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.”
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.
Block Is Cheap
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.
Back in 2022, it wasn’t clear that there would be a strike at all.
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. Both owners and workers are acutely aware that print news isn’t what it used to be, especially in the Rust Belt. The Post-Gazette, which once subsidized Block Communications’ other enterprises, now costs the company millions each year; its journalists have witnessed the deaths of nearby papers in McKeesport, Monessen, and Youngstown. Meanwhile, hedge funds and national media conglomerates are gobbling up family-owned papers. Something has to give. Will it be the workers or the Blocks?
“I’m a typical Pittsburgher,” Blazina told me. “I’m real stubborn. . . . I could walk away at any point, and I’m not going to—not a chance.” The Blocks are also a headstrong bunch. Their rise began with Paul Block, a Lithuanian Jew who immigrated to upstate New York in 1885 at the age of nine. While his father worked as a ragpicker, Block took a job as a newsboy at the Elmira Telegram. From these Horatio Alger origins, Block moved to New York City, where he founded the company now known as Block Communications in 1900, becoming a regular captain of industry and befriending President Calvin Coolidge as well as various power brokers of the roaring twenties. Block’s firm was early to the field of national advertising; as papers sprouted up across the country, he connected them with newly consolidated retailers and manufacturers that hoped to reach an expanding base of middle-class consumers. With his growing fortune, Block bought newspapers of his own: the Newark Star-Eagle and the Detroit Journal in the mid-1910s, followed by the Toledo Blade and some ten more over the next few decades. In 1927, he met William Randolph Hearst in Chicago to plot a takeover of the Pittsburgh newspaper market. When the press barons’ private Pullman railcars left the city, each was on his way to owning two of Pittsburgh’s four leading papers; Block would combine his to form the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
It seemed like a great time to invest in Pittsburgh. The city had been the physical and economic center of U.S. industrialization, connected to the iron mines of the upper Midwest via the Ohio River and situated amid the rich coalfields of Appalachia. In its vast mills, Pittsburgh turned these raw materials into steel, which became railroads, automobiles, weapons, skyscrapers, and all the other trappings of American modernity. The Pittsburgh of 1920 was nearly seven times more populous than it had been fifty years prior, its factories full of black workers from the South and European immigrants; U.S. Steel, based in the city, was for decades the world’s largest corporation. But something was already rotten in the Steel City. Dependent on basic manufacturing and a small number of gargantuan employers, Pittsburgh saw few plants open or expand after 1920. The jobs were still there, but the progress had slowed: between 1930 and 1960, Pittsburgh’s economy grew at around half the national rate.
The Block newspapers did not escape the twentieth century unscathed. Block spent much of the Great Depression so depressed that he literally couldn’t get out of bed. Outside his Park Avenue apartment, his empire, which once stretched from Brooklyn to Duluth, was shrinking; he would be left with just his advertising firm, the Blade, and the Post-Gazette. Block entrusted what remained to his sons Paul Jr. and William, homegrown American aristocrats with degrees from Hotchkiss and Yale. Their prosperity likewise sat on a steel foundation. When the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s hit an industry facing stiff overseas competition, it meant economic crisis for Pittsburgh’s steel producers and social crisis for the city. The Post-Gazette’s readership declined with Pittsburgh’s population and plummeted during a series of strikes in the early 1970s that halted distribution of the paper.
By the late eighties, when Paul Jr.’s twin sons, Allan and John Robinson, got into the business, both Pittsburgh’s population and the Post-Gazette’s circulation were down more than two hundred thousand from their heights—and that was before the internet destroyed the advertising model their grandfather had helped pioneer. But the legacy of Paul Block, penniless immigrant turned press baron, loomed large for John Robinson, or “J. R.,” now publisher of the Post-Gazette and the Blade. As a Yale undergraduate, J. R. made notes for a history paper about his grandfather: “Was Paul Block a man with a message?” he asked. “Was he considered . . . an extraordinary human being?”
While the Iron’s Hot
Joe Knupsky, a Post-Gazette copy editor, is the same age as J. R. and Allan Block. Their families have been on opposite sides of the region’s class war for generations, and Knupsky is proud of it. “My grandfather worked in coal mines . . . and he was one of the first to have a union card,” Knupsky told me. When management caught his grandfather organizing, he was evicted from his company-owned housing. That didn’t stop Knupsky’s dad from becoming a union steelworker in Glassport, Pennsylvania, about ten miles south of Pittsburgh. Knupsky, for his part, took a few years of journalism classes before dropping out and accepting a job at his father’s plant. His first strike lasted three months. “That company was owned by the Rothschilds of France,” said Knupsky, and in 1978, the boss “shut the plant and moved it to Tennessee . . . a right-to-work state.” Knupsky’s next stop was Richeyville, where he worked for seven years in what was once the largest underground coal mine in the world. The mine closed too, but not before Knupsky went on his second and third strikes. After that, he returned to college and escaped Pittsburgh’s industrial hinterland as it was crumbling around him. A chance encounter with Bill Block Sr. led to a position at the Post-Gazette. Twenty-seven years later, Knupsky is on strike number four, the most bitter one of his life.
Sometimes Knupsky worries that “what we’re striking for may be dead.” But he nevertheless sees the fight as part of the “tradition from Homestead, to the radical mine riots, to the tent cities,” a tradition of standing up to people like Paul Block and his grandsons. “Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and Ohio are the heart of unionism,” he insisted. “That’s why twenty-seven idiots are still out on strike after two and a half years.” Knupsky wasn’t the only worker to describe the strike in historic terms. “This is where the AFL and the CIO were founded,” emphasized Pittsburgh NewsGuild president Zack Tanner, a Post-Gazette designer. We were sitting around a conference table in the United Steelworkers headquarters as Klinger, Blazina, and several other strikers brainstormed Kentucky Derby–inspired slogans for the Toledo action: “Stop Horsing Around,” “Take Off the Blinders,” and the like. The modern Post-Gazette, Tanner noted, emerged from a protracted 1992 strike at the Pittsburgh Press that ended with the paper’s sale to the Blocks. “I almost feel like I’d be doing those folks from ’92 a disservice if we didn’t see this whole fight through.” Several journalists who were around for the 1992 strike nodded in agreement.
Back in 2022, however, it wasn’t clear that there would be a strike at all. The Post-Gazette’s union contract expired eight years ago, and since then, the company has sneered at the very idea of negotiating a replacement. After the Guild put up a poster reading “Shame on the Blocks” in 2019, an irate and possibly intoxicated J. R. stormed into the newsroom with his teenage daughter in tow. She cried as her father berated the staff, only for J. R. to allegedly thunder at her, “You’re a Block! You’re not one of them!” The following year, management shunted the workers onto a more expensive health plan and tried to take their jobs out of union jurisdiction. Finally, in 2020, the unit authorized a strike. Nothing came of it. The local’s president resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations a few weeks later, and the NewsGuild’s parent union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), refused to endorse the work stoppage.
What forced the unit’s hand was a separate standoff involving the Post-Gazette’s three production unions. In October 2022, the production workers went on strike after the Blocks allowed their health care coverage to lapse, and the CWA told the Guild that editorial staff had to do the same. A tense Zoom meeting ensued. Page designer Natalie Duleba described how she got into a shouting match on the call, which lasted six hours and yielded a razor-thin vote to strike. The next day, a bare majority of the newsroom walked out. More would join, but thirty-five people kept working—including, crucially, the sportswriters who cover the Steelers. The Post-Gazette was able to keep publishing, and as the strike dragged on, others would cross the picket line, find new jobs, or quit journalism altogether.
Over two and a half years, even journalists’ memories get foggy. Many strikers I interviewed struggled to place events: Was it in 2023 or 2024 that they considered renting boats for a nautical protest outside J. R.’s Maine vacation home? Yet almost everybody in the Steelworkers’ building remembered the day they picketed J. R.’s wedding reception in November 2022 as the first sign that this wouldn’t be a normal strike. “We had Scabby the Rat out there in a taped-up veil,” Tanner said. Such disruptive tactics had worked for the Guild elsewhere, but they only made the Blocks more recalcitrant. The next few bargaining sessions were so icy that after three months an administrative judge ordered the Post-Gazette to negotiate in good faith.
The hardest thing for the workers to do has been nothing. “When we do have small victories . . . it feels great, but then it’s like, ‘Well, we’re still on strike,’” said Emily Matthews, a photojournalist. The empty hours weighed on Tanner as well. “It’s a matter of feeling helpless, feeling like no action we do can move those people,” whether that’s parking a video truck in front of J. R.’s house, flying a banner over the Harvard-Yale game, or tossing complaints into the void that is the glacially slow legal system. The company’s lawyers have insisted on starting each bargaining session at section one, line one, word one, much to the annoyance of strikers; Tanner blew up a recent meeting by throwing a chair at the wall. To photographer Alexandra Wimley, management’s strategy was transparent: “If we just wait this out . . . eventually there will be so few people that the union can and will dissolve.”
PUP and Away
Into this tedium came the Pittsburgh Union Progress (PUP), a strike paper whose coverage has sprawled far beyond the journalists’ grudge match with the Blocks. Features editor Bob Batz Jr. was asked to lead the PUP minutes after walking off the job, and he recruited his staff right there on the picket line. “I love being a photojournalist,” Wimley said, “so having that outlet for still doing your job has been very helpful.” The Post-Gazette’s editorial line has veered to the right in recent years, but the PUP decided to stay away from opinion. Its mission wasn’t to win a political argument; it was to compete with the Post-Gazette by reporting on everything that had disappeared from its pages as it shrunk, from high school sports to underrepresented communities in and around Pittsburgh. “We wrote about trans people. We wrote about labor stuff. We went to the black neighborhoods where a lot of people hated the Post-Gazette,” Batz said. During the second-longest newspaper strike in history, Detroit News and Detroit Free Press workers took a similar approach, and their strike paper—the largest ever by circulation—ran for over two years after the strike ended in 1997.
For workers, the upside of family owners is their willingness to absorb losses. The price is their ability to rule as mad kings.
I met Steve Mellon, one of the PUP’s main contributors, at a church in Homestead for a panel on the East Palestine train derailment. Leaning across the pews, Mellon pointed out the survivors—Carly, who had lost her hair; Ashley, who had been displaced to a camper; Christina, who had studied toxicology so that she could test the water in her creek. “Why isn’t the Post-Gazette here?” Mellon wondered. “This is a huge story.” When a Norfolk Southern freight train crashed in February 2023, dousing East Palestine in hazardous chemicals, the PUP was still figuring out whether it would be a strike bulletin or something more. But Mellon said, “Well, we’re a fucking newspaper, aren’t we?” and got in his car. He would come back weekly for more than two years, and today he’s one of the only journalists still embedded in East Palestine. “We were able to build that trust because we were able to commit to the story.”
Mellon and I continued our conversation on the steps of the church. It was an eerily quiet evening in Homestead, a town built to accommodate the 20,000 who inhabited it in the 1920s rather than the 2,885 who live there now. Before the Post-Gazette hired him in 1997, Mellon shot photos for a book on deindustrialized communities like this one. “The tectonic plates of the economy were shifting, and this is where they were grinding, right along the Mon Valley,” he said. “You had all these people going to the Rainbow Kitchen up here with their food bags . . . because they were laid off. And on the other side of the street, you had all these rusting steel mills.” Mellon kept covering Pittsburgh’s neglected outskirts for the Post-Gazette, but eventually the assignments dried up. It’s heartbreaking, Mellon said, to see these vital institutions collapse. “You combine the newspaper with all these other places that shifted, closed one way or another, and you see the town changes.”
Mellon and Batz watched the Post-Gazette conduct several rounds of buyouts and slowly reduce its print run to twice a week. Yet Batz “always felt it was kind of cool to be one of the last family-owned papers,” given the alternatives: incorporation into a chain, gutting by a hedge fund, or closure, the fate of roughly two American newspapers per week. Klinger grimaced when he recalled his prior experience organizing at the Tribune family under Alden Global Capital, a shadowy hedge fund known for buying up papers, hollowing them out, and squeezing the husks for profit. It was nearly impossible for him to track down Alden’s Florida-based owners, whereas you can knock on J. R.’s door and listen to his excuses or approach Allan at a rest stop and get hit with a Wendy’s bag. At least “the Blocks are around,” Klinger sighed—perhaps all too around.
For three decades, the Post-Gazette unions were willing to accept cutbacks so long as the bosses didn’t ask too much. The Blocks turned on their workers amid their rightward lurch, during which the paper barred a black reporter from covering Black Lives Matter and endorsed its first Republican presidential candidate since 1972: Donald Trump. J. R. remains enamored with the lifestyle of the gentleman publisher, but he has referred to Guild members as “malcontents” grieving “the fact that their mother didn’t love them when they were five.” Allan, who has overseen the business’s expansion into TV, cable, and other emerging sectors, seems as if he would be happy to shutter the Post-Gazette, in his view a “hard-left organ” and a charity case.
For workers, the upside of family owners is their willingness to absorb losses. The price is their ability to rule as mad kings. With the Blocks doubling down on their sovereignty and their margins, some strikers have begun to see the PUP as a model for a different kind of newsroom. “We’re all workers, and nobody owns the Union Progress,” Tanner said. Still, they are realistic about the PUP’s capacity to remake the media world and remain focused, above all, on winning back their jobs.
The Media Empire Strikes Back
One of the strike’s great puzzles is that, in theory, Pittsburgh and its news market are on an upswing. The city has undergone a much-heralded “rebirth,” replacing steel with health care and tech. And as Batz put it, Pittsburgh is “the opposite of a news desert,” with a healthy gaggle of independent outlets that share office space through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. If the Blocks wanted to, they could fully fund the Post-Gazette, which costs a company with roughly $1.1 billion in revenue around $15 million a year. Meeting the workers’ demands would certainly have been cheaper than replacing the strikers and retaining King and Ballow, the industry’s premier union-busting law firm since the newspaper wars of the 1990s, when it represented owners in the record-setting Detroit strike. After all, the union is asking only to reinstate the contract that expired in 2017; Batz estimates that the whole nasty affair could have been avoided for an annual total of $66,000. Plus, he said, “nobody wants to be on strike for two and a half years.” So why is this still happening?
Some workers blame their protracted struggle on the Blocks’ peculiarities and reactionary views. Outsiders might point to the fact that the remaining strikers are mostly under forty or over sixty—radical millennials accustomed to precarity and grizzled unionists fighting a last battle before retirement. But there’s also the grinding of the economy’s tectonic plates that Mellon heard three decades ago, rumbling beneath Pittsburgh once again.
An education reporter had been growing his hair and beard since the beginning of the strike, and what could be more natural than shaving it in the middle of the newsroom?
The city is no longer an emblem of the industrial order, as it was in the 1920s, or even of that order’s disintegration, as it was in the 1990s. Yet its reinvention reflects many of the contractions of twenty-first-century America’s service-led economy. As historian Gabriel Winant argues in his book The Next Shift, Pittsburgh’s new working class arose to manage the suffering of its old one, with nonunionized nurses in the city center caring for former union workers throughout the surrounding region, where most steel mills were located. In Pittsburgh proper, the poverty rate and population have stabilized, though neither indicator has shown absolute improvement. More than three-quarters of the area’s impoverished, however, live outside city limits, and Allegheny County’s population declined from 2020 to 2023. Tech hasn’t saved Pittsburgh, either. The jobs are too scarce, and those who take them are too often temporary residents, arriving alongside higher rents and tax breaks for their employers.
The rebirth narrative, while true for some, evidently rang hollow to the outlying counties that form Greater Pittsburgh, which followed similar jurisdictions across the country in swinging toward Trump in 2016 and 2024. The story of Pittsburgh media has parallel complications. As the economic and demographic gulf between cities and everywhere else—and between cities like New York and Pittsburgh—widens, virtually every newspaper that’s not called the New York Times is under pressure. Ad revenues aren’t coming back, and there was no meaningful “Trump bump” in subscriptions after the president’s second victory. Billionaire owners such as the Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos and the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong are pivoting rightward while cutting jobs and curtailing newsroom independence, just as the Blocks did in 2016. Standing in their way is an increasingly confrontational NewsGuild, fresh off an organizing spree that has added over 8,500 members and 120 shops.
Put together, these are the conditions for an unprecedented strike in Pittsburgh—and for future showdowns across regional markets where owners have gotten tired of their unions. They are also reminiscent of the forces that drove the Detroit papers and the Pittsburgh Press to the picket lines in the 1990s. Newspapers were profitable then, but not profitable enough for the oligopoly of publicly traded news chains that had emerged in the 1980s. Wall Street wanted more, and the companies delivered via acquisitions, budget cuts, and union-busting, the last of which was in high style after Ronald Reagan smashed the air traffic controllers’ union. According to the National Lawyers Guild, the Detroit papers’ parent companies believed that “if they could break the unions in a labor center such as Detroit, they would demonstrate the power to break unions anywhere in the country.” An executive at the Press’s chain mused that “Pittsburgh was never earning back for its shareholders a fair return on the dollar” because of “the stranglehold by the Teamsters.”
It is remarkable that the Post-Gazette has survived as a family-owned union paper. And the city’s crop of upstart outlets, the PUP included, is a welcome sign of Pittsburgh’s appetite for journalism. The harsh reality, however, is that Pittsburgh is among the major American cities that currently lack a daily paper, and the newcomers haven’t been able to sustain a large workforce. The Blocks have shown that family ownership is at best the lesser evil, yet the Post-Gazette may still be the only Pittsburgh institution capable of providing what the strikers, and some of their parents and grandparents, once enjoyed: a journalistic career in a city whose ongoing economic transformations have kept civic life on the brink for decades. “This is about our basic workplace rights and the existence of a union in the future,” Wimley said. “It’s a privately owned thing,” as Tanner acknowledged. “But how can we make the best out of that privately owned thing in this capitalistic world?”
Rank and Trial
I began writing this piece during a period of utter deadlock for the workers. The only news was bad news: the production unions had disbanded in mid-March, ending their strike in exchange for buyouts. That left the NewsGuild as the last union standing at the Post-Gazette. Then, suddenly, the journalists started winning. In the final months of the Biden administration, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed for a rare injunction that would effectively settle the strike by compelling the Post-Gazette to restore the expired contract. On March 24, the Third Circuit granted part of the injunction in an order that required the paper to come back to the table and reinstate the workers’ original health plan. The same court will soon rule on the NLRB’s full request, and failure to comply with its decision could lead to the Post-Gazette being held in contempt and charged escalating fines.
When I asked strikers how they imagined their first day back at work, I got a couple of concrete answers. An education reporter had been growing his hair and beard since the beginning of the strike, and what could be more natural than shaving it in the middle of the newsroom? Mostly, though, they found it almost too surreal to picture, perhaps because a court ruling would feel like a muted conclusion to their long struggle.
Such a win would be historic, but no reprieve. If the initial walkout had shut down the paper as the Press workers did in 1992, the strikers might not have needed to rely on the NLRB, a body that often acts tepidly and too late. The unit will have to confront these organizational weaknesses as it renegotiates its contract in a workplace down three unions and full of scabs. Should that lead to another strike, the journalists won’t be able to count on the NLRB, which Trump has deprived of a quorum; nor can they necessarily depend on the new Pittsburgh for solidarity, even as banners in the city center trumpet its traditional identity as a union town. Five thousand people came out to prevent the Press from printing in 1992, Blazina remembered. “We can’t get five hundred at a rally today.” One journalist told me that they’re afraid of ending up in the history books as the last gasp of New Deal labor law.
In retrospect, Tanner thinks that from 2017 onward, the Blocks’ goal was “to bust every union at the paper [and] make it a nonunion shop.” They might still succeed, and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop trying in an environment of political reaction and persistent deficits. If more owners follow suit, the only way to preserve a livelihood for reporters in the Rust Belt may be to refuse the demand that journalism make a profit—through either worker-run publications like the PUP or a public-funding regime that improves on those already passed in half a dozen states. Toward the end of the two-year Detroit newspaper strike, as workers considered returning under their old contract and then bargaining for a better one, a Free Press reporter pondered many of the same questions that the Post-Gazette union may soon have to confront. Winning the strike would be “a symbolic victory over corporate greed. But the corporate giants, even in defeat, would gird for the next battle,” he wrote in 1996. “Instead of merely fighting to get back our old jobs,” he continued, “we could be fighting to create our own jobs.”
Shortly after I came home from Pittsburgh, Klinger texted me. The court had rejected the company’s bid to appeal the injunction. It was a satisfying moment, one that inched the union closer to victory, with all its elation and uncertainty. The workers had been on strike for 925 days. Now they just needed to wait a little while longer.