People's World

PEOPLE’S WORLD. From its first issue on 1 January 1938 until its last on 31 May 1986, the People’s World (known popularly as the PW) print edition reported on labor and radical news to a milieu within and beyond the Communist Party of the West Coast. Succeeding the narrower Western Worker, the PW brought together Communists from California, Oregon, and Washington in a united front of sorts with progressive unionists, especially of the longshore and seafaring trades, and with prominent liberal supporters from Los Angeles to Seattle.

Early on, the paper came to be known for its lively style, fashioned by Daily Worker veteran Al Richmond, and dramatized by the extremely popular columnist Mike Quin. A reflection of the West Coast Communist movement – less restricted to insular ethnic milieux and more integral to multiracial milieux than its East Coast equivalent – the PW achieved an easy acceptability in union and intellectual circles rare for radicals after 1920. In its years as a daily (1939–1949), it had a circulation in the tens of thousands.

The PW suffered, like the rest of the Communist movement, from McCarthyism and from internal woes of the 1950s–1960s. It succeeded to an extraordinary extent in maintaining (or reestablishing) ties after the worst of the repression, reemerging with prestigious supporters especially among movements for racial equality. More than any other Communist publication, certainly, the PW effected an accommodation with the changing political moods of the 1960s. Progressive Democratic Party candidates for local Bay Area and congressional offices, some of them elected, found in the PW a valuable source of support, and reciprocated in public gestures.

In 1968, editor Al Richmond left the PW after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Veteran Black journalist Carl Bloice took the editorial reins, and the PW continued to provide important coverage of current events (most notably, César Chávez’s United Farm Workers crusade, as seen by reporter Sam Kushner). The united front character of the paper diminished, however, and the Communist Party remained virtually alone in its support and staffing of the paper. In 1986 the PW merged with the Daily World to form the People’s Daily World, which, despite retention of several prominent PW writers, more nearly resembled the New York than the California version of Left journalism. Later, due to financial constraints, shrinking readership, and the 1991 split in the Communist Party after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European States, the People’s Daily World become the People’s Weekly World (PWW).

In the mid-2000s, the PWW editorial board moved its office to Chicago, the birthplace of the CPUSA. By this time, the PWW editorial board comprised party stalwarts such as Tim Wheeler, Fred Gaboury, Roberta Wood, and Teresa Albano, and reflected a more-open, popular front approach of the CPUSA’s new national chair Sam Webb.

While the PWW print edition retained a cohort of a few thousand paid subscribers, as well as a modest distribution network in local union halls, community centers, campaign headquarters, and among peace activists across the country (with a print run totaling about 10,000 copies weekly), its print and distribution costs mounted. Like its predecessor papers, the PWW could still rely on CPUSA members, chapters, and clubs to organize regular regional events, banquets, and dinners as fundraisers for the newspaper. However, by the late-2000s the CPUSA and PWW editorial Board agreed it was time to suspend publication of the print publication and make a transition to a daily online news source that would not only publish original daily content, but would also occasionally incorporate video, podcast, and other multimedia formats. This new daily news source would become the online People’s World and carry forward some of the traditions of the West Coast print edition.

In a 2014 pre-convention report, People’s World editorial board member Terrie Albano noted that the publication’s readership growth was slow and modest. She wrote, “When we started out on this journey [in 2010], our circulation averaged around 2,500 readers a day, we had a negligible presence on social networks,” and email PW subscriptions “numbered about 3,000…” However, she added optimistically, “Today the situation is quite different.” In particular, Albano boasted about the PW Facebook presence, which had grown to 56,000 “likes.”

By 2020, the PW had nearly 90,000 Facebook “likes,” but that number only touched on its continued relevance, especially to the labor movement. Its acceptance among trade unions, central labor councils, and state federations continued to grow, and PW articles were reprinted and shared through union email lists. Additionally, PW articles were reprinted in labor publications, such as the St. Louis Labor Tribune and the Workday Minnesota. Like during the CPUSA “Hey Day,” PW reporters were again invited to AFL-CIO executive council meetings and PW editorial board member John Wojick served as vice president of the International Labor Communications Association, the professional organization for trade union publications and media production departments of national, regional and/or local affiliates of the AFL-CIO.

The PW’s unique grassroots coverage of labor, community, peace, student, and electoral struggles, coupled with the CPUSA’s Marxist analysis, built a small, but growing niche of readers for the publication. As of December 2020, the PW had 3,200,000 annual readers, roughly 267,000 readers per-month – a far cry from its modest paid subscription. The online PW’s editorial board was also much younger than its print predecessors, with young activists C.J. Atkins, Chauncey Robinson, and Al Neal playing leadership roles. Like its West Coast predecessor, the online People’s World maintained and reestablished ties with the peace, labor, Black Lives Matter, and Poor People’s Movement, among others, while expanding its coverage to include issues like climate change and native rights; of course, the PW also remained a voice for internationalism, Marxism, and the Communist Party. In the twenty-first century online media landscape, the PW continued the radical traditions of the socialist and communist publications of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Richmond, Al. A Long View From the Left. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.

People’s World Editorial Board. “Convention Discussion: Peoplesworld.org – Breakthroughs & Challenges,” April 18, 2014.

Robinson, Chauncey. “3 MILLION REACHED! – PW website traffic 2020,” internal report in author’s (Pecinovsky) possession.