CLEVELAND – On March 9, at the hometown newspaper The Plain Dealer, health reporter Ginger Christ jumped in her car and headed to City Hall. At a press briefing, health officials confirmed the first case of the novel coronavirus in Cuyahoga County. While they addressed the situation, her phone rang. It was labor relation consultant Bill Calaiacovo, with totally unrelated news: a courtesy call to her, the paper’s Guild chair, that they would be announcing layoffs for 18 editorial staffers, over half the Guild, and four non-union managers. PD editor Tim Warsinskey, on his ninth day on the job, gave the Guild only a 30-minute warning before he went public.
Frantically, Christ phoned in her story to the newsroom, and alerted Guild members about the layoffs. “I was walking through City Hall so unfocused I couldn’t remember where to find my car,” she recalled in an April 22 interview.
As the pandemic intensified, Christ’s life grew frenzied. She was working 60-hour weeks to cover the steps health officials and community members were taking to slow the spread. For a health reporter, it was the story of a lifetime. But as Guild chair, she was meeting with lawyers, bargaining with management, and attempting to allay her colleagues’ anxiety. No one knew who would be let go.
On a Friday morning, April 3, management instructed Plain Dealer employees to wait by their phones. If Warsinskey called you, you were gone. If Mary Lou Brink, another editor, called, you stayed. Christ and 13 others got a call from Brink, and that afternoon, Warsinskey met with them. “He said just keep doing what you’re doing, and I thought, ‘OK, I’ll just keep covering coronavirus because the whole staff was covering coronavirus,’” Christ said.
She filed three coronavirus stories on Monday, April 6, when Warsinskey called another staff meeting. He gave remaining reporters a false choice: Cover the outlying counties (which the PD had abandoned covering decades ago) and give up beats they had developed over years, or volunteer to be laid off. Advance Publications, the out-of-state conglomerate that owns the PD and dozens of other media outlets across the country, framed the move as expanding coverage. Reporters, and much of the public, disagreed. Unionized reporters’ beats—and the knowledge and contacts that made them good at their jobs—were being pilfered by cleveland.com, the newspaper’s Advance-owned, non-union companion.
At a time when media unions are seen as a lifeline in an uncertain industry, Advance has created a union-busting model for media conglomerates to follow.
Christ and nine others, including her vice chair Rachel Dissell, departed, leaving just four PD journalists. Just like that, the plan to expand coverage to the outer counties was dead—despite Warsinskey’s insistence that the layoffs would not weaken local journalism. “We will continue to be the leading source for news and information here in Northeast Ohio,” he wrote. “And we are not going anywhere.”
A month later, on May 12, the Guild announced that it would decertify, after coming to an agreement with management whereby the four remaining Guild members would be rehired at cleveland.com in non-union positions. Under the agreement, Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild promised that it would not try to unionize cleveland.com for one year—though other unions, even the International, are not subject to the bar.
National media saw the downfall of the PD as part of an emerging barren landscape for journalism during the coronavirus outbreak. Indeed, at least 36,000 journalists and support staff have lost jobs since the crisis began, exacting a huge toll on local and national news coverage. Those lucky enough to have a union were at least able to deliver better outcomes for their members. Some unions averted layoffs through furloughs and pay cuts, and for those laid off, unions made sure they got expanded severance or continuation of health coverage. The PD Guild was able to secure these types of benefits, contingent on journalists signing non-disparagement agreements.
But what has happened in Cleveland is not due to the pandemic. It reflects the final acts of Advance’s long-term, systematic plan to bust the Guild, recounted by dozens of former Plain Dealer reporters, Guild leaders, and labor experts. (Some Guild members spoke with the Prospect for this article before they signed the non-disparagement agreements and some refused to speak at all, citing the agreements.) At a time when media unions are seen as a lifeline in an uncertain industry, Advance has created a union-busting model for media conglomerates to follow, honed through nearly a century of hostility to labor. This is the story of how Advance destroyed the nation’s oldest newspaper union, and how it deeply wounded a daily newspaper Clevelanders have been picking up since 1842.
The Newhouse Legacy
For decades, the Plain Dealer Guild was the biggest unit in Local 1 of the American Newspaper Guild, which included the PD, the Akron Beacon Journal, The Canton Repository, and the Massillon Independent. At the high point in the 1990s, Local 1 had more than 700 members, with the PD unit boasting at least 340. Unions had long enjoyed a strong foothold at the PD. The Pressmen represented the men and women laying out each day’s pages, and the Teamsters represented those who delivered the paper seven days a week. In 1944, editorial reporters joined Local 1. The three unions lined up their contracts to expire at the same time, so they could sit at the bargaining table together. This “unity council” lasted for more than a half-century.
But the story of The Plain Dealer and the Guild’s demise begins back on March 7, 1967, when media mogul Samuel I. Newhouse bought the 125-year-old publication for a record-breaking $54.2 million, entrusting day-to-day operations to his brother Norman. At the time, the Newhouse family empire, Advance Publications (named after its first purchase, the Staten Island Advance), controlled 22 newspapers in 16 cities. Today, Advance grosses $2 billion in revenue per year and remains a private family-run enterprise, with principal ownership resting with Newhouse family members. In addition to newspapers, it owns Condé Nast, makers of top magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, along with large stakes in Discovery, Inc., and social media site Reddit.
Emanuel Wallace
Unlike other newspaper families such as the Sulzbergers or the Grahams, making money was the Newhouses’ main objective, contends biographer Carol Felsenthal in her book Citizen Newhouse. A former PD editor told Felsenthal that Norman Newhouse’s visits to Cleveland “reminded me of a guy who collects rent in the old days.” The Newhouse family also brought in anti-union leadership, such as Leo Ring, known to Guild members as “The Enforcer.” Ring “negotiated the elimination of more than half of the 600 positions in The Plain Dealer’s composing room, arranged for the installation of plenty of modern, labor-saving equipment, and regularly faced down the paper’s Guild unit,” wrote Richard Meeker, another Newhouse biographer.
Still another Newhouse chronicler, Thomas Maier, detailed the origins of Advance’s union-busting strategies, a playbook it would return to in Cleveland. “At the Long Island Press in the 1930s, Newhouse set up a special spy network to find, harass, and sometimes fire those who thought of unionizing his newsroom,” Maier wrote. “For this, the spies received bonuses and better hours and assignments.”
In the 1940s, “Newhouse supervised the creation of something called the Allied Bi-County News Service—ABC for short,” Meeker wrote. Every reporter at the Long Island Press started at ABC as copy boys, off the regular Guild payroll. This enabled Newhouse to “maintain a night shift at the Press without paying Guild wages or overtime.” Newhouse also paid an outside picture service for photos, rather than Guild photographers.
“During the course of his career, [Samuel I.] Newhouse put more newspaper people out of work than any other publisher in history.”
Reporters were paid so poorly that some took public relations jobs while still working for the paper, and printed positive stories about their employers in the Press. Meeker wrote that “Newhouse was so blinded by his hatred of the paper’s unions that he would stop at nothing to keep his employees’ wages and benefits down.” The two-newsroom model and relentless violations of journalism conventions so depressed standards of quality that readership suffered and subscriptions plummeted, and the Press shuttered in 1977.
After the Portland Oregonian won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting, staff struck in 1959 for better wages and benefits. Newhouse brought in “nearly five dozen strikebreakers from Oklahoma, some with rifles and shotguns, and trained his nonunion supervisors to run the newspaper in the event of a walkout,” according to Maier’s book. Strikers were joined by staff of the city’s afternoon daily, the Oregon Journal, and for four years they published their own daily paper, the Portland Reporter.
Newhouse bought the Journal in 1961, but the strike continued until 1965, when both newspapers were forced to become open shops. In 1982, Advance shut down the Oregon Journal, leaving Portland a one-newspaper town. This was a Newhouse business strategy: create newspaper monopolies, and enjoy the positive side effect of kneecapping the unions.
When Samuel I. Newhouse began his career in 1911, few newspapers were chain-owned. By 1977, nearly two-thirds of all U.S. daily newspapers were. Cities with two or more competing newspapers fell from over 500 to 35. “Newhouse did not cause this remarkable consolidation alone, but he certainly profited from it. And, in the end, he helped legitimize it,” wrote Meeker in his biography. Consolidation led to fewer newspaper jobs and more owner power. As Meeker concludes, “during the course of his career, Newhouse put more newspaper people out of work than any other publisher in history.”
Kelly Green Jackets With Horseshoes
When Newhouse acquired the PD, the union was strong. But a strike in 1972 to raise wage scales revealed some of the new owner’s tactics. PD editors called City Hall, and shortly thereafter the Cleveland mounted police charged the picket line. At the time, Cleveland was very much a union town—250,000 members strong—and a private company, even one as influential as the local newspaper, enlisting local government on the side of management in a labor dispute was shocking, and triggered a backlash. The city council soon adopted a city ordinance banning mounted cops from strike scenes. The Guild remembered the mounted-police assault as a “day of infamy,” and later donned kelly green jackets whose crests included a pair of horseshoes.
In 1974, another strike made Guild members of the Cleveland Press and the PD allies, despite the two papers’ rivalry. It quickly became clear that management planned to import strikebreakers. In response, on the strike’s sixth day, the Press printed a double masthead with the PD, and instructed their drivers to deliver papers to both Press and PD stops. The Teamsters refused, and Press reporters struck, joining The Plain Dealer in what would become a seven-week strike.
The threat of the strike gave Plain Dealer reporters leverage. But there hasn’t been a walkout since 1991.
The Guild gave reporters a voice—such as when The Plain Dealer retracted a hard-hitting investigative story in 1981. The story, by Walt Bogdanich and the late Mairy Jayn Woge, proved that Teamsters leader Jackie Presser, who was also affiliated with the Cleveland mafia, was taking kickbacks and acting as an FBI informant. Presser was campaigning to be the Teamsters’ next president, but “there’s no way the mafia, which still controlled the Teamsters, would allow that to happen if the Teamsters knew that Presser was an informant,” Bogdanich, now an investigative reporter at The New York Times, said in an interview with the Prospect.
The two-part series ran in August 1981, and Teamsters delivered the papers without comment. But after publication, Presser contacted the Cleveland mafia, who contacted Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno in New York, who contacted Roy Cohn, who contacted the Newhouses, who instructed Plain Dealer editors to retract the story. When the retraction ran a year later, the Guild organized a picket line. “The slogan for The Plain Dealer at the time was ‘When the news breaks, we put it together,’ and so [the union] had signs printed that said, ‘When the news breaks, we apologize,’” Bogdanich said.
The threat of the strike gave PD reporters leverage. But there hasn’t been a walkout since 1991. Bill Meyer, a PD copy editor laid off in 2019, told me he picketed the former PD building downtown and the paper’s printing press in protest of the April 2020 layoffs. He invited others to join, but they told him they feared violating the non-disparagement agreements attached to severance and future health care benefits. So Meyer picketed alone.
AS THE 1970s came to a close, The Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press were in a heated circulation war. Despite the Press’s more than 300,000 subscribers, it was looking for a buyer. Before Newhouse could snap it up and consolidate the Cleveland market, in swooped multimillionaire local industrialist Joseph Cole, who bought the Press in 1980 for $1 million. “Give a publisher—or anyone else for that matter—a monopoly and you run a very real risk of seeing a square deal converted into a rigged deal … Simply said, I don’t like monopolies,” Cole said in a speech at the time. But just two years later, Newhouse abruptly paid Cole $22.5 million for the Press’s circulation list and a subsidiary bulk-mailing company—allegedly in exchange for Cole agreeing to shut down the Press.
John Funk, who worked at the Press from 1978 to 1982, said that Press reporters got “less than a day’s notice the paper was closing.” Police told reporters leaving the newsroom that Cole “don’t want you to take nothing like your typewriter or whatever,” Funk said. After 103 years, the Press ceased publishing. If you wanted to work for a daily, there was now just one gig in town: the PD.
In 1984, federal investigators began to investigate the Cole-Newhouse transaction. An article ran in the Akron Beacon Journal headlined “Plain Dealer Offered Cole $14.5 Million to Fold Press,” revealing a contract with Newhouse which included that promise. But though a federal grand jury in Cleveland was impaneled, for reasons that remain unclear, the Justice Department probe ended in 1987 with no charges being filed.
With the Press’s demise, the PD’s circulation jumped: The paper raised advertising rates 47 percent in less than two years and added more than 80,000 subscribers. Circulation peaked in 1983 at 497,386 daily and 501,042 on Sundays.
Despite the boost, the heavy-handed, penny-pinching Newhouse ways had sapped public trust in Cleveland newspapers. A 1980 Cleveland Magazine story that surveyed readers found them “brutally critical … ranging from a belief that the papers deliberately cover up and distort the news, to a feeling that their writers and editors are simply incompetent.” In the mid-1970s, More, a journalism review, published a list of the ten worst papers in the U.S. The Plain Dealer, along with three other Newhouse papers, made the list.
Perhaps the community’s low regard for its daily stemmed from the PD’s unwillingness to offend anyone in pursuit of its stories. “The PD’s failure to even examine Power in the community, let alone challenge it or present a countervailing influence, tips the scale of justice and equality time and time again against the ordinary person and deforms its responsibility in its most important task—to inform citizens in a free society,” wrote Roldo Bartimole, a local media critic, in 1993. Yet after the 1982 loss of the Press, Clevelanders had no choice for their news.
The Good Times Go Bad
Initially buoyed by the lack of competition, The Plain Dealer expanded throughout the 1990s. Dozens of journalists were hired to cover and edit news from Lorain, Lake, Geauga, Portage, Summit, and Medina Counties, joining a staff of over 400. “It was so much fun, you could write for days because it was such a thick fat paper, they had so much room and they were begging people to write giant stories,” recalled former PD reporter Joan Mazzolini.
But the absence of a second newspaper in town, while good for subscriptions, weakened worker power, and the Guild knew it. In 1996, the Guild, alone at the bargaining table without the Pressmen or the Teamsters, signed its first ten-year contract—an unprecedented length for the industry. It was mostly a long-term extension of existing terms. It offered stability, but in exchange, the contract included a no-strike clause, something increasingly common in Guild contracts at the time.
“We felt, quite candidly, that we were in a better position to extend what we had rather than take the risk of it and start from scratch,” explained Scott Stephens, who helped negotiate the 1996 contract for the Guild. “It’s a classic case for the Guild that we were a so-called professional union. We were at the bargaining table as, in a sense, as amateurs … The Teamsters are the muscle [who could] shut the place down in the event of a labor dispute and to give you that kind of upper hand.”
Rather than seek new revenue models or digital subscribers, Advance reacted to the new realities of journalism in the internet age through brutal downsizing.
During that stretch, health care costs and pension costs doubled for the union. The more people laid off, the more expensive health care became for those who remained. But locked into a ten-year deal, nothing could be changed to relieve that strain.
In the late 1990s, Newhouse also introduced new rates that charged Cuyahoga County residents 25 cents at a newsstand and double that for those in the outer counties. The decision lost the PD swaths of subscribers. “As far as I’m concerned they’ve been sliding ever since,” said Local 1 president and Canton Repository reporter Edd Pritchard. Advance virtually priced themselves out, Pritchard added. Today, the weekday newsstand price is $2.
Former Guild members cite these decisions as examples of where Newhouse management went wrong. At the same time, the industry started down a path of turmoil as the internet matured. Historically, daily newspapers were a money machine for local advertising and classifieds, but the shift of readership online and the rise of Craigslist (and later, Google and Facebook) slashed revenues. Local media ran stories on how Advance was “slow to recognize the vast disruption of the internet and failed to adequately monetize its digital offerings.” Advance underlined its commitment to print by building a new PD editorial office building and printing plant in the early 2000s. This kind of lumbering transition was fairly typical in media, particularly for legacy chains accustomed to monopoly profits. But rather than seek new revenue models or digital subscribers, Advance reacted to this new reality through brutal downsizing.
In 2006, the paper offered incredibly generous buyouts to people who had been at the paper at least 20 years, with two and a half years of full pay and health care. Between the Guild and management, over 60 people took the buyouts. Up to that point, Plain Dealer jobs were for life. The wages were enough that you could buy a house, raise a family, and make a good life in Cleveland. Even during the Great Depression, the PD never had layoffs, one former staffer told me. “It was the first cold slap in the face that the fat days of newspapers were over,” said Harlan Spector, PD Guild unit chair at the time. “It was just unheard of to try to cut the staff like that.”
At their non-union publications, Advance Publications adhered to what they described as “The Pledge,” vowing never to lay off an employee. Spector recalled people saying the Newhouses never did layoffs and doubted that they would really go through with it. “And it turns out that they went further than anybody else and they destroyed the union,” he said.
As the Great Recession hit in 2008, another 50 Guild members were laid off, and remaining staff accepted a 12 percent pay cut. Guild members’ pensions had been frozen for five years, and members were hit with annual double-digit increases of their health care costs. Scott Stephens volunteered to be laid off. “[The PD] had a number on a piece of paper and they wanted to get there one way or another,” he said. As other former reporters told the Prospect, Stephens said he felt that if he left, someone who needed the job more would be able to stay.
Meanwhile, Advance Publications was cutting jobs and journalism across the country. In 2012, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a non-union Advance paper around since 1837, moved from a daily paper to three days a week. Two hundred employees lost their jobs, including half the newsroom staff. (Eventually the Times-Picayune would resume daily printing, but in 2019 Advance sold it to the Baton Rouge–based Advocate, consolidating the two newsrooms. The Times-Picayune’s entire staff was laid off, and only a handful were rehired.) Consolidation, layoffs, and decline marched on in Cleveland, and Advance prioritized busting the union.
The Rise of Cleveland.com
The Guild’s decertification became virtually inevitable in 2013 with the creation of a split newsroom: the unionized Plain Dealer and non-union cleveland.com. The dot-com side originated with just a few tech staff to complement the print product in 1996, mostly as a vehicle for ads. Its physical location was “across the river,” as former energy reporter John Funk put it.
Unlike most digital-print operations, the operations were completely segregated. All PD content was produced by PD journalists, and the same for cleveland.com. The Guild contract didn’t allow for content sharing until 2013, when Advance proposed allowing reporters from cleveland.com—technically a separate subsidiary—to create content for print. In effect, Advance wanted to create a competing non-union newsroom owned by the same company. There’s little precedent for this at other papers; The New York Times or Washington Post didn’t build a scab operation inside their organizations.
The PD was the one remaining union shop in the stable of Advance Publications. And the digital strategy was obviously tied to diminishing the union’s power.
Management touted the digital platform as the future of Cleveland news, albeit years after other organizations had beefed up their digital operations. Cleveland.com reporters were urged to contribute multiple stories a day, stressing quantity over quality. PD staffers grumbled about a lot of writing up of press releases. Especially for some young reporters, the breakneck pace made sense for their future careers. But the jobs often lacked the security, benefits, and wage scale of Plain Dealer union jobs. Bill Meyer says he knew of at least one person at cleveland.com in 2013 who was also driving for Uber to make ends meet.
The 2013 contract negotiations came on the heels of years of pay cuts, furloughs, and pension freezes, during which the Guild had lost many members through attrition. Management said that its digital-first strategy required drastic cost-saving. And if the Guild did not accept management’s offer, Advance would lay off at least 80 people—about half the unionized staff—and would saddle remaining staff with new pension and health care costs of up to an additional $100 a week, while continuing the 12 percent wage cut.
“By 2013, they could dictate a lot of terms,” said then–unit chair Harlan Spector. “It wasn’t exactly a fair fight.” In the end, 58 journalists were laid off and another five people were promoted to management. Another 13 reporters took job offers at cleveland.com and left The Plain Dealer and the Guild. The PD dropped from seven-day to four-day home delivery as part of the reorganization, contributing to a dramatic loss of circulation. Advance did restore the 12 percent pay cuts for remaining employees, made health and pension funds whole, and included a six-year no-layoff guarantee. But the cuts left the Guild at just over 100 members, with the non-union newsroom waiting in the wings.
The two-newsroom strategy, which Advance executed across the country in its local newsrooms, has resulted elsewhere in consolidations and job cuts. In 2012, columnist Ryan Chittum described Advance’s digital strategy as “disinvesting in journalism behind a digital smokescreen.” In another 2013 piece, he pointed to The Ann Arbor News, where Advance shut down the daily, replaced it with a website and biweekly newspaper, halved the newsroom, and required reporters to churn out as much content as possible because clicks are the model.
The difference in Cleveland was that the PD was the one remaining union shop in the stable of Advance Publications. And the digital strategy was obviously tied to diminishing the union’s power. The company told the Guild that layoffs were an economic necessity. “But economic necessity would not permit the ramp-up such as what really happened at cleveland.com,” said Bill Meyer, the former PD copy editor. Within a few weeks of the layoffs, “Advance had hired almost person to person the positions that we gave up—maybe even in excess of the numbers that we gave up.” Among the new reporters hired at cleveland.com were a cadre of laid-off PD reporters. To some former reporters, they were scabs, but “many or maybe even most of them do not know it,” said John Funk.
“By being reasonable, we got rolled and it was because we allowed ourselves to believe that there was a shred of honor and integrity from the company, and did not realize that this was basically the Long Island Press model being rolled out here in Cleveland from the Advance Publications playbook,” Meyer concluded.
Dividing the newsroom and slashing staff diminished the paper’s ability to produce reporting that holds power to account.
Because this was textbook union busting, the Guild could have filed a grievance at the National Labor Relations Board. But with a dwindling member base, it would have been virtually impossible to fight against Advance’s deep pockets. “What are you fighting over when the membership is dwindling?” asked Roland Dreussi, a professional union bargainer who began working with the Guild in 1997. “Say you win that. So, what’s to stop them from just closing the newspaper?” The union did get a settlement from the NLRB preventing cleveland.com from pilfering more than 20 people from the PD without Advance hiring replacements for the newspaper.
“I remember telling our members that after this agreement [in 2013] all bets are off,” Harlan Spector told me the day after the Guild announced decertification. “This buys us six years and after that they can start coming after people and it could be the beginning of the end.” Spector recalled sending the offer to the International for an outside opinion. “Their lawyers looked at it and they said, ‘Do it now before they change their mind.’”
Spector himself volunteered for the layoffs. “I just felt like the walls were caving in. I kind of got tired of living that way—constantly looking over your shoulder for layoffs, pay cuts, pension problems, and health care costs,” he said. “There were people who were really physically affected by the stress.”
At the time, Spector recalled a copy editor summing up the contract: “Well, it’s a shit sandwich but at least it has lettuce and tomato.”
Changing Newsrooms
After 2013, Meyer began an effort to reach out to the newly hired—often very young—cleveland.com reporters, in an effort to organize them. He was met with fear. One person who expressed public support for the union allegedly received a dressing down from top brass, Meyer said.
As cleveland.com began its hiring spree, The Plain Dealer clearly became “the stepchild,” as one former reporter put it. Former reporters on both sides said that the newsrooms frequently both sent reporters or photographers to the same events. The PD stories were often buried on the website. Cleveland.com reporters were told not to communicate with PD reporters directly and vice versa, to only channel coordinating efforts through editors.
News Guild President Jon Schleuss explained that the arrangement pitted reporters and editors against each other. “The way that you fight a union is you divide people,” said Schleuss. “You lift some people up, you bring some people down. You exploit racism, you exploit ageism. It’s really about trying to break individuals down.”
Emanuel Wallace
Management booted PD staff out of the Plain Dealer building downtown to another, smaller downtown office space. Cleveland.com reporters were moved into the former PD building, still located at Plain Dealer Plaza. Then, PD staff were moved out of downtown entirely—15 miles away to Brooklyn, Ohio, at the paper’s printing press. From the parking lot to the newsroom was roughly a quarter-mile walk. “Hardly anyone would come to the office … or to the editorial meetings,” said Christ. “There was a weird smell in the building, it was cold, you had to go through security to get in.”
The divided staffs were never together. “It was all traceable back to the union thing,” said Guild Vice Chair Rachel Dissell in an April 15 interview. “If we were all in the same room, some magical union dust would get on people.”
Advance issued laptops and cellphones, eliminated personal desks, and transformed the newsrooms into shared working spaces, described by some as “backpack journalism.” While it worked for some reporters, for PD staff who had recently been ousted from their own building, it seemed to reflect management’s disdain. “Everybody was expected to work on card tables and on folding chairs. We were treated like crap,” said John Funk. “People felt like they weren’t valued because they weren’t! They were just seen as people who cost too much.”
As staff was decimated, institutional knowledge and collaboration—hallmarks of big metro newsrooms—largely disappeared. “In 2013, I was looking around for an old fart who knows something and I realized that I was the old fart and there’s no one here who knows more than me,” said former Plain Dealer reporter Mike Sangiacomo.
While Advance was making cuts at the PD, it was also reorganizing the Sun papers, a chain of 11 local weeklies serving Cleveland’s suburbs. Advance added the Sun papers to its media empire in 1998, and in 2013 it laid off dozens of staff, bringing them back as stringers. Rates for these stringers are currently $35 per story with a $10 bonus if the story receives 3,000 or more web hits, and $15 per photo. Such low rates make it virtually impossible for reporters to cover communities the way they once did.
Vigorous local reporting can unveil a corrupt underbelly and expose a city’s ills. But dividing the newsroom and slashing staff diminished the paper’s ability to produce reporting that holds power to account. Readers may have made no distinction between cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, but they could see that the journalism in their community was deteriorating.
“A newspaper has a lot to do with how a community is operated,” said Roldo Bartimole, who for 32 years published lucid critiques of city power brokers in his biweekly newsletter “Point of View.” “There isn’t really any sharp criticism of what’s going on. The paper is very obliging to the mayor, it doesn’t seem to [run] the kind of stories that you would expect out of City Hall.”
Newsroom diversity also became less of a priority, especially with no Guild at cleveland.com to force the issue. “The Plain Dealer now has no African-American, Asian-American or other journalists of color,” wrote Olivera Perkins in a May 5 email. Perkins was part of the April layoffs prior to the Guild’s decertification. At cleveland.com, journalists of color are also scarce. “I think of all of the stories I and my Plain Dealer colleagues would have told to add depth and context to how the coronavirus is impacting the residents of Northeast Ohio.”
Chris Quinn, cleveland.com editor and now, with the Guild’s end, Plain Dealer editor, said in a Zoom forum with the Press Club of Cleveland on May 19 that diversity is his newsroom’s biggest problem. “Because we don’t do a lot of hiring, [increasing diversity is] taking much longer than it should and it is embarrassing and it’s really bad,” he said. “You cannot cover a city that is 50 percent African American when you don’t have African Americans on your staff in any kind of significant number.”
The Final Blow
Last year, Bill Meyer was part of a round of layoffs that reduced the Guild by a third. The company outsourced the “Pub Hub,” where copy editors like Meyer and page designers produced the paper. Twenty-eight other copy editors, page designers, and illustrators were also laid off and told they could reapply to non-union positions. Ginger Christ said that the Guild approached management with a production plan to save jobs, but that the company had no interest.
Fourteen reporters and photographers also lost their jobs. John Funk, an energy reporter until he volunteered for last year’s layoffs, said that since his departure his beat has been left uncovered.
A year later, Advance closed the trap and the Guild was gone; the PD had gone from hundreds of journalists and Guild members to zero in just two decades.
Neither Warsinskey, briefly the editor of The Plain Dealer and a former Guild member himself, nor Quinn, also a former Guild member, responded to requests for comment. CEO of Advance Local Randy Siegel deferred comment to Quinn through a spokesperson.
The fact that the final settlement stipulated that the Guild couldn’t organize cleveland.com for a year gives the game away: This was about busting a union that was seen as too cumbersome. “When the company needed to evolve, it did not have time to negotiate every change with the Guild,” said cleveland.com editor Chris Quinn at the Press Club of Cleveland forum in May. “We are way too nimble for that.”
Scott Stephens, the former union chair, said that he thinks the Guild did the best they could for their members at the time. After the Guild’s collapse this year, Spector confided that he worried the union had signed its own “death warrant” in 2013. But Stephens insists that the Guild’s work bought reporters seven more years to do journalism. “Any number of people have had award-winning work during that period, and had it not been for the astute judgment of the bargaining unit in 2013, then they would not have had that great work.”
The Newhouse model of union busting and profit extraction has been studiously copied by a new vanguard of financial newspaper owners.
When the first Guild charter was distributed to Local 1 in 1933, at the bottom of the Depression, many of the same factors plaguing newspapers today dogged them. Newspapers were constantly merging and eliminating jobs; employers hired and fired at will; reporters worried that a union might compromise their integrity; and without a tradition of organizing, they viewed themselves as white-collar workers with no need for a union.
“The issues of the 1930s, media consolidation, massive inequality, and the collapse of the free press—we’re dealing with the same thing 90 years later,” said News Guild President Jon Schleuss.
The Newhouse model of union busting and profit extraction dates back just as long, and it has been studiously copied by a new vanguard of financial newspaper owners. GateHouse Media, which recently purchased Gannett and is the largest newspaper chain in America, is operated by private equity firm Fortress Investment Group. GateHouse immediately announced its intention to cut $300 million a year from its budget, which likely means firing journalists and support staff. Hedge fund Alden Global Capital has slashed its 12 unionized outlets to one-third the staff they had in 2012. Alden appears more concerned with redeveloping newspaper and printing offices through its real estate affiliates than reporting the news.
The worry is that every newspaper owner is a budding S.I. Newhouse. At the Press Club of Cleveland forum, a reporter asked Quinn why the Newhouse family, worth $18 billion, is so focused on penny-pinching. “One of the ways they got to be people that have that much money is to not run money-losing businesses,” Quinn said. “This isn’t a charitable organization. This is a business. It’s always been a business. They started 100 years ago.”
The recent growth of unions at online platforms and a few local papers suggests that journalists are perhaps beginning to understand that unions not only help them as workers, but might help bring new life to the industry. But amidst the economic fallout of a global pandemic, the crisis for local news and mass media alike has intensified. For individual journalists, the loss of a job—when for so many it means switching professions—can mean the loss of an identity.
“You know,” Spector told me, “to this day, I have newsroom dreams pretty much every night. Yeah, I do. It never leaves you.”
