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
