The Odds in Portland

In the past 30 years, some 20 U.S. dailies have been launched during newspaper strikes, and struggled to stay permanently in business. Almost without exception, such papers end along with the strike.* Despite such overwhelming odds, during a 1959 strike against both dailies in Portland, Ore., union staffers launched the Portland Reporter, a competitive paper of their own. Last week, the odds caught up with the Reporter. Only a few days after celebrating its fourth birthday, Oregon's strike-born daily went under.

The immediate cause of death was anemia: the Reporter simply ran out of money. Never able to pay its own way, the tabloid managed to avert death only by desperate expedients. At the end, more than half the Reporter's staff was still unsalaried and subsisting entirely on meager strike benefits: up to $79 a week. Even its offset press was leased for a token $10 a year from the benevolent International Typographical Union.

Despite these advantages, the nursling's survival prospect was never very high. The 1959 strike failed to shut down the city's existing dailies, the Journal and the Oregonian, thus denying the newcomer the opportunity to exploit a temporary news vacuum. Moreover, Portland readers seemed undisposed to support a union paper that tried so hard to avoid the union label that it packed as much punch as a Sunday supplement. Although the Oregonian and the Journal have together lost 79,000 in circulation since the strike, the tabloid Reporter could not even attract all those defectors. At death it had barely 58,000 in paid readership.

*A notable exception: the Las Vegas, Nev., Sun. Born during an International Typographical Union strike in 1950, it is still going strong.

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