She stood with striking news workers — after a 100-mile drive and a toll — and then she drove back home

Diane Smith’s nonwork Twitter handle is @IntrepidReportr.

It’s not out of character for this not-shy working news reporter for the Kent, Ohio, Record-Courier to jump into her car to drive from her home in Akron to Pittsburgh to stand with striking Post-Gazette workers.

“LITERALLY,” as she tweeted at one point, announcing her planned Thursday 100-mile drive.

“How could I not?”

She hadn’t yet stood in a picket line, but she knew she easily could be standing in these journalists’ shoes.

She’s been wearing out shoe leather pounding the streets as a Record-Courier news reporter since 1994, a job she loves, and over the years, watched fellow journalists pick up picket signs to protest poor pay and poor treatment by their employers. She knows a lot about that.

But this spring, the half dozen journalists in her newsroom formed a tiny unit of the NewsGuild of Northeast Ohio, Local 1, organized by some of the now Communication Workers of America staffers who are currently working in Pittsburgh.

She likes them and learned from them and is inspired by them and by other recent successful union organizing drives. “I just felt like I was part of something bigger than myself.”

She’s also been inspired by Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh sisters and brothers she’d not yet met, because, as she tweeted, they “are fierce and badass. I am in awe of their strength.”

She even renamed her Twitter account, “Diane stands with the Pittsburgh strikers.” Strangers, but she knows they have a lot in common just as story collectors and storytellers.

Like most journalists, Smith doesn’t make a lot of money. Knowing that most of the drive to Pittsburgh would be on the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes, she prepaid $10 into her E-ZPass account that she hoped would cover tolls.

But while she was on the road on Thursday, a vacation day, she discovered that she’d been charged $10.75 for a previous trip, “wiping out” her E-ZPass account.

“Thanks,” is how she started that tweet.

She made to the newspaper workers’ North Shore picket line around 2 p.m., and soon posted on Twitter a quartet of photos, including one of herself with a picket sign hanging from her neck, “Hanging out with the @PGHGuild.”

The sign covered the old yellow button she wore from her late dad’s Teamsters union.

She spent her three hours on the picket line talking with workers and others and one dog. She doesn’t know if she made any of them feel better.

“I don’t know if I alone have that kind of power in me,” she said. But she said she felt a lift and that she gained needed perspective.

“I think just the group — what impressed me is the solidarity of the group. I think there are a lot of people across the country [who] would be there if they could.”

She would recommend it, because she had a blast.

“Omigosh! I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing today,” she exclaimed after the picket paused for the night at 5 p.m. and she walked back to her Kia Soul, parked on the street for a total cost of $14. She needed to drive home.

She believes that she and her colleagues in her tiny newsroom unit and local and connected unions in Northeast Ohio — given specific situations there and the generally perilous state of the news industry nationwide — could someday wind up in a similar situation as unfolded in Pittsburgh this month and they, too, could wind up on strike and protesting their employers’ imposed conditions.

“I’m kinda seeing the handwriting on the wall,” she said, before heading out. She was hungry for soup, so she stopped at an Eat’n Park for the soup and salad bar and a hot roast beef sandwich before getting back on the turnpikes for the 1½-hour ride home.

On the picket lines in Pittsburgh, people were saying the word “solidarity.”

But this Akron woman — she describes herself in that Twitter profile as “Journalist, family history blogger, auntie, bestie, Jesus lover, 2nd gen. Tupperware diva & 2nd gen, union” — was showing solidarity, and she can show you some receipts.

“You guys have our solidarity today,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“We may need yours tomorrow.”