Striking newspaper employees in Youngstown, Ohio, lost a battle this week when the controversial "scab" section of their Internet site was closed down.

The Vindicator newspaper had complained that strikers were using the Internet to harass replacement workers.

Editors and reporters from five different newspaper chains have been working two-week stints at The Vindicator, enabling it to publish during the 3 1/2-month strike.

Some 160 striking employees retaliated by posting photographs of various replacement workers -- along with their phone numbers and e-mail addresses -- on the Internet site. Readers sympathetic with the strikers were encouraged to write or phone the "scabs" to tell them to stay out of Youngstown.

"It was harassing, threatening, malicious," Mark Brown, general manager of The Vindicator, said yesterday.

His lawyer wrote the Internet service provider, Go Daddy Software Inc., to complain.

Go Daddy, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., shut down the strikers' site, called valleyvoiceonline.com, while the case was reviewed.

Christine Jones, general counsel for Go Daddy, said the strikers' Web site was restored after union members removed the section on replacement workers.

In its written polices, Go Daddy said it prohibits content that is "designed to defame, embarrass, harm, abuse, threaten, slander or harass third parties."

Debora Shaulis Flora, vice president of Local 34011 of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America, said Youngstown strikers would find new outlets to identify and lampoon replacement workers.

The union continues to list a "scab hall of shame" in its weekly strike newspaper, The Valley Voice. It pinpoints the 15 Vindicator employees who have crossed the union picket line and returned to work.

Replacement workers from other newspapers are an equally contentious issue in the strike.

Brown's family-owned newspaper is paying these imported workers $20 to $30 an hour, plus lodging costs and $75 a day in expense money. Top pay for Vindicator reporters is $17.83 an hour.

In addition to the money replacements make in Youngstown, they continue to receive salaries from their hometown papers. High-ranking editors from papers such as the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Ann Arbor (Mich.) News have worked for the Vindicator during the strike. Both of those papers are part of the Newhouse chain, which also owns the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Brown said newspaper chains merely are doing him a favor by providing replacement workers. He said The Vindicator is not for sale to Newhouse or anybody else.

Brown declined comment on whether he planned to hire permanent replacements to take the place of strikers. So far, only temporary employees have been hired during the strike.