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The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are going back to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Steel City for another important and urgent update on the over three-year strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the infuriating aftermath that has played out ever since striking members of the Pittsburgh Newspaper Guild returned to work at the Post Gazette in late November. Now, if you guys remember, the strike began all the way back on October 18th of 2022, and we have been covering it since year one here on the show, over at the Real News.

I mean, I interviewed strikers for my art of class war segment back when I was still at Breaking Points. And we also interviewed some of those workers here on the show back in December of last year. And we talked about what it was like to finally return to work after three years on strike. What issues were still unsettled at that point with the Post Gazette and what possible outcomes were still on the table. Then we did another update episode with Steve Mellon in February of this year. After workers were notified that the paper’s rich owners, the Block family and Block Communications Incorporated, the company that owned the Post Gazette and also owns the Toledo Blade, the Buckeye Sports Network, and a number of TV stations in Ohio and Kentucky were shutting down the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, a paper whose roots go all the way back to 1786.

And at that point, we didn’t know if the paper was going to just close completely or if it was going to get bought out. And then we found out in April that the Venetolas Institute, which owns the Baltimore banner right here where we are, about two blocks from where I’m sitting, was going to buy out the Post Gazette and take over the publication, which was set to cease operations at the beginning of May. And then on May 1st, International Workers’ Day, the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh posted a statement with the headline, “Incoming Post-Gazette ownership/his staff purges former strikers.” And it reads in part, quote, “The incoming ownership of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the Venatullas Institute for local journalism is beginning its stewardship of the paper by cutting at least 40% of its staff and 80% of former strikers.” Venetulas chose to get rid of all but one of the seven guild officers working at the Post Gazette, including multiple members of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting.

And with one exception, every single journalist whose work regularly appeared in the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh strike publication, the Pittsburgh Union progress. And just as a little editorial edition from me, the Pittsburgh Union progress is also an award-winning strike paper. And I know that because I won an Izzy Award with Pittsburgh Union progress author, contributor, photographer, Steve Mellon. But we’re not going to talk about that right now. We’re going to talk about what the hell is actually going on here, what comes next and what you listening can do to help. And I’m really grateful to be joined or rejoined on the show today by three guests. First, we’re joined by Andrew Goldstein, a now former Post-Gazette education reporter and still acting president of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. And we’re also joined by Helen Fallon, who was a longtime copy editor for the Post Gazette and Professor Emerita at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.

And we are joined also by Aaron Hebert, a now former copy editor and designer for the Post Gazette and the first vice president of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. Goldie, Helen, Aaron, thank you all so much for joining me today. And I’m so goddamn sorry this is all happening. And I want to ask if we could go around the table and just have you each walk listeners through your own accounts of what has happened since our last episode and what it’s meant to you and in your lives to experience these events as they’ve unfolded in real time.

Andrew Goldstein:

Sure thing, Max, and thank you for having us on the show today. So I believe we’re going to pick up the story from February when, as you said, the former owners of the newspaper, the Block family, were intending to shut the paper down with the last day of publication being on May 3rd. At that point in time, and for really several months after that, we heard a lot of rumors, but very little definitive about a potential buyer, about what could happen with the Post-Gazette. I don’t think I have to explain to you that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is one of the oldest newspapers in the country. It is the paper of record for Pittsburgh. And it really, in addition to being historically a very strong journalism outlet, is also a Pittsburgh institution. I look at the Post-Gazette banner and I think about other type of institutions we have here in the city like Hines or the Steelers or other entities like that.

I mean, it’s part of the fabric of Pittsburgh. So we were all upset, of course, to hear that the Post-Gazette might be closing. And what we did as soon as we heard that they were going to be shutting the paper down was we got to work to try to do a couple of different things. One of those ideas was to try to find some new ownership. And as The Guild, I know that we had tried to bring different groups of people together in order to maybe figure out a way to buy the paper and keep it at least together as much as we could. And then we also, of course, decided to start an exploratory group, which we of course call PAPER, which is the Pittsburgh Alliance for People and Powered Reporting. And I’ll talk more about that soon, but we got to the point where as the days started rolling by and the months and the weeks were in single digits until the closure, we weren’t sure what was going to happen.

There were a lot of people who were sticking around with their fingers crossed hoping for a buyer, but we really didn’t hear anything except for rumors until early April. It was about, I want to say a week, maybe two weeks into April when finally we all were called into the Post-Gazette, I hesitate to call it a newsroom, but the current office of the Post-Gazette and were told that Venatolis Institute was going to buy the paper. And so of course the immediate reaction was we were all very excited. We know that the Baltimore Banner journalistically has a really good reputation, and so we were excited to try to find out more details.

We talked about being cautiously optimistic because pretty early on we were hearing that job cuts were coming, which wasn’t necessarily a surprise, but we heard rumors to kind of what we’re seeing now as reality, maybe 40 or 50% of the newsrooms slashed. And that’s just terrible. I think if you look at any newsroom in the country, you can ask any journalist and they’ll say, “Yeah, we feel like our newsroom is understaffed.” And I certainly felt that way even with the Post Gazette, once the strikers returned, there was still news that I’m sure we wanted to cover that we just couldn’t get to. So now that it’s come to this, I’m really concerned what the future of journalism is going to look like in Pittsburgh, not just because of the Post Gazette. I mean, Pittsburgh is certainly not a news desert by any stretch. We have a lot of really good news outlets, luckily.

However, the Post Gazette is kind of like that leading beacon. A lot of reporting that goes on on TV and on the radio is taken directly from the newspaper. So things have been chaotic. We got very little information even after the notice of the sale from Ventulis. Maybe I can let Aaron and Helen pick up the story a little bit more specifically on how that went in the weeks after the announcement. But generally speaking, it was a roller coaster ride all the way until the announcement. And then yet again, there was still more uncertainty and chaos even as we got up until the final days here last week.

Erin Hebert:

Yeah. What Goldie said was absolutely correct. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the last four months really beyond that have felt like being in a hostage situation. I mean, we were not given any details of anything. We were hearing through the grapevine through rumors, I mean, as in being out and about in the city, because Pittsburgh is a big small town, people coming up to us, talking to us saying, “Oh, we hear there’s a buyer. We hear there’s a buyer.” This happened probably four times that a buyer was apparently imminently going to be announced and then it just never materialized. So really in that situation and after being on strike for three years, we’ve learned how to respond to situations of crisis like this very quickly. We’ve become incredibly resilient and we knew that we would not be able to rely on the Block family or on the management structure at the Postgazette right now on doing the right thing when it came to the guild.

We knew that we had to do something proactive. And from the beginning, we were exploring every option we could. And even after the announcement of the sale and who the buyer was, which happened on April 14th, I believe, we didn’t know, but then we had to hold both of these possibilities in tandem at the same time and put our best foot forward with Venatullas and make sure that we recognized that this was an opportunity for a new start, that this was a possibility for us to truly reorganize the post-cazette unit, which had obviously been split in very real ways, significant ways from the strike and from things that happened before the strike. So it’s just been really disappointing in how it played out. That’s the biggest feeling because we were, despite the caution and the skepticism that we knew we needed to maintain because we’re journalists, how could you not expect us to question this person coming in, this nonprofit coming in and claiming to save us in a city that they knew nothing about?

So it’s upsetting. It’s frustrating to know that they kept 80% of the people who publicly disavowed our union’s leadership while simultaneously cutting 80% of the people who were on strike for three years, including Goldie and I and Helen and people who have just dedicated decades to this newspaper and to the city and who understand it in a way that a lot of the people who were hired during the strike or even people who were there just really don’t understand. And it’s sad. It’s sad what’s happened to it. And I hope that the city doesn’t suffer for it and that the media ecosystem in Pittsburgh doesn’t suffer for it. And I think that’s what we’re working on right now with paper. We’re trying to find solutions and be productive and constructive and build from the ashes of what we’ve done and what we’ve fought for. There’s a lot of mixed emotions going on right now in the unit, I would say.

Helen Fallon:

This would’ve been my 39th year working part-time for the Post Gazette, which just astonished me when I sat back and thought about it. And I’ve known every generation of Block from Mr. Block, as we called him, to the current twins who basically led to this demise. The strike particularly, we believe Alan Block and not J.R. Block, even though he holds as much culpability as the rest of the family. And just to explain my role, I was a full-time professor of journalism at Point Park, and I had the opportunity to work at the Post Cassette for a summer, one month in the summer when they brought back professors into real world journalism for a month. And I was kept because I had a prior journalistic background. I had worked at a lot of smaller newspapers and even PR firms, always did a lot of writing and in the editing.

And I’ve always been, first I was an illegal one day a week employee, and then the union let me become a legal part-time one day. You had to work two days, but I couldn’t figure that out. And I’ve worked in that newsroom from when we were almost 300 people to where we were before the strike to what’s happened now. And I’ve taught journalism, I’ve lived it, I’ve breathed it, I’m passionate about journalism. I’m very active in local journalistic professional organizations. I belong to the Pennsylvania News Media Foundation Board. I’ve just done a lot of statewide journalism things belong to national organizations. So I kind of have had a different perspective and people would say, “Why in the world do you want to work another job in addition to teaching?” Well, it’s because it was with place I always wanted to work and I got my postcard rejection right after college, like so many other people, but it was just a way, and I was mentored by some fabulous people that led me there as well.

It wasn’t just my own abilities. But the Post Gazette, we were once the very scrappy newspaper in town, the Pittsburgh Press, which was at its demise, was the Beamath in the town. And I sat in the newsroom the day, Mr. Block announced that we had bought the press and it was just unbelievable, just unbelievable. Just like this situation now is unbelievable on how we’ve gone through generations of the Block family who besmirched, I believe, the legacy of their grandfather and great-grandfather when you take a look at all of this. And we do understand the monetary pressures too, but there’s taking care of your business, but you also have to take care of your employees and they have decided not to do that. There were so many purges in a way with buyouts in different ways, and the union had gave back so much. One story, Max, is kind of funny.

Once we bought the press and we hired just some of the press people and we realized we couldn’t run the paper with so few people, we hired more and then we were a million dollars in the hole. So what union members and other people did from the press, people took leaves. I came back for a whole month one time because they were so short of people. I mean, everyone kind of pieced together because that’s the way the union and management worked back there in the ’90s and before that. And now you fast forward now to what’s happened and I’m shocked but not shocked because of the way this happened. And you can blame the Venetulas Institute, but I think a lot of this blame schly squarely with the block, the BCI board, and I think they dictate to their managers who still are, they’re worried about their own jobs.

So how they picked people, we’ll never know the total truth here. I would love to get someone to the side to tell us the truth. My one day a week salary, I’m sure would break the bank. We have two copy editors, I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, anyone, to do all this work. I worked my last shift on Friday and I worked from the time I turned on my computer that I have to give them back because they gave me one to work from home until I left and I did advanced copy all through the week. That’s the way we work and that’s the way we wanted to continue working. And it troubles me greatly. Just another thing you should know about me, I was a department chair and an acting dean and an honors program director. So I’ve managed people and I’ve supervised people.

I got along very well with my immediate supervisor. I knew him from the day he walked into the door and we had small discussions. They’re not allowed to talk. It’s just a situation where if the union, the current employees, management and the new management coming in would’ve worked together, we wouldn’t be talking about this today. There would’ve been a more equitable distribution of the beginning initial jobs. They keep telling us, and I think they already know they need more people. That happened at the Baltimore banner now, the banner. I just read today they’re moving into Prince George’s County too and expanding. So where’s the money going? Why can’t they do this here? And this was such a rush job. I think there’s just a lot of mistakes. And I think they’ve made an egregious mistake. We were just covered again yesterday on all the local news channels.

CGAR just came out with a story today. I mean, this couldn’t have been handled more poorly and it just troubles me as someone who’s been in this business for a long time.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it troubles me as well. And I don’t feel like I’ve been in it that long, but it’s funny when I talk to journalism students today, they look at me like I’m some dinosaur writer who’s been around for forever, just because I can remember the first Trump administration. But when talking to a legend like yourself with so much history in your own story, so much that you have firsthand witnessed, in such a pivotal moment in history when we’re talking about Pittsburgh and how much it’s changed over the course of your career from when you started in journalism to now, the United States of America and how much it’s changed over that time, the society writ large, the digital revolution and all that. So there’s so much I wish that I could just sit down and talk to you about in a longer format. And I may just have to do that.

I may be coming to bug you later, but I say that all to say in the spirit of just really wanting to know more and learn more from you, as we’re talking about this heartbreaking end to a valiant struggle by you all at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Helen, I just wanted to ask, if you could sit down at a table with your first day of work in journalism self, what would you, I guess, try to communicate about how much is going to change in the industry or what do you think she would communicate to you about what we most need to continue fighting for less we lose it completely?

Helen Fallon:

Well, after I got that postcard rejection, my first job was at the Daily Notes in Cannonsburg, a little teeny tiny town in Pennsylvania where I made $95 a week. And the funny story always was when I became a PG employee, fast forward a couple other iterations. I did my second job, third job, somewhere around there, I was making $150 a week. And I went from being on strike at that paper, which is another long story in itself. When I came back and I signed the dues checkoff form, the then president of our guild, the late great Harry Tech said, “You realize, Helen, you’re making as much in one day as you made all week with the Valley Independent.” And that was a union paper. I got overtime. We’d always work six day weeks so that we made a decent salary. And why do we do that?

And I tell students this all the time, we’re so important. Journalists are so important. The world we’re living in right now, good Lord, the Pulitzers were just announced and it’s wonderful to win those prizes. I don’t know if people are reading those right now, the ones we want to know what is really true. We record that first draft of history and it’s so needed, but you also have to understand how much work it is. And I didn’t understand that as a young person. It would take me hours to write a story or do a layout. I used to have to hang those stupid AP tapes where we ran them through the computer. I hated doing that. I mean, I became a copy editor, which greatly enhanced my writing. And I wrote with my students as Goldie will attest, took them everywhere. We did a lot of things.

We worked with a post because that on a number of issues. I used to bring my students over there, people would come to my classroom because I always wanted to instill in people how important this was. So my young self would say now, why the world would you go on strike two times in your life? And did you really want to end your career this way? Well, I went on strike because I’ll never cross a picket line for anything. And I believed in all these younger people. I went from being one of the youngest strikers, my first strike, which was lasted 14 months to being the oldest striker by a few months. But it’s just that I also ended up working for the Pittsburgh Union progress and writing stories like I was a kid again. And what it taught me, Max, was how important, how hard this work is, but how great the work is.

And I’m sure Erin and Andrew would agree with me, I was still getting emails from people who were so thrilled that someone bought the Post Gazette and we could go back to work because we did such good work. And now they’re writing to me saying, “I can’t believe this happened to you all. ” Why would an institute, a nonprofit who wants to save local journalism do this? And I don’t have a good answer for any of it, but I’ve watched vindictiveness after our last track. I remember we came in, we had a clock in and out of a time machine like all the other people the first time around. And I was kind of like an ethema to everybody. I couldn’t get a job at another newspaper because I was labeled. And it’s just, I hate the fact that unions have been so denigrated in every profession, not just ours, but people, I hate the adage, you should be happy you have a job.

We should be happy we have careers and we should be well taken care of and have the right benefits so we can live our lives. And we have to tell that story, not just for us, but for everyone. So I still think, Max, our job is important. I just don’t think that these companies, and we understand economics, they are not going to be able to cover the city of Pittsburgh the way we did before, even with our reduced newsroom. Getting rid of arts and entertainment, we’re a cultural gem here in Pittsburgh. High school sports, that’s the life of every community here and helping those kids get recognition so they can go on to college and do things. It’s mind-blowing. Even the opinion section where I was laboring on Friday and I was reading these op-ed pieces that some of them were just so heartfelt and so good.

It’s where are those voices going to go? I’m really concerned and more concerned than I’ve ever been. And I’m hating to see this happen in front of my eyes and involving me in Pittsburgh. I hope that answers your question.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh, it does. I really appreciate it. And like I said, I have so many follow-ups, but we’ll have to save them for another time where we can really stretch our legs.

Helen Fallon:

You taught me anytime. We’ll talk even off camera. It’d be a fun thing to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Yeah. I will absolutely take you up on that. And I could talk to all of you for another two hours about this, but I know we don’t have that long. So I wanted to kind of build on that question of what’s going to happen now, both at the former Pittsburgh Post Gazette, whatever it’s going to end up being under the Venetolas Institute, what happens now to the former strikers who are still working there, everyone else who’s getting laid off. And I also wanted to just sort of like throw in a little bit about what I see here in Baltimore as a neighbor to the Baltimore banner. And as someone who now lives in a city that like so many around America has experienced not only economic declines like social and political disinvestment, we’ve been losing population for like decades and decades. And in that case, Baltimore is a little more special, but it’s a city that’s gone through a lot of hard times and it still continues to struggle and it deserves so much better than what it has been getting in terms of the journalism and media organizations that are still around.

There are a number of us in the independent sphere who are doing our best, but you got like Sinclair and like buying up everything, including like the owning stake in the Baltimore Sun. So you get the Baltimore Banner here at a moment where a city really didn’t have its own answer for like how to cover these stories. And it did feel like a godsend in a lot of ways. I think Baltimoreans are very understandably skeptical and mistrustful of outsiders, so there was a lot of that. But they’ve been able to, because of the money that they have, buy an insanely expensive building right there on the waterfront in the inner harbor. They’ve been able to hire tons and tons of people and throw them at beats that other outlets can’t because there’s sort of a Silicon Valley model there where it’s like you can outspend your competitors without figuring out how to make a profit.

And that is the sort of model that I’ve been seeing work to some extent here. I mean, yeah, it’s getting them nominated for Pulitzers. It’s giving opportunities to a lot of young journalists. But I think what it tells me about what we may expect in Pittsburgh is that sort of model is like getting rid of the institutional knowledge and local knowledge that literally lives in people like you three and your colleagues and your knowledge of the industry, your knowledge of the city, your experience with it. And instead, we’re going to get an influx of, I expect younger, non-native or less experienced journalists who, of course, we don’t hate them. We want all journalists to thrive, but these owners are probably going to replace the Pittsburgh locals with that kind of model. And they, I don’t want to editorialize, but why does any boss not want to have a union?

So they can fire people whenever the hell they want so they can make changes whenever the hell they want without ever having to ask their workers what they think so they can have total top down untilateral control.

And then I think also the last thing I’ll say is that I’ve been inside the Banners offices. I’ve met a lot of great people there, but I’ve also seen the sort of very metrics focused way that they’re tracking every single story and that they’re diverting resources to stories that get the most traffic. So there’s a sort of machine at work in there, and that doesn’t mean that good people can’t do good work within it, many of whom I’ve actually met, but the model itself, as we’re discussing here, there’s so much is lost even though the institution and the building of the Post Gazette may be saved. So I want to shut up and bring y’all back in here to sort of like help us flesh that out. First, talk about what the heck is going to happen to the workers, but then if you could just pick up on that, Helen’s got me thinking here in all these big historical terms, but please just help flesh that out for folks about what Pittsburgh would be losing if it continues to lose folks like you three and even if a place like the Venetolas Institute ends up bringing in this new model.

Andrew Goldstein:

The Ventulist Institute did recognize the union right now just because of the circumstances, we have five dues paying members who were offered jobs there and who are going to continue to work there. And we also represent the rest of the newsroom, a lot of the people in the newsroom as our bargaining unit members as well, who of course crossed our picket line during the strike and we’re doing a bargaining unit members jobs, but it is still our job to represent them. So the post-cassette unit of the newspaper guild of Pittsburgh is going to continue. Obviously, there’s going to be a lot to figure out, but we are in contact with the Ventulas Institute attorney companies and we fully intend to do contract bargaining with them and we’re going to try to do the best job we possibly can because at the end of the day, as really awful as this whole situation has been and as many hard feelings as there are, I feel very strongly like the reason we do this work is because we believe people should have quality working conditions and be able to work with respect and dignity in their workplaces.

So that is kind of what’s going to happen next in terms of the post-Gazette. Obviously there’s a lot to sort out there still, but I’m not giving up on it. After fighting for so long, I’m not giving up on it. Now, in terms of the institutional knowledge you mentioned, yeah, it’s a terrible loss. I don’t think that you can work at a place like the Post Gazette for as long as any of us have and ignore the fact that what makes it so great is not the names, not the owners, it’s the people who work there. It always has been. And a lot of us are Pittsburghers. Speaking for myself, and I don’t want to make this about myself, but I mean, I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. I went to the Pittsburgh Public Schools and now I never would have imagined, here we go years later, I was covering the Pittsburgh public schools.

It was like a dream come true and being able to work with people like Helen and so many other wonderful journalists who I read growing up, the Post because I was in my house every morning. And it’s really kind of the only place I ever wanted to work because when you’re in Pittsburgh, the Post because that is that beacon, it’s our New York Times. It was my New York Times, that’s for sure. How you describe Baltimore, Pittsburgh’s very similar. We don’t trust outsiders necessarily, certainly right away. I think trust is something you earn, but we’re a city again for decades, centuries really, that time and time again has been hurt. The working people of the city have been taken advantage of over and over again from people as far back, the Carnegies and the Fricks of the world and all the way up to the blocks.

And we have UPMC now, the big medical center that is just such a horrific union busting operation. We could talk about a lot as well. So you just see this fight continuing over and over and it’s hard to sustain. I know because the past three years have been exhausting. I mean, it’s not just about us, it’s about the story of Pittsburgh itself. We are part of it, of course, but when you lose high school sports writers who have such a great knowledge of the kids here who end up going pro, I mean, where are you going to find their backstories? You have so many places, so many beats from the arts to sports to news, where when you lose that institutional knowledge, there is so much history here, you just can’t get that back. Even by reading and researching as much as you want, when you have that institutional knowledge, there’s just nothing that compares to it.

So it’s really unfortunate to lose that, whether it was through the four or five buyouts that I’ve been through at the Post-Gazette where we’ve lost dozens of great journalists or the situation here. Now, I do want to mention, of course, we are going to try to recoup some of that institutional knowledge and legacy as we move forward with the Pittsburgh Alliance for People Empowered Reporting, and we are in the throes of business development right now. There’s still no guarantees, and we understand that it’s very hard to create a sustainable journalistic model of any kind. That is the goal. We may start out small, but we definitely want to make sure that we haven’t spent the last three or four years in vain here and can actually make something good out of it. And I know we can because I’ve seen the group that we had on strike do the impossible.

I mean, our backs were against the wall. No one expected us to win this strike, no one in the world. And we just kept on fighting and plugging away and stuck with it, and we did. Unfortunately, it’s led us here, but we’re going to keep fighting now.

Erin Hebert:

I’m going to start off my answer to this with a little anecdote from, I believe my first day in the Postgazette newsroom when I was hired as a two-year associate, which I believe Andrew was also in that position for his first two years at the Postgazette. And I was hired on the copy desk on the night shift and I was sitting … My first desk was right across from a veteran post-cazette copy editor named Steve Siebert. And various managers and reporters had arrived at my desk. I was 23 years old. This was my first professional newsroom job. I had worked at a remote editing center for the New York Times before that as my first job out of college. And not being from Pittsburgh, being from South Louisiana, knowing really nothing about this region before I got the job here, other than that, it was a place where I wouldn’t need to have a car as a young person and where I knew I could have a decent life.

I asked who Mario Lemieux was. And when I say that Steve Steibert, I have never seen anyone more incensed. He wasn’t rude. He wasn’t aggressive toward me, but what do you mean who’s Mario Lemieux? So I learned very quickly that Pittsburghers love their city, they love their culture, and you better respect it and you better learn it if you’re going to fit in here. And I think my response to that newsroom and this city welcoming me as an outsider was to respect that and to understand the labor history. I immediately, as somebody from Louisiana where either your unionism is hid from you entirely, or if you hear about it, it’s completely disparaged. I recognized as somebody who graduated from journalism school into an extremely uncertain market when Donald Trump had just declared his candidacy for president, that our union was the answer, that these protections were what would enable me to stay in one place, which was not the norm and hasn’t been the norm for a while for young journalists to make a living.

It’s just not possible. You tend to have to bounce around. So knowing that I had the possibility of that sense of financial security, which I had never, ever had before, as a working class rural person who grew up in a very isolated part of Cajun country and Louisiana, I recognized that power and I recognized how much something like unionism, like the labor movement in general, would have just changed the lives and the livelihoods of so many people that I knew. So I think ultimately I’m hopeful that some people in the city are going to be able to unite and maintain that institutional knowledge. And really the heart of what the Post Pzet has been for decades, which is people who are rooted here and people who know each other. It’s a big small town. And if you come in and you say, “We’re not going to respect any of this place’s history.

We’re not going to respect the history of the place that is literally called the cradle of the American Labor Movement, what do you expect us to do, but call you out? ” So I hope that things work out and that they’re able to save the institutional knowledge that they have, but it’s just such a, again, a disappointment just doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Helen Fallon:

I was thinking about this and when you told that little story, I always remember when I was first at the PG and I had a work at night copy desk and there were many more. I was like the sole woman there with all these guys and they were all, most of them were very nice to me, a couple characters, but someone had turned in a business story. It was actually someone I got to be very, very good friends with. And that’s when there were tons of banks and it was the first this, the first national first, federal first this, blah, blah, blah. And when the copy editorist kind of said, “You know what? Where’s a phone book? I’m going to look it up.” She said the wrong bank name and he saved her butt on a page one story that would’ve been very, very embarrassing by looking something up in the phone book, which we can now do very easily.

And you didn’t fault the reporter. It was something that was done on deadline, it was a mistake. And you think about that, what you need to always have in any working environment to make it work better is you have people with knowledge and then new people who bring in their energy and their creativity and their own set of knowledge. It’s got to be this mix. And I think we don’t have that mix right now in the current PG newsroom. Plus the workload is going to be so excruciating. As Aaron and I know from on the desk, I mean, it’s just really difficult. And do you want to have a great product or just a product?

And it’s a balance and we know these are terrible economic times. Post-Gazette did not do a good job of marketing itself, of moving into the online in the appropriate way rather than posting a ton of sports videos. Even when I look on the website the last couple days, I mean, everything’s about Steelers, the pirates, the hockey, the this, that. And people want that, but that’s not all they want. So they’re going to have to figure out, and I hope bring back more people who have that knowledge and that expertise and can bring this together and constantly build because we had left a lot of positions unfilled. When the labor reporter took a buy out, no labor reporter, environmental, nothing there. We could just keep going through a lot of beats and that’s what happened because they said they couldn’t afford it. So that’s the kind of thing we have to work out in the metrics and still respond to the community.

We did not do that. And we had a lot of problems with our Black community because of the way things were written and presented, and a lot of that still remains.

And the way you fix that is with some newer people, some older hands, people who know things, people who need to learn things. And probably one of the reasons we were talking originally, Max, like, why does this older lady still come into work every day? I learned something every day. It’s amazing what you learn when you edit copy and when you’re in the midst of the must and the fuss of getting an addition out. And I worked Max when we did three editions, a Bulldog, a suburban edition, and a city edition. It was just frantic, but it was so much fun and it was just invigorating. And go home with such a headache as I drove home, but it was a good headache. And I think this is a good headache for the Benatulus Institute. They’ve got to fix this. They’ve got to figure this out.

And it’s interesting as, I don’t know how you know about this, they’re no longer the Baltimore banner. They’re the banner. I was told in my conversation because they’ve moved into these other counties, so they’re learning. You can’t call yourself the Baltimore Banner if you’re in Prince George’s County. I love Baltimore. I’d come down and visit you anytime. It’s just one of the neatest cities and reminds me of Pittsburgh too. But you have to learn and you have to grow. And if you’re going to grow and expand, that’s part for them too. That’s the nature. This business keeps changing. How do we keep people interested? A, you have to provide the content they want and you have to make sure you have the right people who can provide that content.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I guess that’s a perfect segue into our kind of last speed dating round here before we … I got to let you guys go. But I guess there’s so many sort of questions that I could ask, but I really just want to sort of offer this last round around the table is like final messages that you want to share. Was it worth it going on Stryker? Do you have any messages for folks out there who are asking that question? Any messages you have to other journalists, young or old who are facing these squeezes in their newsrooms? Any advice that you have for folks listening about what they can do to stay up to date with y’all, support y’all, support the union, support the Pittsburgh Alliance for People Empowered Reporting? Any final messages that you just wanted to share with our listeners before we wrap?

Andrew Goldstein:

Sure. Well, let me start out with paper, the Pittsburgh Alliance for People and Power Reporting. And I will just say that we’re going to continue working on that. In Pittsburgh, we have a lot of committees for people to join, but if you want to get involved, just check out ourpapernow.org. There is a lot more information about what we’re doing, as well as a place to donate if you’re so inclined. And obviously, whatever we do is going to need funding. So if you want to check it out again, ourpapernow.org. One other thing I’ll say, just because you mentioned about how we feel about the strike now, I’ll just say for myself personally, I thought from day one that we absolutely did the right thing and I’ve never changed my mind. We had to stand up for ourselves. You have to stand up against a bully. When you look around the country in this time and you see what’s happening, if we don’t fight the battles at our level, I get it.

The Post Gazette in the grand scheme of things is small potatoes. The newspaper go to Pittsburgh is small potatoes. But when you look and you see around the country and the world what’s going on here, if we’re not fighting these fights at this level, then where does this end? Where does this end? If we’re not willing to stand up for ourselves and our friends and neighbors here in Pittsburgh, then who’s to say that these big corporations and these other bad faith actors won’t do it to everyone else around us, everyone else in Pittsburgh, everyone else in the country? So my thought is I know that we’re not saving the world by what we do here, but at the same time, if we don’t fight our battles at our level, then it’s going to be someone else’s problem. And when it gets to them, it’s going to be an even bigger problem.

So I regret nothing and I’m so proud of what we were able to accomplish together.

Erin Hebert:

Yeah, I will never regret going on strike. Despite everything that happened, I like Goldie knew from day one, despite how it began, despite all of the things that happened along the way, that it was the right thing to do because I had spent at that point, six years being in the middle of the collapse and the chaos that the Block family had brought upon this place. And I knew that it was the right thing to do to stand up. And ultimately, the strike, I think, taught all of us that we don’t need institutional validation to do the work that we do and to do good work. We’ve done that for the Post-Gazette. We’ve gotten awards for this newspaper, we’ve served our community through the work that we do, but that doesn’t need to stop just because the place who pays our bills and who gives us a paycheck tells us that they don’t want us anymore.

So I think ultimately what we’re trying to do here is explore a way to build something that has some greater form of immunity from the broader changes that have always hit places like Pittsburgh, the hardest, places like where I’m from, Louisiana, the hardest, these places that are constantly in these cycles of destruction and renewal. And if the media apparatus within those places is vulnerable to people, to bad actors, to ideological actors who just want to control the channels of information for a place, then how do we do that? And we’re trying to do it very carefully. We know that it’s a big undertaking. We know that it’s ambitious with what we’re doing with paper specifically and any sort of news outlet that would come out of it, but we know that it’s the right thing to do to at least try. We knew in 2022, this was what we had to do and we had to try and we had to figure out our motivations for staying out for as long as we did.

And if you talk to me, Andrew, and Helen, Steve Mellon, Bob Batts, we all have different reasons for what motivated us, I think, internally, but ultimately it’s all meant to serve our city and the place that we love and the place that we call home.

Helen Fallon:

The only regret I have, Max, is that my whole career was bookended by strikes. 40 some years ago, we were fighting over healthcare as well as better wages. And here I was again, doing it and it took longer. I kept telling everyone, “Oh, I was on strike for 14 months. It’ll never be that long.” Well, we regretted that comment. You don’t know how many times I could take those words back. If there’s a message I would like to give, it’s to our people who are in the newsroom or picked instead of our people and those who left. Enjoy your severance. Enjoy the savings in your healthcare because our contract was reinstated. We didn’t do this just for us, but even though you’ll never admit it, we did it for all of you as well. And they’re walking away. And for some people who were not picked, who were not part of us, it’s going to be a lifeline until they can find another job.

You really think about that because when the imposed conditions came in, and Goldie can correct me if I’m wrong, the severance was not that good, or if they even had to give it to us. I can’t remember. I don’t have it memorized as chapter and verse the way these other people do. And I got into a little social media war with someone over something like this just the other day, which I kind of enjoy after a while. Somebody’s got to push back. But I think that I would just disagree with Andrew. You’d see we ultimately call him Andrew and Goldie, so it just gets back to that. We did save our little piece of the world because we proved that a union can win. We won battles that will be part of other unions’ fights from here on in. What an accomplishment. And I think finally in the stories that are being written now, we’re getting a little bit of that recognition.

So you do as much as you can. My mother used to always ask me to be useful, and so that’s what you have to have in your whole life. You must be useful. You can’t think only of self, you have to be useful. We’ve been damn useful to these people who call us all types of names and sign letters saying how awful we were. And I hope that money helps them realize some of their folly. I don’t know that it will with every single person. I have two children I’ve raised in my own. They’re as different as night and day and you do your best. But I just think of all the students that I’ve taught, some whom I’ve worked with beyond Andrew and that newsroom, some who crossed the picket line to work, whom I’ll probably never really speak to again, just because I can’t bear that and others who did not.

It’s that these union victories are so important because that’s what this country needs right now. So I hope we are a great example for others to follow.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Andrew Goldstein, now former Post Gazette education reporter and still acting president of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, Helen Fallon, who was a longtime copy editor for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and Professor Emerita at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, and Erin Hebert, a now former copy editor and designer for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and first vice president of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. To learn more about the Pittsburgh Alliance for people- empowered reporting or paper and how you can support it, you can use the link that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, please go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.