YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Two reporters crossed picket lines and returned to work at The Vindicator newspaper yesterday, but about 140 other employees risked their jobs by remaining on strike.

Vindicator General Manager Mark Brown said the process of hiring permanent replacements for the strikers was under way. Their jobs will be filled as soon as newcomers can be interviewed, tested and put on the payroll, he said.

Strikers would then be placed on a hiring list. They could be recalled to work only if vacancies occurred.

Brown said he had no choice but to find permanent replacements. Unionized Vindicator employees in the newsroom, circulation and classified advertising departments have been on strike for more than eight months.

They voted 85-17 Wednesday night not to accept a contract that would have paid them raises and bonuses totaling 6 percent during the next three years.

"This is such a strange strike," Brown said. "We've lost money for eight years, yet we put a pay increase on the table that the union asked for. Then the union turns it down. They've turned down settlements on three separate occasions, even though their international recommended that they accept them."

Striking workers are members of Local 34011 of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America. The local president, Anthony Markota, said his membership was so fed up with the family-owned Vindicator that it saw no choice but to keep striking for a better contract.

"They're willing to lose their jobs over it. That's how bad it is," Markota said.

Most strikers were on the streets yesterday, handing out leaflets urging Mahoning Valley residents to drop their Vindicator subscriptions and pull their advertising.

Union members said they were especially frustrated with Brown, contending that he had ignored inefficiencies and morale problems at his 64,000-circulation daily.

"It's the worst place I've ever worked," said striking reporter Maraline Kubik. "You spend most of your time navigating through newsroom politics because there are many managers who oversee only one or two people."

Markota said his members did not understand how Brown could plead poverty while employing at least 18 managers to supervise a newsroom with 53 workers. The paper also uses 61 stringers who are paid by the story.

Kubik, 43, receives $300 a week in strike pay from the union, less than half of what she made at The Vindicator. As bad as things are, she said, she still hopes Brown will work with the union for an equitable contract settlement.

She is most concerned about proposed contract language that she said would permit newsroom employees to be placed in new sections, then laid off because they lack seniority.

Brown said such fears were unfounded. Overall seniority would be the prevailing factor in any layoffs, he said.

Moreover, even though the Vindicator has lost money since 1997, it never laid off anybody, Brown said.

Only 24 of 179 union members have crossed the picket line and returned to The Vindicator since the strike began Nov. 16. But a dozen others have changed jobs or careers.

Striking reporter Steven Siff was the latest. He resigned from The Vindicator yesterday.

Siff, 33, said he could not cross a picket line to return to the paper. But he will not remain with the union, either. Instead, he has enrolled in a journalism doctoral program at Ohio University.

As the labor troubles drag on, anger fills Vindicator Square. A handful of strikers picket there each day while muscular guards in combat fatigues keep an eye on the newspaper's buildings and equipment.

Strikers call the guards "goons," and complain that Brown pays them far better than he did his staff.

Joe Surko, who worked in The Vindicator's circulation department for three years until going on strike, said he made $8 an hour and never got a raise. Unlike Kubik and others on the higher-paid newsroom staff, he now makes as much in strike pay as he did at The Vindicator. He said Brown should be ashamed of that.

Brown, though, said the wages he paid were fair. What is out of line, he said, is a union that pays certain strikers so much to picket that they have no incentive to vote for a settlement.