D&C journalists rail against Gannett
The folks at the Newspaper Guild are launching an ad campaign to get public support for their labor dispute with Gannett.
Editor and Publisher reports:
The radio spot asks listeners: “Notice that our only daily newspaper has less news and fewer features?” The voice-over continues that the new contract posited by management wants to strip benefits and job protections from newsroom employees.
“So who is losing? The newspaper’s hard workers and its readers.” The spot concludes by asking listeners to e-mail Kane and sign the online petition.
The ad campaign cost about five figures confirmed Rochester Guild President Steve Orr.
According to the E&P, the D&C workers haven’t had a contract since 1992, making it “the longest-running labor dispute in Rochester.”
The Guild’s ad does make some good points. There are legitimate points of criticism of the D&C, and I frequently wish it did a better job covering issues of real concern in the city. As for the actual labor dispute, I really don’t know enough to have an educated opinion. The Newspaper Guild’s website and online petition is here, and it sure seems like they have a point:
If you’ve read the Democrat and Chronicle for even a few years, you’ve noticed: The sections are slimmer, the photos less plentiful, the stories less in-depth. The stock pages are bare-bones. Our staff is shrinking, with job after job eliminated.
…And we work in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Will jobs be cut? Will expenses be slashed — again? Is there another benefit that Gannett could possibly find to reduce?
They’ve already gutted our pension and life insurance, cruelly denied us access to a 401(K) retirement savings plan, cancelled health care for retirees and exacted a $1,800-a-year penalty for any employee who wants to insure his or her spouse.
Our contractual minimum salaries are among the lowest of any unionized newspaper in North America.* Some actually are below the state minimum wage!
….And while we don’t know this year’s profit goal, rest assured it’s a handsome one. Company-wide, Gannett newspapers earned 25 percent before taxes last year.** In Rochester, the margin typically is higher than that.
*The Newspaper Guild of America, salary report, 2003;
**Merrill Lynch Newspaper Industry, April 8, 2004.
This ties in with the larger newspaper narrative all over the country. Around the 1980’s (I might have the date wrong) Wall Street realized that newspapers could actually turn a tidy profit, and started running them to generate said gobs of cash. Now that papers have hit hard times, papers are cutting costs, doing a lot less “investigative reporting”, and frequently copying press releases verbatim. Which would be fine in a business, but the press is the Fourth Estate, charged by our founding fathers to maintain a watch on the doings-on of the government. When the Fourth Estate abandons its journalistic integrity for the lure of greed, the civic sphere as a whole suffers.
Of course, maybe Gannett is running the D&C differently than (nearly) every other paper out there / that they own. Maybe the Newspaper guild is greedily asking for luxuries like a salary higher than minimum wage. I don’t have enough information to be the judge in this specific instance.
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If the founding fathers “charged” the fourth estate to do what you said, it was just another unfunded mandate. I didn’t realize they went back that far! Newspapers have to turn a profit for stockholders.
Yeah, they just don’t make ‘em like Thomas Paine anymore. I don’t think he considered it an unfunded mandate. He just considered it part of the job. http://www.ushistory.org/Paine/index.htm
Good catch, Sahar.
Of course papers do have to turn a profit, but I think they’d have a better chance of doing that if they attracted more good reporters and put out a product people wanted.
I’d subscribe to the D&C if they had better reporting.
Sounds like you’re assuming the reporters there aren’t good. I’ve seen quality engineers do an increasingly bad job the more they’re overworked, underscheduled, unappreciated, and working in a climate of fear and bad morale.
I’d add that when you’re the only print publication in town and there are small businesses dying to get noticed, you can turn a profit just fine without reporting a thing.
Newspapers were first hurt by radio, then TV. They are not the monopoly that they used to be. Now the internet has come along and taken another chunk of readers and revenues away. Newspapers will survive the internet challenge, but they will have to downsize to keep profit levels where the owners (i.e. stockholders) want them. Funny thing is you may even be a “stockholder” in Gannett if your pension or investment package uses Gannett as an investment.
Of course, the trouble is that in most cities, the greatest resources for digging up news tend to be found in the local newspaper. Papers like those in New York, Chicago or Washington have changed their delivery and model to fit the online community, but in our case it seems that a lot of the brain-trust had been drained long before the Internet presented any problem.
We’ve covered the strike in January. There was a lively discussion in the comments. More the Newpaper Guide actions against the D&C, here and here.