Guild Fighting to Save Jobs and Journalism Itself

Like manufacturing workers who fear they'll show up one morning and find out their plant is closing, newspaper workers go to work wondering if today is the day that their publisher will announce layoffs, buy-outs and other cost-cutting measures that will change their lives — and change their communities.

The deluge of cuts in the newspaper industry hasn't just devastated the tens of thousands of workers who have lost jobs. It's hurting the ability of journalists to cover city hall, local schools, police and the other vital beats that hold public officials accountable.

Newspapers large and small have slashed staff over the past two years, from Boston to Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles and everywhere in between. At the San Francisco Chronicle, where newsroom workers are represented by the Northern California Media Guild-CWA, management is in the process of cutting 25 percent of the newsroom staff — 80 reporters, photographers, copy editors and other workers, and another 20 managers.

"That's not just trimming the fat, that's an amputation. That's losing a limb," Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, told the paper for its own story about the cuts.

Profit and Loss

Wall Street has twisted journalism's traditional values as newspaper companies change hands, going from private owners to public or small companies to bigger companies, all with boards and shareholders demanding profits.

The crisis is industry-wide: Between newspapers, magazines and broadcast media, an estimated 30,000 jobs were cut in 2005 and 2006, with several thousand at newspapers alone.

The irony with newspapers is that most of them still make money, a lot of money in some cases — just not as much as Wall Street demands.

"These guys got used to monopoly profits over a long period of time — 10 percent, then 15 percent, 17, 22. The profit margin kept increasing to the point where some might call it obscene," TNG-CWA President Linda Foley said. "It wasn't sustainable. But there's still all this pressure on publicly traded companies to continue to bring in those earnings."

Foley said newspapers haven't yet figured out how to compete with the Internet, which has eroded newspapers' advertising revenue, especially for classified ads. Meanwhile, most papers continue to make their content available online for free, cutting into newspaper sales.

Saving Jobs and Journalism

When downsizing happens, the Newspaper Guild works swiftly to reduce the number of cuts and minimize their damage through buyouts. Guild leaders in San Francisco negotiated buyouts at the Chronicle worth two weeks of pay per year of service, up to a full year, with health coverage for an equal amount of time.

At the San Jose Mercury News last fall, the company announced plans to lay off 100 workers; the Guild got it down to 27. Where possible, locals have made sacrifices to save jobs. At the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire, Guild members voted overwhelmingly this summer to give back a week of vacation in 2008 to avoid immediate layoffs.

The problem with givebacks, Foley said, is that contracts have gotten so lean there's no wiggle room anymore — virtually nowhere in health care, retirement plans or other benefits to make cuts to stave off job loss.

But as illustrated by an appeal the Wall Street Journal reporters made to shareholders, newspaper workers have a natural ally in their readership. By engaging the communities they serve in their fight — from parades and demonstrations to letters to publishers and advertiser boycotts — Guild members across the country have been enormously successful in getting readers to stand with them in battles for contracts and jobs.

"The goal is to educate the community and rally support around the idea that, 'This is our paper and we have a stake in what happens to it,'" Foley said.