by Edward Hershey

When 11 Pittsburgh newspaper labor unions settled a nine-month strike with a deal that returned the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to the streets in January 1993 and consigned Scripps-Howard’s virulently anti-labor Pittsburgh Press to oblivion, union leaders could not know that one day they would view the strike as a high point for their members.

“It was a great victory for us,” says Joseph Moliner, a longtime International Brotherhood of Teamsters official in Pittsburgh who also heads the IBT’s national newspaper division. ”But it was the last victory. Since 1992 every settlement has been concessionary. We keep losing jobs and those that remain are asked to do more for less.”

Front pages of the Post-Gazette and Press reflecting pivotal strike moments looked down on Moliner and five other union leaders in the offices of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh one day in September as they surveyed the increasingly gloomy fortunes of their industry, to a man wondering aloud if there will even be print editions in most cities in a few years.

The beginning of the end may have come two years later in Detroit when the Knight-Ridder and Gannett chains broke a strike. “The publishers learned from their mistakes here,” Moliner said, “and didn't repeat them in Detroit.”

The Teamsters, who once represented 750 newspaper delivery drivers in Pittsburgh, are down to 290. And as leaders of 11 locals in a unity council warily eye management consultants imported by the Post-Gazette prior to the start of negotiations in October, Moliner says he fears as few 250 drivers may be working after the current contract expires in March.  View short video of Moliner analyzing the industry's decline

Hit by a triple whammy of reduced classified advertising lost to the Internet, a meltdown in display ads from closures in the auto and retail industries largely stemming from the recession and lower circulation generally attributed to lack of young readers, the Post-Gazette is again looking to its unions for further cost-cutting measures.

“Younger people aren’t even reading the paper,” said Don McConnell, longtime president of Pittsburgh Typographical Union No. 7, like the Newspaper Guild now part of the Communications Workers of America’s Printing, Publishing and Media Workers sector. “They aren’t reading our paper or any paper.”

Actually, according to assistant business editor R. J. Hufnagel, president of the local Guild chapter, the Post-Gazette is relatively well off compared to dailies in most major cities that have responded to more precipitous declines in revenue with steeper staffing cuts and other reductions.

For one thing, he says, Pittsburgh was not a high flyer in the pre-2007 real estate boom and thus has maintained its property values. For a second, the local populace is among the oldest in any American metropolitan area, protecting readership. And for a third, as one of the nation’s last family-owned major-market dailies the Post-Gazette has not been subject to the kind of mindless cost-cutting mandated at papers that are publicly owned or in heavily leveraged private equity portfolios.

“We have had buyouts but we have not had layoffs in the city room,” Hufnagel said. “And believe it or not we have even added some staff recently to help with the start up of PG Plus.”

PG Plus, which received national attention when it surfaced in August, is an effort to lure paid Internet subscriptions with features such as inside dope from sports and political writers and discounts for services and goods not available in the print or free Web editions of the paper.  View short video on PG Plus

Bill Toland, one of a half-dozen staffers reassigned to get the new service going, says it is too early to tell whether it will lure enough $3-s-month subscribers to make a difference, but the paper was encouraged when a third of print subscribers polled said that right features might get them to pay. He added that PG Plus would not repeat the basic mistake of prior publications’ efforts at “putting Web content behind a pay wall” by trying to charge for material once available for free. And after all, he and other Post-Gazette staffers acknowledge ruefully, the experiment costs very little, filled with articles and videos filed by reporters working more hours for the same pay.

Longtime officials like McConnell says union leadership have not been about resisting change for many years.       

“I’m an optimist and it’s hard to be an optimist when you are selling in this climate,’ said McConnell, who has watched new technology shrink an army of 450 skilled production employees to 18 production technicians, and three years ago agreed to transition the entire advertising sales staff to 100 percent commission pay. Google and Monster.com, once considered enemies, are now partners.

“We used to be one thing,” McConnell said, “and now we have to be something else. We can start over. We are working on new ideas. It’s miniscule so far but it’s happening.”

But is it too late to save the print edition of even a daily with some advantages like the Post-Gazette?

Moliner, the Teamster who is one of three co-chairs of the Unity Council and its de facto leader, sounds as if he thinks it might be.  He shakes his head when he notes that the paper recently eliminated 13,000 subscribers in outlying areas and stopped all Monday-Saturday circulation in neighboring areas of Ohio and West Virginia because it cost more to deliver the papers there than they would could return in revenue.

“In the old days we used to ask to see demand to see their books,” Moliner said. “Now they offer them to us. It’s like the old Henny Youngman joke: 'Take my books. Please!' When they’re losing $10 million or $20 million a year how can we go in and ask for raises? Now we say, ‘What can we do to help you make this company profitable as long as it doesn’t hurt our members?’”

In the end, he adds, quoting Thomas Jefferson on the importance of a free and vibrant press to a democracy, more than union members will suffer if the Post-Gazette and other dailies gut their staffs and abandon their print editions, eliminating the kind of journalism that recently exposed efforts by a local pharmaceutical firm to cover up production of substandard drugs.

 “If you don’t have the quality of reporting that exposes corruption, reporting that only newspapers give you,” Moliner said, “then you’ve lost just about everything.”

videos by Fred Glass
photos by Ron Lind