Sunday 11 October 2009

Vintage clips

The Internet Archive website has a couple of vintage gems for advocates of print media and journalism.

Seventeen Days: The Story of Newspaper History in the Making is a 20-minute replay of the June 30, 1945, strike by 1,700 New York newspaper delivery workers that halted delivery of eight daily newspapers to 14,000 newsstands.

On day one of the 17-day strike, circulation plummeted. But when readers learned their favourite morning and evening newspapers were still being published, they came by foot, car, cab, subway and bus to purchase papers daily at the newspaper plants.

Tens of thousands of readers in long lineups braved threats by strikers, the heat of the sun and occasional downpours to buy papers at the plants. A remarkable 10,628,000 papers were sold over the counter during the strike.

As the narrator says, the New York Times, the News, Sun, Post, Journal-American, Herald Tribune, Mirror, World Telegram learned that "if the newspapers could not go to the public, the public would come to the papers."

What loyalty.

For another 1945 flashback, you can watch Journalism here.

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