I am a charter subscriber to Labor Notes, or near enough. Yeah, I mean the AFL or some such subset of powerhouse unions, something that has the financial clout to actually run major media. The British Labour Party used to have a paper of its own. or near enough, until Maxwell ate it. It's a rhetorical question, but maybe not quite; at least thinking about why big labor doesn't try tells you somethingn about big labor as well as about the structure of the media. --jks
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>_____________
>
>what do you mean why doesn't labor run a newspaper? do you mean why is
>there no national paper run by the AFL-CIO? there are quite a few
>independent labor papers around the country. two of the ones i read
>regularly are LABOR NOTES out of Detroit and THE WORKING STIFF JOURNAL out
>of my old home of Austin. both of these papers do exclusive labor
>reporting, are not "snoozers", and report from a strict rank and file
>reform perspective. while WSJ is mostly local, LN is international, with
>pretty wide distribution.
>
>another form of labor publication that is important to note are strike
>papers. in Detroit, while the newspaper workers were on strike (for 6
>years) they managed to publish a weekly strike paper called the Detroit
>Sunday Journal. it was meant to be an alternative to the scab papers, so it
>didn't report exclusively on labor issues and politics. in fact, a good
>deal of it was tv listings. but it was a hell of a paper, and was
>incredibly popular in Detroit. the newspaper workers on strike in Seattle
>also published a strike paper. i believe you can read it online, although i
>don't know the url offhand.
>
>again, an example of how if we define "labor" as the AFL-CIO, we get a far
>different picture than if we define "labor" as the rank and file.
>
>David Hill New York City
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