Portland Reporter Publishing Company, Inc. (Created from Oregonian / Samuel Newhouse Newspaper strike) - Oregon 1960

Beautiful certificate from the Portland Reporter Publishing Company, Inc. issued in 1960. This historic document was printed by the Goes Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an eagle. This item has the signatures of the Company’s President, Robert D. Webb and Secretary, J. Wykoff, and is over 49 years old.


Certificate Vignette



In November 1959 the Portland Stereotypers Union struck Portland's two dailies, the Oregonian and the Oregon Journal. Members of other local unions refused to cross the Stereotypers' picket lines. The two dailies joined forces and continued publication of their respective papers despite the strike. The affected local unions organized Reporter to employ their idled workers and to compete with the struck dailies.

The Portland Reporter newspaper was born out of a long and bitter strike by union workers against the Samuel Newhouse-owned Oregonian, a morning paper, and the Oregon Journal, an afternoon newspaper controlled by trustees of the founding Jackson Family. The striked started in November 1959, and the unions launched the Portland Reporter as a weekly on Feb. 11, 1960. It went semi-weekly April 12, 1960, and daily (except Sunday) on Feb. 11, 1961. At its height, circulation reached 78,000 in spite of the fact that the two dailies continued to publish using non-union labor. In August 1961, Newhouse bought the Oregon Journal and moved it into his Oregonian plant. The Portland Reporter generated national attention for its challenge to Portland's newspaper monopoly until it folded in October 1964. Strikers continued to picket the dailies until April 4, 1965, but the Newhouse monopoly had essentially broken the strike long before.

History from the Northwest Digital Archives and OldCompany.com Stock Research Service.

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Article from the New York Times

New paper is set in Portland, Ore.

Semi-Weekly Tabloid Issued by Strikers Will Become a Daily About Nov. 1

Special to The New York Times, Sep. 18, 1960

PORTLAND, Ore. - A new daily newspaper will be published here beginning about Nov. 1, the officers of the Portland Reporter have announced.

The Reporter, a tabloid published twice a week, was the product of the long strike against the two established Portland dailies, The Oregonian and The Oregon Journal.

At present, four carloads of printing equipment are on sidings in Portland. The preses, linotypes and other machinery were shipped here from Miami where they were used in a strike-paper venture backed by Unitype, Inc., the publishing branch of the International typographers Union.

The machinery will be moved into an old building erected in 1017 as a stable for horses of the Wells Fargo Express Company. Unions outside the newspaper field bought the building, then leased it to the Portland Reporter for 3-1/2 per cent of the purchase and remodeling cost plus taxes.

The I.T.U. printing machinery is being leased to The Reporter for $10 a year, plus taxes and insurance premiums, with the provision that workmen using it must be members of the Portland locals of the I.T.U.

An application was filed a few days ago with the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to issue 175,000 shares of $10 par value stock.

The public offering would be 125,000 shares, the remainder would be divided among payments to the Portland I.T.U. local for services in installation, lease payments, and a block of 39,000 shares reserved for employee purchase.

The Reporter appeared in mid-February as a weekly published by members of the unions who walked out of The Oregonian and Oregon Journal on Nov. 9, 1959. It was an answer to the continued publication of two papers with non-union labor.

Now employs 250. From the eight-page weekly the tabloid has come to be a twice a week publication ranging from thirty-two to forty-eight pages. It prints advertising from most of the city's leading retail stores. Robert D. Webb, the publisher, now reports a circulation of 130,000.

No firm figures are available on the circulation of The Oregonian and Oregon Journal since the strike's beginning. Union sources have asserted both papers have lost substantially from The Oregonian's 235,000 and the Journal's 190,000 pre-strike circulations.