Stop the Presses

By Tadhg Larabee

Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been on strike for more than a thousand days. In our new issue, Tadhg Larabee reports on the union’s battle and its connection to Steel City’s labor history.

WHEN NEWSGUILD STAFF ORGANIZER Jacob Klinger picked me up outside Pittsburgh in his battered truck, he couldn’t wait to talk about the cease and desist he had just received from a small private school in northwest Ohio. It was the 922nd day of the Guild’s strike against the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and we were driving to Toledo, where the paper’s workers had plans to picket the school’s annual fundraiser. The protest was for the benefit of one graduate whose vote could help end the seemingly endless dispute: Diana Block, a board member of Block Communications, the 125-year-old family company that owns the Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade, as well as TV stations, cable companies, and internet service providers throughout Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois. In the back seat of the truck hung a linen blazer and a collared shirt. The gala was Kentucky Derby–themed, and the strikers intended to follow the dress code; two of them had even bought tickets so that they could mingle with Block and her fellow donors.

As we left town, Klinger told me about his life before the Guild, which included stints as a sportswriter, a tenant organizer, a janitor, and a candidate for Pittsburgh ward constable (his platform, he explained, was to do nothing except obstruct evictions until he got removed from office). The conversation came back to the strike after we picked up a copy editor and designer named Erin Hebert. Hebert, it turned out, was involved in a key aspect of the Post-Gazette’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting: its October 29 front page, where the victims’ names were printed on a stark black background. The journalists had been working without a contract for over two years when they brought home the Pulitzer, and Hebert was fed up. Her grievances included unpredictable scheduling and workplace harassment, issues union members described as endemic in a newsroom that hadn’t seen an across-the-board raise since 2006. As her colleagues celebrated the Pulitzer, Hebert said, “I felt like everything I had gone through there had been worth it.

Later that afternoon, a community supporter remarked that “a Pulitzer should get you a raise of fifty cents an hour” while the strikers handed out leaflets across from the fundraiser’s venue, a converted stable surrounded by farmland and forest. Veteran transportation reporter Ed Blazina stood next to the country road, sporting a smart vest and cherry-red Converses. Decades ago, when Diana Block was learning the family business, he had briefly been her editor. “I took her out . . . to show her the kinds of communities we dealt with,” he remembered. “There was no air about her at all.” What would he say to her today? Simple: “Settle the strike.”

“The journalists had been working without a contract for over two years when they brought home the Pulitzer, and Hebert was fed up.”

In the end, none of the workers got the chance to deliver their message. The school canceled their tickets at the last second, and a trio of sheriff’s deputies lounged near the gala’s entrance, bickering with demonstrators about the precise location of the property line. Car after car drove past, the candy hues of derby hats muted by tinted windows; only one stopped to see what the fuss was about. The strikers decided to leave when the sun started to set. Trudging to the campground where they had parked, some workers wondered whether this, or any of the similar actions they had staged since walking out in 2022, had made a difference. Still, nobody seemed to doubt that they would be at the next one.

Two and a half years is a long time to be on strike. In summer 2024, the strike became the longest ongoing labor action in the nation; it was already the longest in the history of American newspapers and of any Pittsburgh industry. A lot can happen in two and a half years. Strikers have gotten married, bought houses, battled cancer, and sent their kids to college. Multiple workers had taken up—and then quit—smoking on the picket lines before I met them. At first, nobody thought the strike would last more than a few weeks; then nobody expected it go on past six months, one year, two. The journalists are exhausted and eager to get back to work.

The fact that the strikers are still standing is the product of a once-in-a-generation collision between an exceptionally dedicated union and an eccentric family unwilling to accept anything short of the union’s dissolution.

Continue reading “Stop the Presses,” an essay by Tadhg Larabee, on our site.

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