Proposal could avert layoffs

MediaNews has informed the Guild that it intends to lay off five newsroom staffers at the Los Angeles Daily news by the end of the week as part of its declared need to reduce Daily News newsroom expenses by 15 percent. As reported yesterday to Guild members, the positions identified by the company include three metro reporters, one photographer and one graphic artist.

The Guild has been discussing a plan with the company that could avert or reduce the planned lay offs by allowing some workers at the Daily News to volunteer for a reduced work week for a period of six months.

While the Guild is opposed to any reduction in force by the company, such a plan may offer an option in lieu of more drastic workforce reductions.

Guild members that opt to take the reduced hours under the proposed plan would retain the same hourly rate of pay and still receive all health benefits afforded to full time employees.

Guild representatives are meeting with the company on Wednesday to further discuss this proposal.

Tuesday Roundup

Three plus six equals one

It's been confirmed that April 20 is LANG's D-Day for transferring copy editors of the Daily News, PT and Breeze to the universal copy desk at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune facility in West Covina. Daily Breeze EiC Phillip Sanfield sent out a memo on Monday informing Breeze and former-PT copy editors that Monday April 20, the day following Long Beach Grand Prix coverage, would be their first day in West Covina. Daily News employees report being told the same date.

MediaNews options

Gary Scott has an excellent article on the options available to MediaNews Group in the wake of the foreberance agreement recently negotiated with its lenders and announced last week. This includes a startling prediction by former Los Angeles Daily News editor Ron Kaye that MediaNews will unload all of the LANG papers and be gone from Southern California by mid-summer.

Better late than never

After years of giving away content for free on the Internet and letting online aggregators steal content with few repercussions, it appears that the newspaper industry is finally beginning to see that content costs money to generate and news organizations should be compensated for this work appearing in the digital world.

The AP on Monday announced that while it prefers to work out solutions with websites now using its content without permission, such as Huffington Post, Yahoo and Google, the trade association would resort to legal remedies to either block unpermitted use of AP content or force such users to pay for the content.

“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,“ AP Chairman and MNG head Dean Singleton said at the AP annual meeting being held in San Diego. "We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more," said Singleton, using the oft-quoted line from mentally deranged and obsolete newsman Howard Beal from the film "Network."

Friday round-up

MediaNews Group has reached a forbearance agreement with its lenders, according to a report in the New York Times. A forbearance agreement is where the debtor and the creditor both acknowledge there is a financial problem and arrange a payment schedule that will allow the debtor to make moves to regain its financial footing. While not specified in the NYT article, it should be noted that forbearance agreements typically include a drop-dead date by which time the debtor must straighten out its finances or face default to the lenders. This could all mean that unless MNG revenues dramatically increase, more "cost cutting" is likely.


The Los Angeles Newspaper Group announced further company-wide cost cutting measures Thursday. The latest move freezes vacation accrual for all non-Guild employees, as well as management, between April 5 and July 4. LANG is also asking these employees to take any vacation time already on the books.
The move does not apply to LANG employees under a Guild contract at the Press-Telegram and the Daily News.
Gary Scott at reporter-g and LA Observed have posted several internal management memos explaining the freeze from the MNG perspective.

NLRB issues preliminary ruling on charges

Officials at the regional National Labor Relations Board have filed a Motion for Default Judgment against the Press-Telegram over our charges that the newspaper violated federal labor laws in March 2008 by moving P-T Guild members to the non-union Daily Breeze and laying off others.

In filing the motion, the Region 21 counsel calls for the NLRB to find in favor of the Guild on all counts.

The counsel said in the motion that because the P-T did not "file an answer within the time and in the manner prescribed by the [National Labor Relations] Board's Rules and Regulations, all allegations in the complaint shall be deemed to be true and have been so found by the Board." 

If the Region 21 motion goes forward, the decision includes a list of possible remedies, including (but not limited to) back pay and benefits, plus interest, for the employees laid off by the company. Transferred employees could receive compensation for any wages and/or other benefits lost to them as a result of their transfer.

Responding to the Board's decision, the company filed a request to extend the deadline. According to the company's request, their failure to respond was the Guild's fault, and the company should not suffer any consequences for ignoring the numerous notices and letters issued by the board over the last several months.

In January of this year, the P-T received an order that consolidated the Guild’s cases and a copy of the consolidated complaint along with the hearing date notice. Then in February the NLRB sent yet another copy of the complaint to the P-T. When the company continued to ignore NLRB requests, the board informed the P-T on Feb. 24 that "it had 7 days to file an answer, and failure to do so would result in a filing for default judgment."

The P-T repeatedly failed to answer the "consolidated complaints" as required by the NLRB’s Rules and Regulations, even when notified of the legal necessity for filing a timely answer. (The company was served notice of the Guild's first NLRB charges in August 2008 and again in September 2008. It also received copies of amended charges, first in October of last year and then again in November.)

On March 26, the company filed a request for a deadline extension. In the filing, the company argues to the NLRB that both parties had reached an "agreement in principle" on all charges and that is why, it alleges, it did not respond to the NLRB complaints. (Late February was the final deadline for the company to respond however, so the company would have already received the notice of an imminent decision by the Board.)

P-T management and Guild officials had a brief conversation earlier this year in which they discussed that all affected persons should be "made whole" - but details had not been worked out. The Guild conducted a survey of the workers impacted by the March 2008 layoffs and transfers to help it determine what a reasonable settlement should look like.

The Guild has not received a written settlement offer from the P-T.

The five-member panel at the NLRB in Washington, D.C. will now have to vote on the Region 21 motion, however the board currently has only two sitting members, one a recent Obama Administration appointee and the other a Republican holdover from the previous administration. This fails to meet the board's required three-member quorum to hold a vote. Like many federal boards, the NLRB panel is required to be made of no more than three members of the majority party. Due to the quorum rule, a vote on the Region 21 motion will have to wait until President Obama appoints at least one more member.

A way to (non)profits?

Since last year, we've been reporting on the rise in nonprofit news ventures. Now, one U.S. senator is trying to make that option a little easier.

Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-Maryland), has introduced a bill to allow newspapers to restructure into nonprofit organizations.

This effort, which currently has no co-sponsors, gives newspapers the option to "operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies," according to the Reuters article.

This seems like a no brainer. NPR and PBS offer valuable coverage that's often not available from traditional profit-driven media. But their small-scale coverage - local and community news - is virtually nonexistent. Cardin's bill would enable community papers to complement other nonprofit media outlets, and ensure that our right to information is not capriciously wiped out.

And in the abstract, widespread nonprofit community newspapers might hold the key to reinventing journalism as we know it.

We are unabashedly optimistic about print journalism. Not because we believe that the printed page is essential - but because people will always care about the mundane, day-to-day events that shape their lives. More often than not, local newspapers have the operational resources to get the story faster and more efficiently, and it on a larger scale, than anyone else in town.

But newsrooms have been under attack for decades, a slow erosion based on a business model that believes readers are the product, and advertisers are the customer. Content and news are just a means to an end.

Nonprofit newspapers, dedicated to providing earnest, quality journalism could undo all that. If nonprofit news gains market share, it could re-establish the primacy of content, and provide a total rebuke to the argument that one-size-fits-all, shared content is good enough for readers.

Still, it's unclear how viable nonprofit status is for papers like the Press-Telegram or the Daily News. There are requirements that would significantly impact the owner and debt structure of MediaNews, and there's virtually no reason to believe the company would consider the idea.

A digital copy of the bill can be found here.

What do you think? Is nonprofit news the future of the industry? If you support community news and want to help protect the future of journalism, contact your state senator and ask for their support on this issue.

Barbara Boxer can be reached here or at (213) 894-5000.

Diane Feinstein can be reached here or at (310) 914-7300 .

Denver slashes in Rocky's wake

The MediaNews Group-owned Denver Newspaper Agency, which provides non-newsroom services for the Denver Post, fired 40 people on Friday and is set to let another 160 people go in the coming weeks, according to the Denver Business Journal.

The DNA, which was created to consolidate business services for the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, had been expected to slash its staff following the demise of the Rocky last month. Former LANG head and current DNA president and CEO Gerald Grilly said that the cuts will help DNA "shape a new business model' to adapt to "new market realities."

“We are not just ink on paper anymore," said Grilly about the cuts. "We are true information providers across many platforms."

There is certainly increased competition, and responding to the challenges of the digital era is the biggest obstacle facing newspapers today. But this attitude might come as a surprise to many LANG employees - especially all of the online and "new" media staff that have been slashed throughout MediaNews over the past several years. There has yet to be a cogent argument that justifies trimming resources and reducing the core business at a time of increased competition. Yet the industry response to new challenges has always been to retreat, regroup, and far too often, surrender. We can only hope that any new business strategy not only recognizes the importance of reducing costs, but the value in strengthening the product and the newsrooms that produce it.

3/20 bargaining update

The latest email update went out, and it seems this session was a step back from our recent progress.

Even though the Guild agreed to a company proposal to accept wage freezes if they're implemented across LANG, and allow wage freezes to restrict negotiated raises, the company amended their proposal this session to include a provision that would eliminate negotiations over wage freezes altogether.

Their proposal also replaced the second year's 2% wage increase with a "wage re-opener" - essentially deferring the discussion, with no guarantee of employees receiving anything.

The company did not address Guild proposals regarding severance or vacation accrual.

Although the company is still trying to enable managers to perform bargaining unit work, MediaNews negotiator Jim Janiga said the company was considering reclassifying some of the currently-exempt management staffers as Guild unit members, in light of their regular performance of Guild work.

The next session is scheduled for Thursday, April 2. If you have any questions or concerns, contact Vicki Di Paolo at 562.259.9430 or scmg9400@gmail.com