November 02, 1990 The Obits and the News By Ernest B.
Furgurson
NEW YORK. — New York. - IN JANUARY 1928, they electrocuted
Ruth Snyder, the first woman sent to the chair in New York. Most of Manhattan's
newspapers ran columns of purple prose about it. Page 1 of the Daily News told
the story in one word and one picture.
The word, in huge type, was DEAD! The blurred picture below
it was of Snyder at the instant the shock hit her -- taken by photographer Tom
Howard with a hidden camera strapped to his ankle.
That may have been the News' most famous front page, at
least until the one in 1975 when the president refused to bail the city out of
its financial crunch. The headline that day was was FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.
The word ''dead'' has figured often in the 71-year-history
of the News; the paper has specialized in crime reporting, and printed the
best. But for the past week, since a long-feared strike began, some of its own
employees have become actors instead of narrators in a running crime story.
Starting with the first editions after the strike began,
competing papers have covered it as if the News itself were on its death bed,
as it may be. There are three tabloids in New York, and the common wisdom is
that not more than two can survive. If the strike and management's
determination to break the unions does kill the News, one of those rivals might
have the bad taste to run its own gleeful headline proclaiming the News DEAD!
That would be the Post, once stodgily liberal, now wackily
conservative, catering to readers downscale from the News' hard-core
blue-collar fans. The other, more upscale, is New York Newsday, the Manhattan
sister of Long Island's Newsday (owned by Times-Mirror, which also owns the
Baltimore Sun).
*****
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