Newspaper publishing is unlike other industries in several ways, including its strictly contemporaneous nature. Publishers cannot print several days of editions in advance of anticipated production problems and stockpile them for sale, as other manufacturing industries often can do to prepare for an anticipated shutdown. Nor can newspapers, after an interruption of publication, go back and  make up missed editions. Revenue lost due to interruptions caused by strikes and lockouts cannot be regained, and some customers may be lost forever during publication interruptions.  Readers deprived of their daily newspaper may find alternative sources of news and other information, while advertisers may similarly find other outlets for their promotional messages.

Labor relations are therefore of crucial importance in the newspaper industry. Using the leverage inherent in their importance to the publisher, powerful unions have in the past won handsome wage rates and working conditions by threatening – and carrying out – strikes against newspapers. Publishers who have resisted these demands have often found their revenue base eroded due to customers, both for information and for advertising, being lost during a shutdown. Suburban and satellite city newspapers, often non-union, have found such opportunities valuable for making gains in both readership and advertising at the expense of their idled metropolitan daily competition. Some metro dailies have been forced to cease publication or combine with competitors due to the economic hardship imposed by strikes and lockouts, such as in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1992.

But labor-saving changes in technology and restrictions on union tactics included in labor legislation passed during the 1980s era have allowed some U.S. newspapers to continue publishing during subsequent strikes, often in an attempt to increase corporate value by rolling back the high wage rates and restrictive manning provisions won by unions during their heyday. The result has often been violent picket-line confrontation, attendant bad publicity and boycotts organized by labor against both a newspaper that continues to publish despite pickets and any advertisers that may appear on its pages. In strong “union towns” in the U.S. where such conflict flared in the 1990s, such as New York and Detroit, the result of labor boycotts has been lost readership and advertising similar to what a newspaper would have incurred as the result of a shutdown.

Yet despite their potential importance to the economic viability of newspapers, there has been little scholarly research on the effect of publication interruptions due to strikes and lockouts or of labor boycotts imposed against a struck newspaper continuing to publish. There has been no shortage of critical polemic detailing the struggles of labor in such situations, nor of analysis of management strategy published in trade magazines. But as one media economist has observed: “Few important economic studies of the role of labor in media industries have been made, and the scholarly literature is nearly devoid of such contributions.”

This paper undertakes a pilot study of research in this area. By identifying key strikes and lockouts at major metropolitan daily newspapers in North America and analyzing the audited circulation figures of those newspapers before them and after, it seeks to find a correlation between length of publication interruption and magnitude of circulation loss. In the process of this review, trends in newspaper union-management relations during this period will also be identified and analyzed.

Literature Review

Most of the scholarly study of  newspaper publication interruptions has been audience-oriented, consistent with the dominant paradigm in media research over the past half-century. In fact, the origins of “uses and gratifications” theory derive from a seminal study conducted during a newspaper strike more than 50 years ago. Berelson’s survey of New York readers during a two-week newspaper strike there during 1945 helped establish the concept of an “active audience” which, far from being a passive receptor of media messages as previously thought, instead goes looking to fulfil its information requirements and other psychological needs. Berelson and colleagues from the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University conducted interviews with sixty Manhattan residents during the 1945 strike and found they read the newspaper in “the apparent desire . . . not to be left alone with their thoughts.”  The gratifications readers receive from newspapers, Berelson found, are
 

both “rational” (like the provision of news and information) and non-“rational” (like the provision of social contacts and, indirectly, social prestige) . . . . the newspaper is missed because it serves as a (non-“rational”) source of security in a disturbing world and, finally, because the reading of the reading of the newspaper has become a ceremonial or ritualistic or near-compulsive act for many people.
 

Some need related to news was not being fulfilled by the drenching quantity of alternate media of communication. People seemed to feel drawn to the news as it appears in a newspaper without fully understanding what they get out of it, or without knowing how to analyze for themselves what it means to them. . . . A printed record can be screened when the moment is convenient and stories of interest can be examined at length. Furthermore, it is a process in which the reader participates actively. This may account for some of the dissatisfaction expressed by radio and TV listeners [sic.] during the strike.

By the time the papers were ready to publish again the prototype New Yorker was one who had settled firmly on television or radio (more often the former) as his primary communication medium – but supplemented by one or more newspapers as a secondary yet highly valued part of his daily experience.
 

A 1985 strike at both daily newspapers in Philadelphia allowed the study of compensatory media behavior there. Recognizing that basic media needs are interrelated with social situation and background factors, the researchers sought to determine if suddenly-unfulfilled media needs would be actively replaced with alternative media use and if this replacement need correlated with demographic characteristics. Four gratification dimensions were identified – surveillance, “killing time,” entertainment and advertisements. A total of 215 newspaper-reading adults were interviewed during the strike, with another 142 interviewed three weeks afterward. By far the most significant factor in media replacement behavior was education. The researchers concluded that “media gratifications are primarily the result of the social situation and background factors and may depend more on habit than on internalized need states.”  The same researchers published a secondary analysis of their data comparing media use by reporters and members of the public during the 1985 Philadelphia newspaper strike. Utilizing media dependency theory, they postulated that media replacement behavior would be highest among those thought to be most reliant on newspapers – reporters. Statistical data manipulations did not find strong support for this hypothesis.

In 1992, political scientist Jeffrey Mondak was preparing to survey Pittsburgh residents in hopes of determining influences on their voting behavior in the upcoming presidential election when both daily newspapers there went on strike. The joint-operating Pittsburgh Press and Post-Gazette were shut down for eight months by a Teamsters strike which lasted until after the election. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Mondak changed the focus of his study to instead compare media use during an election in a city deprived of newspapers with a similar site nearby, for which he chose Cleveland. The result was the most comprehensive look to date at media consumer behavior in a newspaper deprivation situation.

Mondak found that while Pittsburgh broadcasting stations sought to meet the demand for missing information and suburban dailies doubled and even tripled their circulation, neither were able to make up for the loss of the major dailies, which between them had circulated 350,000 issues daily. In a vain attempt to emulate the newspaper function, the television stations even took to scrolling “seemingly endless strings of classified ads and obituaries.”   Playoff performances by all three major-league sports teams went unmemorialized in the press – an attendance dropoff for the baseball Pirates was blamed on the strike, and “when the Penguins won hockey’s Stanley Cup, there was no banner headline to proclaim the victory.”
 
Finding television of limited value as a substitute for newspaper coverage of local House and Senate races, some deprived readers refused to rely on broadcast media alone for coverage of the presidential race, instead switching to national or suburban newspapers or news magazines. Consistent with other studies of the active – even obstinate – audience, a survey of voters found those with greater knowledge of civic politics were less likely to give up reading about politics.
 

Faced with an extended newspaper strike, many voters in Pittsburgh apparently endeavored to replace print with print, again demonstrating a willingness on the part of the electorate to assume a relatively active role in the process of information acquisition.
 

A similar study ten years later in Detroit interviewed 797 people during a 46-day strike at all three daily newspapers there – the Free Press, News, and Times. It found a stronger effect on buying habits than Roper had in New York, with twenty-eight percent of respondents reporting the strike made a difference to their shopping. The difference, other than the length of strike, the researchers speculated, was the fact the Detroit newspapers were idled over the crucial Christmas shopping season, while the New York strike was in summer. Those with more education were more inclined to seek a substitute for their missing newspaper, while the effect of missing the newspaper lessened with increased distance from a reader’s residence to the downtown business core. “By far the most common shopping inconvenience during the strike was the extra time spent in the selection of purchases, and a resultant decrease in the number of purchases which could be made on a given shopping trip.”

Another study of the 1955-56 Detroit strike estimated retail stores there lost $35 million in December sales as a result of the shutdown.  A broader picture of the economic effects of a newspaper strike in a major metropolitan area was painted by a study of the 1962 shutdown of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, which lasted 116 days from mid-April to early August. Data from such secondary sources as parking meter collections, bus ridership, building permits and new car deliveries were analyzed, and telephone interviews were conducted with 198 area business owners shortly after the strike ended. The study concluded that a total of $58 million in consumer expenditures was lost during the strike, including $35 million in retail sales and $23 million in services.

Further study of the effects on shopping habits of deprivation of newspaper advertising showed a resulting decentralization of retail sales toward local stores. An analysis of shopping patterns during a 134-day strike at Detroit newspapers in 1964 found that sales at shopping centers dropped in the absence of advertising to draw customers to their centralized location. “Many shoppers – in the absence of regularly available information about price, bargain sales, or availability of certain brands or products – tend to change their shopping habits. They tend to pay more attention to ‘convenience’ of shopping during the strike than before.”  In Toledo, Ohio, both daily newspapers, the Blade and Times, were idled by a five-month strike from October, 1966 to March, 1967. A study of shopping patterns during the period found no lasting effect on total retail activity, but did find that downtown and shopping-center stores lost market share to local neighborhood retailers.
 Of all newspaper markets studied during publication interruptions, New York has proved the most popular, doubtless due to it being the media capital of the country, as well as the largest city in population and leader in number of competing daily titles. No newspaper strike there has provoked more analysis than the violent five-month confrontation at the Daily News from October, 1990 to March 1991, during which the owner, the Chicago Tribune continued to publish behind picket lines. Two books and most of a third have detailed the union-busting attempt and subsequent change in ownership to British media magnate Robert Maxwell, and subsequently, on his death, to Mort Zuckerman, publisher of the newsmagazine U.S. News and World Report.

One systematic study of the effects of the Daily News strike conducted at Fordham University surveyed 386 adult residents of Queens County about their substitution of other media, as well as their attitudes toward the paper’s management and unions. Polich also provided longitudinal comparison with a similar study done of the 1978 strike at all three daily newspaper in New York [during which he was research director of the New York Times], and with Kimball’s study of the 1958 New York newspaper strike. Union support was found to have dropped from 47 percent during the 1978 strike to just 28 percent in the 1990-91 strike, with public sympathy for the paper’s publisher rising from 18 percent in 1978 to 24 percent in 1990-91. While both strikes were about cuts to union manning clauses, less than half as many New Yorkers were aware of that in 1990-91 (16 percent) than in 1978 (35 percent).   The study also analyzed Daily News circulation figures and those of its competitors, finding the losses of the strikebound paper were not totally taken up by the other area papers, with total readership in Queen’s shrinking by seven percent.

Pre- and post-strike Daily News circulation figures were also compared to show the  effect of the strike and boycott on the newspaper in economic terms. While the 1978 study had shown the paper had recovered 81 percent of its readership a month after the strike ended, the 1990-91 strike resulted in readership losses almost double that level. From an audited pre-strike daily circulation of 1,194,237, the Daily News slipped to 759,068 – a 36-percent decline. A year later, that had increased slightly, to 777,129, but by 1993 circulation had declined again, to 761,677.  The lesson for the newspaper industry generally, Polich concluded, is that “a strike is an accelerant poured on the smouldering fire that has eaten away at national newspaper penetration for years.”
 

Traditionally, newspapers were sold by habit and read by habit. The presumption was that the benefits of a newspaper were manifest. Today many managers think of telephone solicitations, radio and television commercials, billboards, and in-house ads as their key channels of communication with readers and prospective readers.
 

Extending Polich’s analysis of circulation change resulting from a newspaper strike to other titles, this study identifies major strikes (five continuous days or longer) at major daily newspapers (more than 100,000 circulation) in an attempt to find a relationship between strike length and circulation change. Strikes, classed as either complete interruptions of publication or  continuing publication under a labor boycott, were identified from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publication Major Work Stoppages Annual. Audit Bureau of Circulation figures for struck newspapers were compiled from annual editions of Editor & Publisher Yearbook.

The theoretical material reviewed above suggested the following hypotheses:

 
Hypothesis 1: A strike of workers at a major daily newspaper lasting at least one week will result in reduced circulation of the newspaper after the strike.

Hypothesis 2: The longer a newspaper strike continues, the greater will be the circulation loss, as disaffected readers seek alternative sources of information.

Hypothesis 3: The circulation loss due to a complete publication interruption will be equal to circulation loss resulting from a boycott of a struck newspaper which continues to publish. (Null Hypothesis).
 
Results

 The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publication Major Work Stoppages Annual listed    the following strikes lasting one week or longer at newspapers employing 1,000 or more workers. Audit Bureau of Circulation figures for the struck papers collected from annual editions of Editor & Publisher Yearbook are included in the following table for both the year before strike and the year after it.
 

City                      Paper(s)     Year      Duration     Circulation  Circulation     Change
                                                   (Days)       Before      After            (%)

New York                  Daily News   1990-1  continued      1,226,855     780,280         -36.4
                                               publishing

Pittsburgh                Press        1992        245         256,504      Closed
                          Post-Gazette                         156,782      277,118         -29.1

Vancouver                 Sun          1994         9          221,263      208,639          -5.7
                          Province                             175,296      166,780          -4.8

San Francisco             Chronicle    1995         11         485,493      482,420          -0.9
                          Examiner                             110,596      107,704          -1.2

Detroit                   Free Press   1995-7   continued      655,725      481,806        -26.5
                          News                  publishing     354,403      246,638        -30.4
 
 
Discussion

The small sample size of newspaper strikes studied prevents any but the most generalized observations being made. It is apparent, however, that the large circulation losses found by Polich to have resulted from the 1992 strike at the Daily News in New York were not experienced at some other newspapers struck subsequently. Some support was found for Hypothesis 1, as all of the newspapers stuck suffered circulation losses following the resumption of publication or lifting of the labor boycott. Some support was also shown for Hypothesis 2, but length of strike was correlated with circulation loss in only the most general way, absent sufficient sample size to allow for statistical validity. The same shortcoming allowed only intuitive conclusions being drawn about Hypothesis 3, as the largest circulation losses observed during the time period under study were the result of boycotts imposed against a struck newspaper which continues to publish, in addition to the permanent closure of one daily.

Further Research

Extending the time frame under analysis would allow for a larger sample size, but not likely to the extent of endowing the research with any measure of statistical validity, while introducing the additional difficulty of attempting comparisons between eras. Adding a market measure of competition might enable a comparison between situations such as the one studied by Mondak, where competing newspapers continue to publish, and those where all daily newspaper publication in a metropolitan area was interrupted, such as in the Vancouver market. Longitudinal analysis of repeated labor shutdowns of the joint-operating dailies there, the subject of the author’s dissertation research, showed some merit in the qualitative analysis of industrial organization of a newspaper market in order to understand the long-term effects of circulation erosion.  The present attempt at drawing insight from quantitative analysis seems to underline some shortcomings of such an approach.
 

NOTES

1. Jon Udell, The Economics of the American Newspaper (New York: Hastings House, 1978), 139.

2. Robert Picard, Media Economics: Concepts and Issues (Newbury Park, California: Sage), 1989, 110.

3. Ibid., 123.

4. Bernard Berelson, “What ‘Missing the Newspaper’ Means,” in Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton, eds. Communications Research: 1948-1949 (New York: Harper, 1949), 129.
 
5. Penn Kimball, “People without Papers,” Public Opinion Quarterly 23, (1959), 394.
 
6. Penn Kimball, “New York Readers in a newspaper shutdown,” Columbia Journalism Review, Fall 1963, 50.
 
7. Ibid., 48.
 
8. Ibid., 52.
 
9. Harold de Bock, “Gratification Frustration During a Newspaper Strike and a TV Blackout,” Journalism Quarterly 57 (1980), 66.
 
10. Leo Bogart, Press and Public: Who Reads What, When, Where, and Why in American Newspapers, 2nd Ed. (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), 251.
 
11. William R. Elliott and William L. Rosenberg, “The 1985 Philadelphia Newspaper Strike: A Uses and Gratifications Study,” Journalism Quarterly 64 (1987), 687.
 
12. William L. Rosenberg and William R. Elliot, “Comparison of Media Use by Reporters and Public During Newspaper Strike,” Journalism Quarterly 65 (1988), 30.
 
13. Jeffrey Mondak, Nothing to Read: Newspapers and Elections in a Social Experiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 6.
 
14. Ibid., 7.
 
15. Ibid., 67-68.

16. Elmo Roper and Associates, A Survey of the Effect of a New York City Newspaper Strike, cited in Charles F. Cannell and Henry Sharp, “The Impact of the 1955-56 Detroit Newspaper Strike,” Journalism Quarterly 35 (1958), 34.
 
17. Cannell and Sharp, 34.
 
18. David J. Luck, Retail Sales in Detroit During December 1955 Newspaper Strike, East Lansing: Bureau of Business Research, Research Report No. 16, Michigan State University, 1956.
 
19. William A. Mindak, Andrew Neibergs and Alfred Anderson, “Economic Effects of the Minneapolis Newspaper Strike,” Journalism Quarterly 40 (1963), 214.
 
20. Rikuma Ito, “Effects of a Newspaper Strike on Retail Sales,” Journal of Marketing 30 (July, 1966) 57.
 
21. Thomas A. Klein, “The Impact of the 1966-1967 Toldeo Newspaper Strike on Retail Sales and Advertising,” College Research Center, College of Business Administration, The University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, August, 1969, 20.
 
22. See Kenneth M. Jennings, Labor Relations at the New York Daily News: Peripheral Bargaining and the 1990 Strike, (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger), 1993; Richard Vigilante, Strike: The Daily News War and the Future of American Labor (New York: Simon & Shuster), 1994; Stephen R. Sleigh, On Deadline: Labor Relations in Newspaper Publishing (Bayside, N.Y.: Social Change Press), 1998.
 
23. John Polich, “Daily News, its unions, newspaper market lose in 1990 strike,” Newspaper Research Journal16 (Winter 1995), 74.
 
24. Ibid., 77.
 
25. Ibid., 80.
 
26. Ibid.
 
27. Ibid., 81.

28. See Marc Edge, Pacific Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver’s Newspaper Monopoly (Vancouver: New Star Books), 2001.