We had to do something. I looked at Natalie, Aaron, and all the people we’ve been striking with. I thought we could do whatever we wanted. We have community support. We have the skills. We have the talent. We have the determination. After a series of meetings, we thought of forming our own publication, one that we can inoculate against corporate abuse and against the influence of money. The result was a worker/community-owned cooperative: a multi-stakeholder cooperative. I had no idea I’d be in this position as a co-owner of a publication with my coworkers and so many other people in the community. I did not expect to be here, but it feels good.

Natalie Duleba: During the strike, our goal was always to get back to work, but also to build a Post-Gazette that we and the journalists who would come after us could build a life with. The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism did buy the Post-Gazette from Block Communications. Even with the Post-Gazette continuing, the new owners did cut the newsroom by about 40%, 80% of whom were strikers. We wanted to get back to the Post-Gazette, but now we’re in control of our own destiny in a way that we weren’t during the strike. We’re doing the work ourselves, and it’s fully under our control, which is really amazing.

Alvarez: What did working and striking at a paper like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette teach you about what a project like the Pittsburgh Progress needs and why it needs to exist?

Mellon: I learned a lot both during the strike and especially after the strike was over. After we had won the strike, and the Post-Gazette announced its closure, we had conversations with people in the community. One of the first questions we asked was, ​“What does it mean to lose the Post-Gazette? What does it mean to you and your community to lose the Post-Gazette newspaper?” At that point, we didn’t know that the Venetoulis Institute was going to step in and buy it. One of the responses really stuck with me. A young woman stood up and said, ​“The closure of the Post-Gazette doesn’t mean anything to me because they’ve not been relevant to my community for years.” 

Now, as a journalist who spent a good chunk of his professional life reporting on this city, that was heartbreaking to hear. These institutions that I’d given my life to were irrelevant to the communities that had supported us during the strike and that had leaned into our effort. We’re seeing the crumbling of communities all over this country. Newspapers and news organizations have failed in their duty to be a cohesive force, and that’s an issue. How do we solve that? We kicked around several different ideas. When we started talking about a co-op, we saw a lot more people showing up. We’re not going to have people stand up at a town hall and say the Pittsburgh Progress is irrelevant to my community. We’re trying to make sure that that does not happen to us. Our way of making sure that happens is having that young woman in the room when we’re making decisions.

Duleba: I learned things at the Post-Gazette besides the skills that I built there. Being on strike, we saw what it was like to be on the other side of business interests overriding journalistic ethics. The coverage of the strike was just insulting. The Post-Gazette tried to hide the fact that people weren’t talking to them because [the sources] were holding our picket line. They’re not putting in that the mayor’s not talking to them at all because he’s respecting a picket line. That shades the way that people might perceive that article. They may think that the mayor is running away from accountability on this issue. Being so intimately on the other side of it places us in a great position to poke at what is not being said in these press releases. There’s all this stuff that they’re leaving out that we learn by talking to the working class, the people of Pittsburgh, the regular everyday citizens that are affected by these decisions.

Alvarez: Tell folks more about what the Pittsburgh Progress is, where it’s going, what they’re going to find there, and what they can do to support you.

Mellon: We launched on Monday. We’re working up to becoming a regular daily publication. And so a lot has happened very quickly. We’ve had to come up with a business plan. We’ve had to come up with bylaws. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that we were able to sit down and think: ​“Oh, wait a minute, if we’re going to publish, we’ve got to have some stories in this damn thing.” So, we put together a slate of stories that we felt matched what we want to be and what we want to do. Our lead story right now is about organized nurses here who are fighting for their contract. That’s a big story in this town, where medical companies have a big footprint. Nurses on the front lines: that’s one of our lead stories. Natalie has a story on third places for the members of the LGBTQ community. We have a review of a new book on WPA workers. We’re really going to lean into high school sports because we’re not interested in covering our millionaire sports heroes. We are interested in covering the sports played by the sons and daughters of the working people of this region.

One of the things I learned working in newspapers as a young man is that weekly small daily newspapers in small towns were part of the fabric of that community. They held the community together by being a voice where people could look at that publication and recognize themselves and their community.

hat’s gone. What we see in a lot of newspapers, the Post-Gazette being an example of this, is an institution talking to other institutions. What happens when workers’ voices, regular peoples’ voices are lost? One of our goals is to create a publication in Pittsburgh that does not do that, where people can look at that publication and recognize themselves and recognize a community that they care about and that they’re willing to invest in.

Duleba: [The stories] build on each other, with the same concepts of building community. I think that as the contraction, consolidation, and gutting by private equity of these local newspapers that serve communities continues, it’ll be the workers who build things back up. We know how to cover our city. We know these communities. We don’t need permission from a rich person to do this work. Let’s do it ourselves.

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Maximillian Alvarez is editor-in-chief at the Real News Network and host of the podcast Working People, available at InThe​se​Times​.com. He is also the author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke.