eleven per t a year. pensation of the three highest-paid officers and directors last year was $399,500, $362,700, and $335,400 respectively, exclusive of profit-sharing and pension-plan accruals.
But top ma is disced and saddened, and middle ma is drinking too much. Morale in the newsroom is fair, because of the ret raises, but the shining brows of the copy boys, traditional emblems of energy and hope, have begun to display odd, unattractive lines. At every level, even down into the depths of the pressroom, where the pressmen defiantly wear their square dirty folded-paper caps, people want ma to stop what it is doing before it is too late.
The new VDT maes have hurt the paper, no doubt about it. The people in the newsroom dont like the maes. (A few say they like the maes but these are the same people who like the washrooms.) When the maes go down, as they do, not infrequently, the people in the newsroom laugh and cheer. The executive editor has installed one-way glass in his office door, and stands behind it looking out over the newsroom, fretting and groaning. Retly the paper ran the same stock tables every day for a week. No oiced, no one plained.
Middle ma has implored top ma to alter its course. Top ma has responded with postdated guarantees, on a sliding scale. The Guild is off in a er, whimpering. The pressmen are holding an unending series of birthday parties orating heroes of labor. Reporters file their stories as usual, but if they are certain kinds of stories they do not run. A small example: the paper did not run a Holiday Weekeh Toll story after Labor Day this year, the first time since 1926 no Holiday Weekeh Toll story appeared in the paper after Labor Day (and the total was, although not a record, a substantial one).
Some elements of the staff are not depressed. The papers very creative real-estate editor has been a fountain of ideas, and his ses, full of color pictures of desirable living arras, are choked with advertising and make the Sunday paper fat, fat, fat, fat. More food writers have been hired, and more clothes writers, and more furniture writers, and more plant writers. The bridge, whist, skat, cribbage, domino, and vi-un nists are very popular.
The Editors Caucus has once again applied to middle ma for relief, and has once again been promised it (but middle ma has Glenfiddi its breath, even at breakfast). Top mas polls say that sixty-five per t of the readers "want movies," and feasibility studies are being ducted. Top ma aowledges, over long lu good restaurants, that the readers are wrong to "want movies" but insists that morality ot be legislated. The newsroom has been insulated (with products from the paex division) so that the people in the newsroom o longer hear the sounds ireets.
The papers editorials have been subtracted to Texas Instruments, and the obituaries to Nabisco, so that the staff will have "more time to think." The fn desk is turning out language lessons ("Yo temo que Isabel no venga," "I am afraid that Isabel will not e"). There was an especially lively front page on Tuesday. The No. 1 story epperoni -- a useful and exhaustive gu