Media Moves

Post-Gazette journalists go on strike

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalists walked off the job last week “in solidarity with non-news colleagues and in protest of working without a contract for five years.”

As per NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik:

“Well, you’re seeing these years of roiling tensions really just explode into the open. What’s interesting in some ways is that there’s anxieties about this, and that is that the newsroom did not vote overwhelmingly to do this. I believe it was a 38-to-36 vote, just north of 50-50. Some more members of the newsroom have decided to go on strike in the days since – just in the few days since it was declared. But it’s controversial, and I’ll tell you why.

“This was the first full newspaper strike in 21 years. The last strike was in Seattle, which was kind of a wash. It didn’t really work out well for ownership or for workers. And before that, the last strike was in Pittsburgh, three decades ago, the early 1990s, and that was seen as really the low point for the strength of unions in the newspapering business.

“And so you thought at that point – when I was a newspaper reporter and a member of a union back then, you thought, you know, this is really going to be the waning days of newspaper unions. But instead, you’ve seen this real distinct dynamic, particularly in the past five years, where newspaper unions and, for that matter, digital media unions have surged and soared.”

Read more here.

Mariam Ahmed

Recent Posts

Dow Jones plans to expand Middle East operations

Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch.com and Investor's…

33 mins ago

WSJ seeks a White House reporter

The Wall Street Journal is seeking a White House reporter in Washington, DC, to break…

41 mins ago

Politics editor Pershing leaving WSJ

Ben Pershing, the politics editor of The Wall Street Journal, is leaving the news organization.…

56 mins ago

NY Times taps Stevenson as DC bureau chief

New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn sent out the following on Friday: A January 2010 front…

1 hour ago

Dow Jones senior VP Jones is departing

Brent Jones, the senior vice president of training, culture and community at Dow Jones, is…

1 hour ago

WSJ seeks a logistic bureau chief

The Wall Street Journal is looking for an editor to lead its coverage of logistics…

13 hours ago