Columbia Journalism Review/Volume 2/Issue 1/Portland: a strike paper that lasts and lasts
Portland: a strike paper that lasts and lasts
By GENE KLARE
Gene Klare is on the staff of the Oregon Labor Press, a weekly publication in Portland. He has also worked on the Portland Reporter and the Oregonian, and was managing editor of the Boise Idaho Statesman and the Pocatello Journal.
In Portland, where the oldest of major newspaper strikes is in its fourth year, there have been notable changes in the alignment of the city's journalism. Portland's two older newspapers, which have not missed a day of publication, are now staffed entirely by non-union labor. They have also become a "combination" in the string owned by S. I. Newhouse.
The most noticeable development, though, has been the durability of the city's third newspaper, the Portland Reporter, founded by unions as a strike giveaway and now in its third year of daily publication on a commercial—but unprofitable—basis.
By the sheer fact that it still exists, the Reporter already has proved many prophets wrong. But the Reporter's books are still deeply red. Revenue has fallen short of expenses in two years by $840,000, with this operating deficit only partly offset by $630,000 in stock sales. Moreover, the deficit does not reflect the fact that nearly half of the paper's 283 employees work for weekly benefit checks paid by the printers' and stereotypers' unions.
The publisher, Robert D. Webb, has estimated at a million and a quarter dollars the amount of stock sale needed to change the color of the ink. Meanwhile, he sees progress—a 30 per cent gain in advertising—and an 8,000 rise in circulation in 1962 to 60,000, third among the state's dailies. The combined circulation of the Reporter's two competitors stands at 339,000 (or 90,000 below their pre-strike level). The Reporter has approximately half the circulation of its direct competitor, the afternoon Oregon Journal, but the difference is less in Portland proper because a good share of Journal circulation is in other parts of the state.
The Reporter first appeared as a weekly in February, 1960, offered by the unions because they were asking the public to cancel subscriptions to the struck newspapers. The strikers intended to discontinue the paper on settlement of the dispute.
The strike started in November, 1959, when stereotypers struck the two established dailies. At first, the Oregonian and Journal, using employees and executives not covered by union contracts, as well as imported non-union labor, printed combined editions. This went on for five months before they had enough trained personnel to separate. They were re-combined, corporately, in August, 1961, when Newhouse, the Oregonian's owner since 1950, bought the Journal, which was subsequently moved into the Oregonian building.
But within five months after its birth, the Reporter began girding for transition to daily publication. Eighty local unions outside the printing trades formed a company that purchased and remodeled an old Wells-Fargo livery stable and warehouse in the city's truck terminal district. The International Typographical Union, once a frequent godfather of strike papers, freighted a dormant newspaper plant from Miami to Portland. Other newspaper unions supplied equipment not included in the ITU package. The Reporter later paid for the transportation, installation, and leasing of this equipment in shares of stock.
The ITU decided several years ago against financing any more newspapers. Hence its participation in the Reporter is limited to allowing members on union benefits to work there with no additional salary. About 40 per cent of the members who lost their jobs in the strike work at the Reporter. The group includes thirty-seven newsmen the ITU took under its wing when the American Newspaper Guild cut off their strike benefits.
Another view of Portland
Three years have passed but the feelings of some participants still run high. The strike is still officially on and union workers still subscribing to the struck newspapers are "sowing the seeds for what could be a bitter harvest," according to a recent Portland Inter-Union Newspaper Committee leaflet. It notes the publishers "would like to see Portland become an open-shop city where workers are forced to scrabble along without the economic benefits and security of union contracts."
But the ordinary public couldn't care less. Today the Oregonian and the Oregon Journal are about as fat as ever, showing no visible effects of the strike. "The strike ended three years ago," comments one local resident....
Eliminating featherbedding, plus consolidating the two dailies, has cut "about 30%" of the pre-strike mechanical room manpower, according to square-jawed M. J. Frey, president of the Oregonian Publishing Co.
"Some newspaper unions want to be like the railway brotherhoods—freeze progress," charges one publisher spokesman. However, a news- paper union leader denies newspaper unions oppose automation and doubts the accuracy of the employer estimate on eliminating featherbedding.
However that may be, the success of continued non-union publication has been a major worry to the unions. Leaders feared the "Portland pattern," as it was called, might spread around the country. In fact, about two years later, the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Journal successfully published 27 days without interruption when around 300 union workers of its 1,500 employes stayed off the job during a strike. However, no non-union outside employes were brought in. The union men went back to their jobs...
Tempers and violence flared in the early days of the Portland strike on both sides of the picket line. Name-calling and fisticuffs ensued on several occasions. The climax came with the dynamiting one night of 10 parked trucks under contract for delivering the Oregonian. Subsequently, a former stereotyper union employe was convicted in connection with the truck dynamiting.
Even though both sides decried the use of violence, some citizens inevitably associated the single union man's explosive act with unionism itself. One Portlander sympathetic to the union cause recalls, "I didn't like reading about dynamited trucks."The Reporter obtained stock registration in 1960 from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The offering was labeled a "speculation." The sale, at $10 a share, began on November 4, 1960. Since, more than 8,300 individuals and organizations have responded. Stockholders can be found in all states and in seven foreign countries, but a majority is held in Oregon. Ownership has also become, as The Wall Street Journal puts it, "a national cause among liberals."
Stockholders include such names as Hubert Humphrey, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the late Mrs. Roosevelt. About 25 per cent is owned by unions. The biggest individual share is owned by Mrs. Marshall Field, the widow of the founder of an earlier innovation, the Chicago Sun.
The Reporter has learned that its lineage can affect linage. The paper must work hard to convince the business community that it is a permanent commercial entity and that it speaks with a voice independent of its parentage. Gradually it is chipping away at what appears to have been a business boycott, or at least a deep reluctance to advertise. Accounts now number more than 500 in display and more than 400 in classified. Only about ten major local advertisers eschew the Reporter.
Politically, the Reporter leans toward the Democrats. Still, it has not always supported a straight ticket. In 1962, it endorsed two Republican candidates for county commissioner, both of whom won. (Organized labor opposed both.) One of the Republicans conducted a vigorous campaign highlighted by disclosures of irregularities and cronyism in the county administration. This earned him the censure of the two Newhouse papers.
The Reporter editorial page is most often concerned about such issues as public power, civil rights, natural resources, and consumer interests. A study in 1961 of world peace through law won an award from the state's bar association. The paper is an enthusiastic booster of community projects. It has an editorial advisory board, composed of representatives from education, business, agriculture, labor, science, and the clergy.
The publisher, Webb, recently observed that the Reporter seems to be gaining support among Republican executives and Democratic intellectuals, but is not getting enough circulation among union members. He quoted a taxi driver's explanation: "The Reporter's comics aren't as good as the other papers'."
Comics aside, a reader finds the tabloid lively and a little untidy, but enterprising in its coverage of local events. In trying to live up to its masthead principle ("The vision to see; the conscience to reason; the courage to speak"), the Reporter devotes much effort and space to articles on local governmental and social problems. Its disclosures resulted in the resignation and indictment of one county official (who died before coming to trial), and it helped expose questionable health-insurance businesses. The Reporter also likes to think its sniping helped another county official make up his mind not to seek re-election.
In its occasional forays into investigative reporting, the Reporter treads ground generally unexplored by the two other papers in recent years. The Oregonian, which once did an outstanding job of bringing bright light to dark corners, has seemed a bit shy ever since its Pulitzer Prize-winning exposures of seven years ago were dimmed by ineffective prosecution.
Right Type of Merger Welcome
Every Portland citizen who uses electricity should realize that Portland General Electric is in a position to be a remarkably efficient distributor of electricity because it serves a fairly compact area and has a concentration of customers.. In contrast, Pacific Power & Light is already sprawled over six states and is reaching for more territory.
Because they have compact territories of big and diversified customers, the cities of Seattle and Tacoma are able to provide electricity for more than 25 per cent less than we pay in Portland. In contrast to the upward trend in Portland rates, those of Tacoma and Seattle are headed down.
It is heavily concentrated Portland General Electric and not spread out Pacific Power & Light which is in the better position to reduce the gap between Puget Sound and Portland power rates.
Pacific Power & Light has talked about economies prior to every previous merger. Yet it has not granted a subsequent rate cut except where it faces competition of public power districts or to discourage the creation of public power districts. The most recent example is the rate decrease PP&L has just proposed for southwest Oregon and which utilities commissioner Jonel C. Hill approved, without hearings to determine
Editorial of March 4 combines typical Reporter interests: consumers, electric power
Over-all, the quality and scope of the Reporter's local coverage seems as good if not better than that of the Oregonian, while the latter supplies a more comprehensive picture of the world outside Portland. The Journal's greatest attractions are a gossipy local column and a sprightly sports section.
On a day of no special importance this year, the Reporter in 40 tabloid pages squeezed in 937 column inches (excluding headlines) of staff-originated material (including legislative news, pictures, and sports and women's pages). On the same day the Journal carried 1,108 inches of such matter in 28 standard pages and the Oregonian had 971 inches in 50 standard pages. The Oregonian outdistanced the other two in the quantity of its regional, national, and international report.
The Reporter's news-content shortcomings begin with an under-sized staff. Other deficiencies result from its occasionally overlooking the obvious and its failure to exercise enterprise and investigative techniques. An example of overlooking the obvious came in January when weather commanded the public's interest for nearly a week. On the first day of the area's worst snowstorm in years, the Reporter mentioned it only in five paragraphs on the back page. Like other papers, it sometimes has difficulty recognizing a story until it sees it in the opposition's pages.
Meager space is given national and international affairs, but this situation can be expected to improve if the paper's size increases. Another criticism: Sports, features, and women's news at times get disproportionate space at the expense of general news.
A cadre of veterans from the pre-strike newsrooms of the Oregonian and Journal forms the nucleus of the Reporter's small staff. From time to time the paper loses one of its old hands when personal financial problems prove too severe for subsistence-level pay. (The publisher works for the $79 a week that others on union benefits receive.) But the paper has attracted a number of young newsmen who are willing to work at a sacrifice, and a number of oldtimers who no longer have growing families.
The Reporter is directed by veteran Portlanders. Webb was on the Oregonian for twenty-four years. The editor, Llewellyn M. Gardiner, who attended Portland's Reed College with Webb, worked at the Oregonian for sixteen years. Lynn Wykoff, the Reporter's managing editor, was an Oregonian staffer for twenty-four years. The Reporter reached outside the union family for its advertising director and circulation manager, who are former executives in those departments on the other two papers. The Reporter's city editor was previously the Journal's night editor.
The other papers have had to replace these men—and others. The strike has hit hardest the Oregonian, in pre-strike years one of the best newspapers in the country. There was an overnight disintegration of a distinguished staff when many of its Guild members did not cross the stereotypers' picket line. (Only about half of the Guild members eventually returned to their jobs.) The list of those who left is studded with names that literally made the news in Portland: Wallace Turner and William Lambert, Pulitzer Prize winners and Nieman Fellows, are now with The New York Times and Time, respectively, in California bureaus. Robert A. Lee, one of Portland's top news editor, is with The New York Times Western Edition. He was the Reporter's publisher in its first month.
Some left the newsroom for other pursuits. A former Nieman Fellow is now a college public-relations man; an outstanding city desk man is an executive with a municipal agency; a prize-winning education editor teaches journalism, and one of the city's most promising young reporters has become a public-information aide in Washington.
The loss has not been just in personnel. Discerning readers note a seeming decline of vitality in the two older dailies. And the strike seems to have given the Oregonian and Journal a compulsive anti-union attitude—all the more apparent because the two papers had been notably fair in their coverage of labor news.
Partisans of the Reporter, who are keenly aware that it keeps Portland from having an entirely absentee-owned press, see in the young and independent newspaper a hope of restoring the former energies of the city's journalism. But the Reporter has many bread-and-butter problems of survival to solve before it can become a beacon of excellence.