When The Newspaper Guild and five other unions struck the Detroit newspapers last July, veteran reporter Jack Kresnak walked out too. It seemed natural. Like Lou Grant, he is the prototype Free Press person: a feisty, down-to-earth former copy kid with a big heart who still loves the paper after twenty-six years. But a month later he was back at work, having resigned from the guild.

Money pressures and college expenses haunted him. He had doctors' bills and feared losing his medical coverage despite the union's vows to pick it up. He fretted about being permanently replaced -- as his editors repeatedly threatened. Ultimately he decided, as he put it, that his family and his newspaper came before his union.

Consider the Detroit strike a parable about the state of American newspapering in the waning years of the century, a tough and confusing time to be a journalist. Many of the forces stirring in the industry have come together in Detroit -- a steady march by newspapers toward becoming the tight-fisted investments so praised by Wall Street. And in the newsrooms, a painful round of soul searching: Who are we, independent white-collar professionals, each on our own, or true-blue unionists, better off if we stick together? And how do we hang on here? Or do we even want to stay?

Like others in the newspaper industry, the heads of Gannett Company, Inc., and Knight-Ridder, Inc., who have been partners in Detroit since 1989 in a joint operating agreement (JOA), have groused generally for years about the high cost of printing today, about fewer readers, overmanned production jobs, and outdated work rules. But they apparently decided to seriously cut labor costs in Detroit in 1995.

Gannett, which publishes The Detroit News, and Knight-Ridder, the owner of the Detroit Free Press, clearly were weighing their options long before the contracts expired on April 30. Police in Sterling Heights, a suburb where the newspapers have a major printing plant, say newspaper officials approached them as early as January, warning of a possible strike and violence. And indeed, in no time at all, once negotiations broke down, the confrontation between the newspapers and their unions took on the aura of a battlefield.

 The newspapers' major bargaining issue with the production unions was relatively familiar: it wanted to cut jobs and change work rules. But with The Newspaper Guild, it wanted more. First of all, both papers wanted to switch to an individual merit pay system -- no major guild paper has such a permanent agreement -- and they wanted to cap overtime pay.

To the union it seemed that Gannett, which bargains separately with the guild, was seeking more than Knight-Ridder. Gannett wanted to allow and encourage reporters to shift from hourly to salaried status and then bargain individually, while nominally remaining in the union. The guild saw this as diminishing its collective strength, an invitation to slow suicide. Guild leaders say Knight-Ridder was not initially as firm on these demands as Gannett, although Knight-Ridder officials say they have the same goals as their JOA partner. "We're in a strike about rules from a bygone era," says Heath J. Meri- wether, executive editor of the Free Press.

 Both newspapers clearly studied the tactical mistakes of other owners. Unlike management in recent strikes in New York, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco, the Detroit newspapers were quickly able to put together a newspaper and distribute it. They did this by relying heavily on corporate loaners -- editors and reporters from other papers in the chains -- as well as permanent replacements for production workers, journalists, and, perhaps most important, delivery drivers. Twice, when angry strikers surrounded the News's printing plant, the newspaper used helicopters to
 get the papers over the picket line.

Robert Giles, the News's editor and publisher since 1989, says the papers' only goal was to become "more efficient and competitive." But the unions say his route to that goal is union-busting. They cite a quote from Giles in a St. Petersburg Times story in August about how the strike might end. "We're going to hire a whole new work force and go on without unions or they can surrender unconditionally and salvage what they can," he was quoted as saying.

 Even in Detroit, a city stuck on its gritty autoworker past, the unions weren't ready for that, or at least the guild wasn't.

Although the guild had led the walkout, some reporters found themselves unprepared to bargain in tandem with their blue-collar brethren, a psychic split with historical resonance. At its start sixty-two years ago, the guild's founders were divided about whether they were professionals or simply organized workers, and so in a compromise their labor organization was called a guild, not a union.

The split was reflected on the picket line, where a trickle of returnees turned into a disappointing flow for the guild as about 40 percent of the journalists in its ranks crossed over by October. In many cases, the returnees said they could not let the guild's loyalty to other unions sink their careers.

 Doron Levin, a Free Press business columnist, who went back to work after three weeks, announced upon his return that he no longer needed a union. Mitch Albom, another high-profile Free Press columnist, wrote on his first day back in early September that he was crossing over for the sake of the readers, and that he wanted to save the Free Press. He also vowed to give the guild much of his salary.

Less famous returnees quietly said they were doing it out of loyalty to their bosses, or to keep alive the two newspapers, which have not done well, losing thousands of readers under the Detroit Newspaper Agency, the Gannett/Knight-Ridder outfit that operates the papers under the JOA. Largely because of a JOA decision to drop its share of morning delivery, the News's circulation had plummeted to 354,403 daily just before the strike, down from 676,025 in March 1989. The Free Press's daily circulation was at 531,825, down from 629,295 at the same time in 1989. The six-year-old JOA has earned profits only in the last two years.

Some of those who went back were driven by the threat of being replaced. Less than a month after the strike began, the Free Press, which last year had editorialized against the use of permanent replacements, gave its workers a return-to-work deadline. The News didn't, saying it had enough returning workers, in addition to new ones.

To those still on the picket line, meanwhile, the returnees quickly became the enemy. Abandoning the other unions, some said, would not only be suicide for the guild in future negotiations, but would mean reneging on a promise. That, they said, they
 couldn't do.

Others stood on moral ground no higher than their fury over what they saw as an increasingly exhausting pace of work over the last few years, a speed-up without compensation. The promise of merit pay, in their eyes, was in reality the threat of a longer wage freeze. In its last contract with the JOA partners in 1992, the guild and ten unions had grudgingly accepted a pay freeze.

"Why am I here? The company has been good to me," said Toni Cybulski, a design director for the Free Press, one day at guild strike headquarters. Then she answered her question. "It's because I got into journalism in order to speak against things like this, a corporation without a conscience."

One late September night, as an army of demonstrators, some of whom would later be hurt by delivery trucks barrelling through the picket line, confronted replacement drivers and police at a printing plant, Barry Rohan, a twenty-year Free Press veteran, quietly admitted he had never been much of a union person before. He also wondered who would hire him, a fifty-nine-year-old business reporter. "But this radicalizes you," he added, a placard hoisted over his shoulder. "I'll never cross a picket line."

Kresnak, meanwhile, in his resignation letter to the guild, asked the union to take him back once the strike was over. He added that he hoped the union won.

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