War of the Proses

SPOTLIGHT

the last old-fashioned newspaper war is just getting under way in New York. The three tabloids, the Daily News, the Post, and Newsday, are gearing up for what will probably be a battle for survival, even as the Times, with its young publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., skirmishes with them to capture younger readers without losing its old Establishment audience.

When real-estate developer/publisher Mortimer Zuckerman bought the News in January, only a shrunken shell survived from its glory days as the biggest-selling paper in the country, with a daily circulation of more than two million (now smaller than the Times but larger than its other competitors). But among subway riders it has remained the tabloid of choice over the perpetually terminal Post, currently the property of a bankrupt owner, Peter Kalikow, and Robert M. Johnson's Newsday, which has been slowly gaining ground during the last few years.

The weapons of victory will be talent and skill. Jaded straphangers will flock only to a paper that has the tone of NewYork street smarts-the paper that can tell them about their city in the vernacular that strikes a chord of recognition with those huddled masses yearning to get the edge. After all, it has been the winning slyle of Noo Yawkers ever since they fast-talked the Indians into selling them Manhattan.

If will be a gorgeous, raucous brawl. The winners and losers will be added up each day. Bodies will be left in the street as battles surge from borough to borough. But what excitement, what gasps, what shocks, what horrors, and what laughs, while it lasts.

Read all about it! Getcha paper here! As Pete Hamill remarked when Rupert Murdoch bought the Post at the start of an earlier newspaper war, "New York is a newspaper town again."

CLAY FELKER