What newsroom organizers learned from the years-long strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
After 1,133 days on the picket line, the 26 journalists still on strike from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette returned to work on Monday.
Whether they’ll be back at their desks — well, that’s another story. The Post-Gazette filed a last-ditch stay ahead of an appeal the company has said it plans to file. (The Post-Gazette, owned by Block Communications, declined to comment. The returning journalists met with editor-in-chief Stan Wischnowski on Monday morning, a union official confirmed.)
The union voted to end the strike last week after a federal appeals court ruled in its favor. The president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, who had vowed to grow his beard and hair for the duration of the strike (a promise made before anyone expected it to last more than three years!) made the big chop. And the journalists on strike showed up on Monday ready to get back to work.
Now that the strike is over, it’s as good of a moment as any to talk about the lessons learned. I spoke to newsroom labor organizers, labor reporters, and Post-Gazette journalists on both sides of the picket line.
You need numbers
The initial vote to go on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was rushed and the result was extraordinarily narrow. A little over half of the union voted to strike in 2022, and many Post-Gazette journalists — including a number of its most prominent sports reporters — never left the newsroom.
“There was a complicated situation [in Pittsburgh] where other bargaining units at the newspaper going out on strike essentially forced the issue with the newsroom union,” noted Matt Pearce, former president of Media Guild of the West. (More on the backstory here.) “But one of the basic principles of strike organizing is that you need to button up a super majority as strong as you can. Because, essentially, the more people you have crossing the picket line, the longer a labor dispute is going to go on.”
Those who declined to join the strike cited fears of losing health care for themselves (and their kids) and questions both about the strike’s timing and the steadiness of union leadership. Not that the striking workers didn’t have similar questions.
“We all had our doubts,” one who voted to go on strike from the beginning told me. “If people tell you they had no doubts about this, they’re lying.”
That lack of unity, journalists on both sides of the picket line agreed, prolonged the strike. It lasted more than three years and was the longest ongoing strike in the country for nearly a third of that time. NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss said the importance of coordination and preparation was one of the most obvious takeaways from the strike. That includes coordinating with other unions in the workplace and region and, maybe more importantly, coordinating internally.
“You want every single person to walk out,” Schleuss said. “If [that had happened in Pittsburgh] on day one, this wouldn’t have been a three-year strike waiting for a court ruling. Pittsburgh was a bit of a unique situation. People were quite rushed into the situation of making the decision to go on strike. You need to make sure that there’s a plan and a process.”
There have been 90 NewsGuild-affiliated strikes lasting a day or longer since Pittsburgh went out. Schleuss said some of the lessons learned from the Post-Gazette have already been applied to other strikes. In Pittsburgh, striking workers formed committees that met daily and established workloads with a rotating schedule. The union helped to organize actions like protesting outside an owner’s wedding reception, yes, but also helped distribute the more than $1 million raised for rent payments and medical costs, and coordinated emotional support so strikers didn’t feel isolated or demoralized. NewsGuild has learned to apply similar support and small-dollar fundraising lessons elsewhere.
More recent NewsGuild strikes, including at Law360 and The New York Times Tech Guild, went on strike with more than 90% of the vote.
“There was a lot of planning and a lot of moving pieces that went into that — over months and months and months — to make it successful,” Schleuss said. “That’s, obviously, such a better situation to be in.”
Keep the digital strike publications and the “wanted” posters
Launched two days into the work stoppage as a strike newspaper for the digital age, the Pittsburgh Union Progress was productive over three years. It published more than 4,000 stories — including news about the strike, local sports, and extensive coverage of the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — before being shut down on Sunday as its reporters prepared to return to the Post-Gazette.
Other striking news orgs have created digital news products since, including Business Outsider, Outlaw360, and a union-themed word game.
A lot of emotion in the @pghguild.com newsroom this weekend as we make, edit and publish what looks to be the last Sunday strike paper. It’s full of champions and winners, doers and helpers. And I’m talking about its journalists: www.unionprogress.com
— Bob Batz Jr. (@bobbatzjr.bsky.social) November 23, 2025 at 8:55 AM
The journalists on strike from the Post-Gazette also designed “Wanted”-style posters for top executives and plastered them in their neighborhoods. They were successful enough in Pittsburgh to recreate elsewhere.
When more than 250 employees at Business Insider walked off the job in June 2023, they went with “Have you seen this millionaire?” posters. (The editor was spotted by the New York Post riding a CitiBike and taking down the pro-union posters in his Brooklyn neighborhood.)
Both address challenges for unions that Pearce described as growing ever more difficult in our digital age.
“I think one of the real discoveries of unionized journalists over the past five or 10 years is that there’s a real limit on how much effectiveness public shame has,” Pearce noted. “It works against the journalist, in the same way that it works against the media companies that they work at, that we live in this hyper-fragmented information environment.”
News consumers might not know a labor strike is going on at their favorite digital publication, or notice that there’s been a decline in the content being produced.
“That’s something that limits the leverage of companies in the marketplace, and also limits the leverage of journalists to use public shame directly at their own employer because they are now one information source among many,” Pearce said.
Strike for the right reasons
Labor journalist Hamilton Nolan said the union had a lot to be proud of.
“They put their whole careers on the line to fight for a fair shake from management and we should all give them our respect,” he said in an email.
“Strategically, they were always fighting an uphill battle,” Nolan added. “Management is intransigent, the newspaper industry is shaky itself, it’s hard for many of those journalists to get comparable jobs in Pittsburgh, and management uses that to put pressure on the strikers.”
Nolan told me he thought the union was successful in keeping the fact that it was on strike in the public consciousness in Pittsburgh.
“In one sense, you could say going on strike for years and years to prove a point is Quixotic; on the other hand, that is what it takes to fight for what’s right, and they can all hold their heads high,” Nolan said. “Unions cannot singlehandedly fix the way that the tech industry has broken the economic model of the newspaper industry, but they can hold the line for fair treatment of workers. More strikes in general are good for all working journalists because they show we won’t fold.”
Steve Mellon, a longtime journalist at the Post-Gazette, recalled that he and his colleague at The Pittsburgh Press were awarded first and second place for National Newspaper Photographer of the Year back in 1991. There were toasts in the newsroom and the owners took out ads in national publications to commend them. Less than a year later, the paper was gone and Mellon was out of work. It changed the way he thought about his profession.
“I think we all think of ourselves as valuable, important, and essential, but a lot of decisions at newspapers are made on the basis of money, not on the quality of journalism you provide,” Mellon said. “I would just tell people, be proud of your work. It’s essential work, especially in this day and age. But the people you work for may see your role differently and you absolutely should know your rights and make your employer accountable to those rights.”
Multiple union members brought up a motivating talk Mellon gave early on in the strike. Speaking more than three years later, Mellon remembers feeling unprepared for the moment. He was there to drink beer, not give a speech.
“I was thinking, what can I say to these folks? It’s a mix of young people and people like me who’ve been around for a bit,” said the 66-year-old Mellon. “And the only thing I could think of saying was to encourage them to take the long view.”
Mellon told the strikers to imagine a time — maybe this Thanksgiving or one in five, 10, or 20 years — with the whole family gathered.
“The discussion is going to come around to the Post-Gazette and your kids or your grandkids are going to say, ‘Oh, you used to work at the Post-Gazette. Weren’t you there when they went on strike in 2022? Well, what did you do? Did you go out and strike? Did you go back into the building?’” Mellon said. “And we’re all going to have to answer for that.”
A strike fund for the Post-Gazette journalists raised more than $1 million over three years. Pearce said part of the reason he contributed was that “a situation that ugly could happen anywhere” thanks to a “defanging” at the regulating National Labor Relations Board.
“The lack of enforcement means that the costs for engaging that kind of behavior have to be pretty high or else publishers everywhere would do it,” Pearce said. “Part of this is an important deterrent effect. People may find that uncomfortable, but I would find it even more uncomfortable if more publishers started acting like the Post-Gazette.”
Prepare for a rocky road ahead — even after victory in the courts
The vote to strike, again, was extraordinarily narrow. There are hurt feelings on both sides. Some striking journalists feel betrayed by the colleagues who failed to follow them out the door. Some who never left the newsroom remain upset over some of the tactics and rhetoric in the strike, starting with the rushed decision to go on strike and continuing through arrests and angry social media posts.
As the striking journalists return to the newsroom, both sides expect it’ll be a rocky reunion.
“There’s going to be some people who carry some ill feelings — maybe some people who are pissed off. I don’t want to dismiss that emotion. It’s very understandable. A lot of people have been hurt over this strike financially [and] emotionally. I want to make sure that has its due,” Mellon said. “But we’re going to have to work through that very quickly and get back to work because we’re going to be elbow to elbow with folks and there’s going to be a lot to do.”
He believes his colleagues can “absolutely” be civil to one another despite the unprecedented length of the strike.
“A bigger question to me is, how do we rebuild trust with the community?” he asked. “That’s something that both the Guild and the newspaper are going to have to work together to do.”
Mellon, who has worked at the Post-Gazette since 1997, noted many in newsroom have long-term relationships to lean on. While friendships with those who did not strike have been quiet, he believes there is a solid foundation to rebuild on.
“There are people who did not strike that were good friends of mine long before October 18, 2022. I watched their kids grow up. They watched my kids when my kids were young,” Mellon said. “We’re going to have to talk about these things, work through them — maybe even vent at each other — and then give each other some grace. We have to give each other some grace. There’s not a magic bullet. We’re going to have to struggle through this.”