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

Maximillian Alvarez:

I got work to do. All right. 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 within 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 for today’s episode we’re going to get a critical update on a struggle that we hear on the show and that you all listening have gotten to know very well over the years. But I’m just going to warn you up top, this update is going to make your blood boil. As you guys may recall, in our very last episode from 2025, which we published in December, just before the holidays, I spoke with three journalists and media professionals who had been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette for over three years.

For more than three years, they and their fellow union members with the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh had held the line. And for three years we had been covering it here on working people and on the Real News Network. And that last episode that we did in December on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette strike was titled The Longest Running Strike in the US is over and the workers won. Well, on January 7th of this year, the newspaper Gilda Pittsburgh released this dismal press release that was titled Pittsburgh Post Gazette Owners couldn’t Bust the Union, so they shut down the paper. Now, block Communications, the company that owns the Pittsburgh Post Gazette as well as the Toledo Blade, the Buckeye Sports Network, and a number of TV stations in Ohio and Kentucky said it will be ceasing operations at the Post Gazette on May 3rd of this year. Block Communications is owned by the Wealthy Block family who have claimed that the Post Gazette is no longer sustainable and that it has lost more than $350 million in cash over the past 20 years.

But the obvious glaring bleeding, pulsing fact is that the workers who went on strike at the Post Gazette held out for over three years enduring great economic, personal and professional pain, and they played by the rules the entire way, navigating our broken labor law system waiting months and years for more rulings and more appeals and more rulings. And when they finally won and went back to work and the Supreme Court refused to bail the block family out, the blocks flipped over the table and said that rather than abide by the law like the rest of us have to, they would rather close a paper that has served the people in the Pittsburgh region since 1786 and pardon my French, but that is a goddamn travesty and an outrage. And the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh press release reads in part, after years of wasting millions of dollars, losing court battles in attempts to deny their workers’ basic rights.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette announced on Wednesday afternoon that it would be closing on May 3rd. Employees were told the paper was closing down in a prerecorded video played during an emergency meeting via Zoom at which no company representatives spoke live. Earlier in the day, the US Supreme Court denied the company’s request to stay a US third Circuit court order requiring the Post Gazette to reinstate a contractual healthcare plan it had previously agreed to prior to illegally tearing it up in 2020. In July of 2020, the Post Gazette illegally tore up the previously collective bargained Union contract governing working conditions at the paper and unilaterally imposed work rules that worsened healthcare coverage and other benefits workers went on strike for more than three years over the company’s illegal behavior. The strike followed more than 20 years in which workers did not receive any across the board wage increases as they bargain in the spirit of shared sacrifice to sustain the paper and continue providing news for Pittsburgh readers.

Instead of simply following the law, the owners chose to punish local journalists in the city of Pittsburgh said Andrew Goldstein, president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh Post Gazette journalists have done award-winning work for decades and we’re going to pursue all options to make sure that Pittsburgh continues to have the caliber of journalism it deserves. Alright, so that’s the big update that we’re going to talk about today and to talk about all of this. I am grateful to be joined once again by a friend of the show who has become a dear friend of mine as well as a colleague and collaborator over the course of the Post Gazette strike. Steve Mellon, a veteran photographer and writer who started working at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette in 1997. Steve was on strike with his fellow union members for over three years, and in that time he was a regular contributor to the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the news newspaper produced and run by striking workers. Steve and I won the 2025 Izzy Award together for our collaborative reporting on the Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. Brother Steve, welcome back to the show. I really do wish it was under better circumstances. I’m going to shut up now and ask if you could just step in and lay out for folks what has happened since our last episode together in December, and what has it been like for you and your coworkers and your union siblings to process and respond to all of this?

Steve Mellon:

Yeah, thanks Max. I have to say that was the best summation of what’s happened at the Post Gazette that I’ve heard since the strike ended. Thanks for that. It crystallized in my head all that’s taken place because a lot of this has happened very quickly for us. We had the rush of going back into work and that came with its own stresses. Walking back into a building. We had no idea what kind of a welcome we would have. When we got back in there, we were working through some of the conflicts that arise after the strike because we were working with a lot of people who had crossed the picket line and we were working on those relationships. Those can be fraught, those can be difficult. And we were processing through that. We were, as a guild, we were thinking, okay, what’s the process of bringing these folks back into the guild, bringing them back into the fold?

We were working on all that in addition to working full-time, going back to being a full-time journalist and then we were trying to work out these other issues. We’re still trying to figure out, okay, now we have to bargain a contract, so we have to do, that’s another thing we had to do. We still had that court case in front of the Supreme Court, as you mentioned on the healthcare issue, a court order to provide us with the healthcare that they owed us. So there was still a lot happening at that point. And you mentioned the January 7th. We’d been back for six weeks. We had six weeks worth of paychecks. It felt like being a real person again, you’re part of the working community, being able to pay your bills, not having to finally, we could go out to eat and do some of those things, feel a little bit of comfort like you’re a part of the world again.

And then I was at an assignment with one of my colleagues. I’d been on strike with for three years, Solomon Gustavo. We were at an assignment at a local food bank in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, working class, Milltown, Duquesne, Pennsylvania, down in the Mon Valley. And right as that assignment got started, we were talking to folks and then my phone buzzed and Solomon’s phone buzzed. I looked down at my phone and it was an announcement of the Supreme Court decision that the judge Alito of all people had denied a stay. The post Gazette had wanted the court to stay the decision, the lower course decision on the mandated healthcare. I looked at Solomon and we’re like, that’s cool. We kind of gave each other a thumbs up and that’s good news on a Wednesday. That’s like, where else is there to go? They’ve been smacked. We smacked. It’s amazing.

This comes into my head on occasion max, that you mentioned BCI Block Communications Inc. It’s a media behemoth. In the end, we had 26 strikers, 26 strikers, and we held them to account. We made them follow the law with, I tell you what, it wasn’t just 26 strikers. It’s a community of people that supported us. We never could have done that without all of the people that helped us out. But Solomon and I got that notification and we were feeling kind of good, but we had work to do. We were in the middle of a job. So we finished up that job. As we were wrapping things up, our phones went off again and I looked down and it was a notification from the company and it said mandatory, mandatory all staff meeting at, I think it was like 12, 15, it was like 45 minutes away Max.

And I looked at Solomon, I’m like, this can’t be good. It’s like, this is coming so close. After I thought my first thought Max is that they were going to just lay a bunch of people. They were going to announce we’re going to have a 40% reduction in staff. I thought maybe they’re going to close the place. So I had to wrap things up there. I was on my way back to Pittsburgh. I was driving through Homestead, Pennsylvania, another old steel town just five or six miles away from Duquesne, and I thought, I’ve got to get on this phone call this Zoom call. So I pull into a parking lot. It’s one of the old steel mills. They’re like gigantic smokestacks right in front of me. These are the mills that closed down in the eighties. So I logged on to Zoom in my car and then this video came on. It was like two minutes, two minute video. Somebody I did not know, did not recognize, announced that the paper was going to close, and then the call hung up and it was like, you got to be kidding me. They announced the closure and nobody from the company came on and said, we know you guys have a lot of questions.

It’s nothing, nobody that we recognized came on. It was the one of the most egregious acts of I thought, corporate abuse of it to workers that I’ve witnessed

Maximillian Alvarez:

Disrespects. You look disrespect up in the dictionary, that’s what you’re going to see.

Steve Mellon:

Yeah, yeah. It was disrespectful and Max at my age, I’m like, I’ve been through, I’m 66 years old, so I’ve been through a lot of stuff and frankly I’m in a different position than a lot of the younger strikers are, and I was thinking about Solomon and all these other folks because I could just say, God damn it, this is like these jerks couldn’t beat us. So like you said, they just turned up the table and left. But I was thinking about Solomon and Natalie and Aaron and some of these Goldie and Andrew Goldstein. I’m thinking they’re in their thirties. These folks, they’ve got a career ahead of ’em. They’ve got to figure out what to do now and the fact that most of the workers were working remotely. So I’m thinking about these folks who are sitting at home waiting for their shifts to start, or they’re at home working or they’re out on a job like Solomon and I were alone and this announcement, and then the call’s gone, the call goes away and they’re sitting alone someplace.

Their lives have been turned upside down and they’re alone and there’s not this communal coming together where we could all be together. I thought at least they could do this call is into the office us so we could all be there together and look at each other and say, what the heck? And we could say, let’s go get a beer. We will talk this out there. Any of that. People were alone. I think that was a tough day for a lot of people. We had six weeks or so where we felt we suddenly had money in accounts, money in our bank accounts, we get paid bills. We were working again, which we wanted to be doing all along is to produce the journalism for the readers who stuck with us for so long. And then this happened. It was a shock, but we met immediately. We met as a guild, the union met. We’ve been through ups and downs, max, and we don’t spend a whole lot of time crying over stuff anymore. You’ve covered this strike. You remember the first couple of conversations you had with us? We were complaining about everything. We were just like,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Not that you were wrong to, but I mean, yeah, I totally get the grizzled weathered sort of sense that you get over years of dealing with crap like this.

Steve Mellon:

Yeah, well, we very quickly went to, well, that sucks. And those assholes to, well, what do we got to do now? What’s our next step? We still had the organizational structure. We were still meeting on a regular basis. We still had committees set up. We still had a lot of connections in the community. So we started meeting right away. We had a guild meeting, like the Stryker meeting, then we had a larger bargaining unit meeting, that’s everybody, the bargaining units, those who were on strike and those who weren’t. And we wanted to talk about, okay, what do we do next? So we had a couple of folks, we split ourselves into two groups max. We went to one group, wanted to try to convince the blocks to keep the paper open, to not sell the paper. And another group thought, well, let’s explore the alternatives.

If the blocks are going to, not going to prop the post Gazette up, what are our options at that point? So that happened within two days. It’s like the second or third day after the announcement. We were moving pretty quickly here because we knew the clock was ticking. Decisions like this, things happen quickly when a newspaper is going to close, people step in and decisions are made very quickly. And we thought if we’re going to have a voice in this or if we’re going to have any say in our futures and the futures of our members, especially those who have been on strike with us for three years, that we needed to act pretty quickly. And so we did, and the folks who were committed to trying to keep the Post Gazette open had a presentation in front of the managers about a week and a half or so later.

I think actions show that that wasn’t very effective, that they’ve not responded to that positively. The other group formed an organization called Paper, and that’s the Pittsburgh Alliance of People Empowered Reporting. And that is basically, it’s really, right now it’s kind of a research, it’s kind of program. And what we’re doing is trying to figure out, okay, what’s possible. We’ve looked at, okay, there are some organizations and some people who stepped up and said, well, maybe we can buy the Post Gazette. So far I don’t think that’s gone very well. I don’t think the Post Gazette, it sounds like they’re just not responding to people who are reaching out. So what we’ve been doing is seeing, okay, what are the other alternatives? Is there a way we can have a worker owned or community owned news organization, maybe a co-op? If somebody comes in and wants to buy the Post Gazette or start something new, they want to start new news organization, then we want to reach out to ’em.

When we were working on the Union Progress Max, we were committed to covering working people, working class communities that had been ignored or misrepresented. We felt misrepresented in a lot of the media, but most of the time those voices just weren’t heard. So we were committed to that and we thought, well, if nothing else, if an organization comes in, we would like to go to them and say, look, we have the connections with the community. If you come in here to set up a news organization, it’s not going to succeed if it does not have the support of the working class communities in Pittsburgh, a working class city like Pittsburgh. And to that end, we’ve invited a number of community stakeholders to be a part of the paper, the organization paper. So we’ve had anywhere from like 25 to 150 plus people on our meetings from all over the community.

And these are primarily working class folks. It is a very diverse group. It’s unions, working people, community organizations and white collar workers, blue collar workers, people who can’t work because they’re caring for a parent or children or because of a disability. And so we’ve been working with those communities. Our first question in the big meeting we first had is we asked what is the Post Gazette not doing that it should be doing? It was phrased something very similar to that Max. And we got an earful. We got an earful, and so we took that information, we’re putting that information together. We started fundraising about two weeks ago and the last I checked, we had about $25,000 we had raised. We had been phone banking, we had a soft launch, and then a couple of days later we had a press conference here in Pittsburgh and we actually got quite a bit of media coverage. That was good to see that we had quite a bit of media coverage. The community response has been great. It’s early in the process, max, none of us have done this before. We’re trying to figure out, okay, what would we need to do to put together a news organization? What kind of a business plan do we need?

I’ve been thinking about how do you form a newsroom in this day and age? Does it make any sense? Does it make sense to have a centralized newsroom in a downtown area that’s inaccessible to most people? Should we have, instead of having a centralized newsroom, maybe have five or six little bureaus in different neighborhoods throughout a readership area, maybe four or five in the city in some of these working class communities. So people can just come by, have a cup of coffee or complain to whoever the local reporter is in there. It’s exciting to think that this is an opportunity, as painful as it is to lose an institution, a news institution that over the decades has been so important to the city and so important to the people of the city. Despite the difficulties of the last couple of years, a lot of good work has been done at the Post Gazette over the years.

It’s going to be painful to the city to lose that. It’s going to be damaging, I think to the sense of community here. People aren’t going to know what the city council is doing to a certain degree because you pay somebody a decent wage to go down and sit at the city county building and talk to people every day. That’s different than if you just go there to cover a meeting max that’s beat reporting. So I think it’s exciting to think that, well, we can turn this painful moment hopefully into something new and different that is perhaps more effective and that is in better contact with the working people in this community.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I think that’s beautiful necessary and admirable work. And when you look at the alternative, which is, Hey, let’s have a bunch of rich people buying up all our goddamn news sources and then breaking all our labor laws and then shutting these papers down if they don’t get their way, that doesn’t seem to me like a very good or sustainable model either. And I wanted to talk about that for a second because this fits into a larger grim picture that we’ve been discussing over the course of the strike. Over that course of that strike, we had the SAG after strike. We had the Writers Guild go on strike in Hollywood. We talked a lot about with you guys and other media workers, how all this stuff is connected. And I’m thinking even now about how the Block family can just shutter this institution that’s been around since 1786.

At the same time I’m watching the Billionaire Ellison family take over and destroy CBS and TikTok and Elon Musk buying and destroying X. They came to destroy and they’re not replacing what is lost. I think that’s what I want to impress upon people is when these institutions of commonly understood truth and basic shared understanding between people who are living in the same geographic space, when those things are gone, when the credibility is tanked, when the platforms and algorithms are jacked up so much that people leave, you don’t end up with a replacement outlet. You end up with a more hyper fragmented media ecosystem where no one knows what the hell is true or not, and no one knows what the hell the other person sitting across from them on the subway actually believes about the world. And we are going further and further down that road and we’re losing more and more critical journalistic institutions that we’ve been losing since you started working at the Goddamn Pittsburgh Post Gazette. And so I wanted to just hover on that for a second, and before we wrap up and you tell folks what they can do to get involved with this initiative paper, what folks in Pittsburgh and outside of Pittsburgh can do to support y’all, I wanted to ask if you could just say a little bit about what workers in the media industry at the Post Gazette and also the communities you live in and serve are losing when a family like the Blocks just so callously decides to shutter a paper like the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Steve Mellon:

Yeah, that’s an important point Max because it’s obviously you’re losing a news outlet and Post Gazette had about a hundred people in the newsroom, and that’s a substantial number of people. It used to be almost 300, so it’s greatly reduced, but it still was the biggest news operation in Western Pennsylvania. And if something happened, the Post Gazette was going to cover it in some way. It was a good source of news and information, everything from what’s happening in your local government, the city government, county government to what restaurants are opening up, what locally owned restaurants are opening up, and a lot of that is obituaries. Obituaries is another one. Sports is a big deal in Pittsburgh like it is in Baltimore, and it was, that’s like it becomes a community gathering space. People gather around it digitally. It used to be that people held newspapers up when they were on the subway or were sitting in a coffee shop and they were physically reading the paper.

Now it’s more digital, but it was the same thing. It was a shared information people had. It was a way for them to share their identities. These share a common identity based around geography or even there were a lot of, I remember back in the two thousands, we just started tracking our users where our users came from online and we had readers in Florida, we had readers, expats, people who grew up here and they wanted to stay in touch with Pittsburgh, and so whether they were in Florida or Texas or Arizona or out west, they were staying connected through the Post Gazette. So it provided a sense of connection and community, which is desperately needed. Now in these times where everybody’s yelling at each other, at least we could have that sense of community, a sense of pride in place. So that’s being lost. I do think there’s something important about local news in that way, and who do you trust now?

Do you trust CBS news anymore? Look what’s happening at the Washington Post. Somebody wealthy comes in and buys something and they’re motivated not by a civic duty. Maybe that was the case when people bought newspapers 60, 70, 80 years ago. Maybe the block family bought the newspaper back in 1927. Maybe the motivations were different then. I don’t know. I didn’t know the guy, but now these owners like, where’s the civic duty? You’re going to close the Post Gazette down. Where’s the civic duty at the Washington Post when Bezos is laying off a third of the staff, almost close to half of the staff I read the other day. So their motivations are other than that, I think it’s good to have local people that you recognize. I think one of the things that are out in the community, max, and I think that’s one of the things that’s bothered me about journalism the last 20 years is the trend as newsrooms have shrunk, the trend for reporters is to do a lot of stories by phone, sit in a newsroom and make phone calls.

And I understand the reason to do that because a lot of these reporters are under pressure to produce like three stories a day. You physically can’t go from A to B2C and write your stories and work an eight hour shift. It just doesn’t happen. So work is necessarily done by phone. That’s different. This Max, I mean, this is what you and I did in East Palestine. When you go sit in somebody’s kitchen table and talk to them for two hours about what they’ve been through, what their lives are like now that’s a different conversation than if you call them on the phone and have a 20 minute conversation. You hear a disembodied voice asking questions on the phone. When I talk about an opportunity, what I hope to come out of this situation in Pittsburgh is screwed up as it is, is that we have a news organization in the end that’s dedicated to the type of journalism that can actually build trust.

Again, between the journalism that’s being produced in the city and the city, the journalists who are producing that and the city. I don’t think that’s going to happen if you don’t have a newsroom of people that are out in the community, physically out in the community and talking to people and being present and going to meetings and asking questions and getting yelled at. That’s part of the job. It’s part of the business, but it’s a necessary part of journalism. You read stuff online. I look at stuff with AI now. AI is going to change this business in ways we cannot anticipate, but I know when I look at my social media feed now, max, I don’t know what to trust and what not to trust. The videos and the still images are so good. I don’t know what’s real. I just assume everything is fake unless I know the person that produced it.

I know that person. I don’t believe it, and I think the same is going to be true on a macro level with journalism. If I know the reporter, if I can call that reporter up, if I can go bang on a door and have somebody answer, it’s a way to build Trust Max, and I’m hoping that that’s what we can do. I’m hoping that we can start that process here in Pittsburgh. In the wake of the Post Gazette closing, there’s a way for people to support the effort of Paper. It’s a new organization. We’ve only been at it for like three weeks now, three and a half weeks. We’re having to do a lot of work very quickly, but we are getting things done. We’re having several meetings a week, and we’re setting up the tasks and knocking ’em down. One way that we can show the powers that be in Pittsburgh, that we’re serious, that we’re serious people and that we actually have supported the community both in Pittsburgh and beyond, is through financial support, through donations.

We’re probably going to have to, I’m sure we’re going to have to hire attorneys. We’re going to have to hire business consultants. We’re going to have to put together a business plan. I’m sure at some point we’re going to start holding a series of town halls. We want to be out in the community and listening to people in the community. We’re going to start that process. We’re going to have to rent halls and probably hire sound crews, all that kind of stuff they have to do when you have town halls advertise for these things. So we do have a website. It is our paper now.org. Our paper now O-U-R-P-A-P-E-R-N-O w.org. That describes a little bit of what we are and what we’re about, and there’s a donation form below that. Also, if you have ideas or just word of encouragement or an experience in this that you’d like to share, just send me an email, send me a personal email.

I can give my personal email address here. It’s S mellon SM EL l888@gmail.com. That’s smail888@gmail.com, and we’ll take all that into, I’ll tell you what, max, I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls from people and emails from folks who are interested in this idea, and not all of them are from Pittsburgh. We, we’ve had a lot of support from Baltimore and from folks in Memphis. We are looking at some of the news organizations that have succeeded and you know they’re out there, max, you don’t hear much about ’em. You guys are doing it. There are news organizations out there that are doing the work and that are succeeding. It’s not easy. It’s a lot of work. You’re not going to get Rich doing this. You’re not going to be driving a Cadillac around that Brother Max. But there’s a way, those of us who get into this business, we don’t get into it. So we can live in a half million dollar house and have a swimming pool and join the country club. That’s not our motivation, but I think it’s important work. I don’t think there’s any more important work now. This is, journalism is more important now than in any other point in my career, and I want to make sure that I play a role, whatever that role is in making sure that that continues, that that work continues.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guest, Steve Mellon, veteran photographer and a writer who has worked at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette since 1997 and who was on strike with his fellow union members for over three years, starting in October of 2022. Please go support the work that Steve and his fellow journalists are doing at Paper in Pittsburgh using the links that we provided in the show notes. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you guys for caring. We’ll see you all back here next time for another episode of Working People, and in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network across our YouTube channel. Our podcast feeds our website and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, like I tell you every week, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.