Portland: How Good Is a Strike?

Despite the fact that one New York paper was ready to quit fighting and start publishing (see above), the city's 13-week-old newspaper strike seemed to go on and on. And despite the fact that Cleveland's unions were anxious to settle, Cleveland's 14-week-old strike also seemed endless. But neither city has anything on Portland, Ore. There, an almost forgotten dispute has dragged on since November 1959, and is not one pica closer to settlement than it was when it began. But unlike New York or Cleveland, Portland has not been without its newspapers for one strikebound day. It is, in fact, the only U.S. city that ever went into a strike with two dailies--the Oregonian and the Oregon Journal--and wound up with three. The newcomer is the tabloid Reporter, a strike-born paper that was first published by union members in February 1960.

Little David. The Reporter's survival is a measure of the bitterness of Port land's strike, which began with a stereotypers' protest over the introduction of automatic plate-casting machinery, and was soon punctuated by picket-line brawls and the dynamiting of newspaper delivery vans. Every other strike paper that has been started in the U.S. in the last 30 years--nearly a score in all--has done a quick fadeout as soon as the regulars returned to the newsstands. In Portland the regulars never really left; for six months they published a joint, typo-marred paper; then they hired enough nonunion help to resume separate operations.

To keep the Reporter going in the face of this determined opposition, the newspaper unions dug deep into their treasuries. Eighty Portland locals put up $150,000 to buy and remodel an abandoned Wells Fargo stable; the hayloft still serves as the Reporter's city room. The International Typographical Union shipped sev eral carloads of equipment from Miami, including an ancient Hoe press that was dubbed "Little David," and leased the whole lot to the Reporter for a token $10 a year.

With a circulation of just under 60,000, the Reporter has given its rivals little room for complacency. Since the strike began, both have lost subscribers. The Oregonian is down 28,600 to 213,614, the Journal a whopping 57,300 to 131,364. Both have resorted to giving away stuffed Easter bunnies and toy elephants to lure their readers back.

Pointless Sacrifice. Little David & Co. have not done badly for a slingshot operation, but fact is that they have barely pricked the hides of Portland's Goliaths. Since Newspaper Collector Samuel Newhouse added the money-losing Journal to his chain in 1961, he has been consolidating its noneditorial operations with those of the Oregonian (which he bought in 1950), and claims to be confident of eventually turning a profit. The Oregonian has slashed its noneditorial manpower by 30%, is so fat with ads that it shows a profit of more than $1,000,000 a year.

The Reporter, in the meantime, has run up a deficit of more than $536,000 despite the fact that it can get away with penny-pinching salaries, since 132 of its 283 employees still draw strike benefits from the I.T.U. and the Stereotypers' Union; the American Newspaper Guild shelled out $250,000 in benefits before cutting them off in 1961.

What troubles union members is that the sacrifice seems pointless. "How good is a strike," asked one, "when you turn over three-quarters of the city's newspaper jobs to others?" And both sides--in New York and Cleveland as well as Portland--might also ask how good a strike is if, even with three dailies in the field instead of two, 30,000 fewer newspapers are sold every day.

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