When Steve Mellon showed up to sing Christmas carols on the doorstep of his boss John Robinson Block’s house, he wasn’t sure what to expect.
Mellon is a photographer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but has been on strike for more than two years — since October 2022 — in what has become the longest ongoing work stoppage in the United States. During that time, Mellon and other members of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, which represents newsroom employees, have tried a lot of different ways to get the attention of the leadership at Block Communications Inc., the parent company that owns the Post-Gazette, in order to end their strike. In some ways, this was just another stunt: Mellon had joined with the Pittsburgh Labor Choir that night to sing labor-themed Christmas carols on his boss's doorstep.
It was Dec. 18, exactly a week before Christmas. They opened with “The Whole Wide World Around”
“Let every voice be thunder, let every heart be stone / Until all tyrants perish, our work shall not be done,” they sang.
Mellon mostly just mouthed the words — he was there because of his position as a member in the union, not the quality of his singing voice. The choir had already sung a few carols at the home of another BCI board member earlier that night without a response. Earlier in the strike, Mellon had been to Block’s home a few times, without the choir, and Block had never opened the door — and had rarely spoken publicly about the labor dispute at all. Plus, in Pittsburgh’s long history of labor disputes, Mellon had never heard of any major labor negotiations taking place in such a setting.
Still, Mellon dutifully rang Block’s doorbell. Only this time, the door opened and out stepped Block, wearing, despite it being past 9 p.m., the same type of suit and gold tie clip that Mellon says he would wear around the office everyday. And Block had a smile on his face.
“I'm Steve Mellon. I'm one of the striking workers at the Post-Gazette,” Mellon said after the song came to an end. “This is the Pittsburgh Labor Choir.”
Block thanked the carolers and acknowledged how damaging the strike had been, Mellon said. Then he began talking about the dire state of journalism, Mellon said, before interrupting himself.
“It's cold. I'm tired of standing here in the cold,” Block said. “Why don't you come in?”
‘I won't say that I'm totally into [the holidays]’
Two days after his encounter with Mellon, Block spoke again at his home, this time with WESA, about the encounter and the ongoing strike.
The fact that Block commented on the strike at all, let alone opened the door to the strikers after more than two years — and then two days later, opened his home again to WESA — was unprecedented in a labor dispute that had been escalating for years even before the strike began.
The third-generation media scion did not host many holiday gatherings this year, he said, because his second wife, an aviation lawyer and the former Inspector General of the United States Department of Transportation, Mary Schiavo, had been away at her home in South Carolina. There were only a few “token” presents under the tree, Block said, as his only daughter is now 18.
Block said he’d bought Schiavo a piece of jewelry that former First Lady Jackie Kennedy wore at the White House, and he was excited for her to see it. “It’s a very minor piece,” he said.
Block, who turned 70 in October, isn’t the kind of person to be excessively moved by the holiday spirit. He said he likes the story of the Grinch but thinks most holiday movies, such as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” are played so frequently that he can’t really pick out any favorites.
“I won't say that I'm totally into [the holidays], but I'm not going to be out of it either,” he said.
He does have fond memories of Christmas with his daughter.
“There's nothing like a small child waking up on Christmas morning,” he said. “We were up at about 8, maybe [had] some coffee at 8:30, and we wouldn't really get into the Christmas tree probably until about 9, which I thought was a civilized time.”
One of Block’s favorite Christmas presents was an audio recorder his dad bought for him in the early 1970s, before they were common. Block said he always preferred writing stories to interviewing people.
Was it holiday cheer that led Block to the door to the carolers? Perhaps, with his wife out of town, he just wanted some company. Regardless, after more than two years, Block was now face-to-face with a striking Post-Gazette employee.
“I don't consider myself at war with these people,” he said. “We have a labor industrial action going on. But they're human beings. They're at my door. And I do enjoy Christmas carols.”
“As long as everybody kept away from our disagreements, it was fine.”
Waiting for this moment
There were many times during the past few years when Mellon had dreamed of a moment like this — where he could speak directly to a person who he believed could bring the strike to an end.
“If I had known you guys were coming, I would have had something out,” Mellon said Block told the carolers as he walked them into the living room and took a seat in an upholstered wingback armchair. “I’ve got some Heineken?”
Despite some legal victories for the union during the past year (including one just before Christmas), Mellon said he has learned to temper his expectations regarding an end to the work stoppage — after all, this was the third Christmas season he was spending on strike, and holiday parties had become awkward.
“Everybody there is talking about their jobs and their vacations and they're talking about the things they're doing, the car they bought,” he said. “And you're like, ‘I'm on strike. I'm not doing any of those things.’ And you just feel like the world is spinning and you're not on it.”
Mellon said he and his fellow strikers feel as though they are existing in a parallel world running alongside the real one that they used to live in. They meet weekday mornings over Zoom or in a sparse office that was donated to them by the United Steelworkers union, where they talk tactics and progress. For Mellon, that usually means talking about the story he is working on for the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the online publication run by the Post-Gazette’s striking workers. He also sits on the union’s Health and Welfare Committee, where he hears about colleagues who once spent their life’s work dedicated to the Post-Gazette but are now struggling to pay their utility bills.
But everyone’s challenges are unique, Mellon said, and for him the biggest struggle has been the impact on his identity. He’s been a journalist in this city since 1989 and at the Post-Gazette since 1997.
“I would tell everybody I met: ‘I'm Steve Mellon. I work at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.’ I was proud of that,” he said. “I'm no longer that guy anymore.”
In Block’s living room, Mellon said, he believed he was looking at a man who could make him that guy again. But Mellon’s head was spinning. He was surrounded by golden-framed paintings that looked like they could fill the walls of the city’s’ exclusive Duquesne Club. He was trying to listen to Block’s musings about the state of the media landscape, while also thinking about what he could say to help the strikers who he would see at their morning meeting the next day.
“My synapses were going, ‘What's going on here? This is so bizarre,’” he said. “This was not on my bucket list. I did not count on this to happen.”
But one of the reasons that Mellon said he had shown up at Block’s doorstep is that, on some level, he believed that he and Block did share something important in common.
“I can't appeal to him as a businessman because I'm not a businessman. I can't appeal to him as an owner or as a person who has any ownership stake in anything, because I don't,” Mellon said. “But I know he loves newspapers.”
Finally, Mellon said he asked Block directly — what could Block do to help end the strike?
Who can end it?
To hear Block tell it, his biggest legacy will be helping to stop the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers from leaving town.
It was the 1990s, and a measure to help fund new venues to replace the aging Three Rivers Stadium had already been voted down in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, the owner of the Tribune-Review, Richard Scaife, was leading a crusade against public funding.
“With all due modesty, my Post-Gazette colleagues didn't know how to win that one,” he told WESA.
Block said he had to tell his more journalistically experienced colleagues that they needed to keep hammering their message home.
“This isn't intellectual. It's emotional,” Block said he told other editors at the time. “This is not about being smart. This is about winning.”
Block said he pushed the Post-Gazette to write what some editors told him was an excessive number of editorials pushing the city to find a way to fund new stadiums. According to Block, those efforts made a difference.
But despite his past influence, Block told WESA and the strikers that he doesn’t think he has the power to end the ongoing strike. “I'm a minority owner. There is a majority that out-votes me,” he said.
Block owns 25% of the company, and Mellon said Block told him that he was not happy with the company’s lawyers responsible for the labor negotiations. Block told Mellon that, if they could all get in a room together, he would be able to resolve the strike himself.
“It's frustrating for me because I'm not directly involved in labor relations. And I have to think that I could get it solved if I were,” Block told WESA later. “But people other than me are the experts and they're supposed to take care of it. And so I'm on the sidelines like everybody else. And unhappy about that.”
Block has, in the past, characterized himself as the family member most invested in the success of the company’s newspaper holdings. He has the title of “Publisher and Editor-in-Chief” of the Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade, while his twin brother, Allan, is the CEO of the entire company, which includes TV stations, as well as cable, internet and phone services across several cities.
In September 2018, Block told the Pittsburgh Quarterly that the Post-Gazette had been losing as much $22 to $30 million per year since 2004 and that some members of the family were more eager to stop spending money on the Post-Gazette. “What people in Pittsburgh must understand is that, in my family, I am the one who stood in the way,” he said.
Then the following February, Block entered the paper’s North Shore newsroom late on a Saturday night for a "bizarre" visit, according to several employees present. He lamented the paper’s growing financial troubles and how badly he felt his family was being treated by the staff unions, and reminded his then-12-year-old daughter, who according to witness statements, was shaking and in tears, that she came from an august lineage.
“Do you want to be high class or low class? You’re a Block, you’re one of us! You have to learn how to lead!” he said, according to one union member who was present. A subsequent statement issued by Post-Gazette parent company Block Communications Inc. disagreed with the characterization of what happened and also included “sincere regrets for his conduct” that night.
A few years later, Block was still blaming his employees for any tensions.
“I get along great with the people who want to get along with me,” he told the Columbia Journalism Review in September 2022, a month before the strike broke out. “And in recent times, you know, some people don’t want to be my friend, which is fine.”
(Among those Block has occasionally struggled to get along with in recent years is his brother Allan, according to a lawsuit Allan filed earlier this year against BCI and members of the board, including Block. That suit alleged John Block tried and failed to wrest control of the company away from Allan. In court filings, Allan alleged John and representatives of other family members drafted plans to look into a sale of the company, without circulating the draft to Allan before the board meeting. After Allan sued, the board fired him as CEO. Allan has since been reinstated and the lawsuit dropped.)
In response to a question about whether his other family members loved the news business, Block told WESA: “You can infer what seems to be the answer to that,” he said. “But I love the news business.” And he said: “I'm an individual. I'm not anyone that I'm related to who might have different views.”
After about an hour with Block, Mellon worried that he was running out of time to make his case. Block had been pontificating about a variety of subjects, such as the depressing state of cable news and the fact that people didn’t send Christmas cards anymore.
But before they left, the choir members asked Block if he would sing some carols with them and Block cheerily agreed, even posing for a photo published by the Union Progress afterward. They sang the tune of “O’ Little Town of Bethlehem” with the lyrics to “Joe Hill.” The ballad is about a labor organizer who appears as an apparition to say he was killed by his bosses and then framed.
“Joe Hill ain’t dead,” he says to me — “Joe Hill ain’t never died:
“Where working folks are out on strike — Joe Hill is at their side.”
As Mellon was leaving, he asked Block whether the union could make a statement at the company’s next board meeting. Mellon said Block was noncommittal.
What it meant
Block told WESA and Mellon that he wants the Post-Gazette to thrive again. But he also said he believes the biggest cause of the paper’s financial woes is not the strike — rather, Block points to a business model that can no longer support the kind of paper he once ran.
For example, when Princess Diana died in 1997, Block said he ran down to the presses in Toledo and told them to stop printing and prepare for a new front page with the breaking news. He flew reporters to London that week to continue to cover that event.
Those days, with a 350-person staff, have passed, Block said — but not his love for the business.
“News ink is in my blood. I loved the smell of the ink mist from the presses,” Block said. “That's not supposed to be healthy, but it's like the person who pumps gas: If you are honest, you probably do like that smell.”
But the meeting with Mellon and the Pittsburgh Labor Choir hasn’t appeared to substantially change his outlook regarding labor relations at the Post-Gazette.
“I don't know that I felt any differently [afterward],” Block told WESA “I hope [the strike] ends on a personal level. These people are my friends. I hope they feel that way about me, but I feel that way about them.”
As for Mellon, he has gone back and forth in his feelings about the encounter. After it was over, he said, he kept thinking about things that he could have said to Block that might have left a more persuasive impression. He even wondered whether he should have interrupted Block and gotten angry.
“As much as I appreciate John Block opening his house to us, he's got a magnificent house and he's wearing a suit with a gold tie clip,” Mellon said. “And I know that the people that I'm going to have to go talk to in the morning at the 10 a.m. meeting are struggling to pay their bills.”
More than anything, Mellon said, he wished he had done more to get across to Block the amount of suffering that the strike had caused him and the other strikers.
“Just as a fellow human being,” he said. “Not as the owner of a newspaper, not as somebody that we're in a labor struggle against, but just as a person who has been in the newsroom and has seen so many of these people over and over and over again.”
Block said he has hosted Post-Gazette employees inside his house for holiday parties in the past.
“Mostly management, but we never worried about who was not management,” Block said. “I mean, I can't have the whole newsroom over here because this house isn't big enough — but a lot of people have been here.”
Still, Block said he thinks he understands their suffering.
“Come on. Come on,” he told WESA. “Of course I understand why it’s hard for them to be on strike.”
Block said his feelings extend also to people who have crossed the picket line.
“I have goodwill towards all the people,” he said. “The people who decided to work and the people who decided not to work. This was a difficult choice for all of them. I'm sorry for all of them, for whatever they decided to do, that we didn't avert this.”
Block and his wife are both licensed airplane pilots, and he has said in the past that one of the lessons he has learned from being a pilot is that it’s usually not just one mistake that causes a plane to crash; rather, it’s a series of cascading mistakes. And likewise, he has said, a pilot can recover from a potential disaster by fixing their mistakes. “If you start doing things right, you’ll be able to catch up and save the day.”
Mellon said he is hopeful that his time with Block this holiday season might prove to be such an opportunity to correct course, ease tensions between labor and management, and maybe even bring an end to the strike. Mellon said he isn’t sure whether he’s being naive to believe Block when he says he truly feels powerless to end the labor dispute — but the person Mellon said he met this holiday seemed to be, at the very least, genuinely interested in the strike ending. And when Mellon originally walked in the door, he hadn’t known what to expect.
“He could yell at me. He could throw us out. He could rant at us. But he did not do that,” Mellon said. “He sat down and he talked with us for just about an hour. And I take that as a hopeful sign.”
