Amy Sancetta/AP Photo
The front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in September 2010
CLEVELAND – Yesterday was the last official day of the Plain Dealer News Guild, after more than 80 years of union membership. The unit decertified after a long battle where Advance Publications, the newspaper’s management, wielded layoff after layoff, seeking cost savings amid the decline of local newspapers.
The announcement also signaled the end of the Plain Dealer newsroom. At the moment, it seems that the paper will still be printed seven days a week and delivered to subscribers four days a week, but even that may be subject to change. Advance previously shut down the print product at The Ann Arbor News, which switched to all-digital after 174 years as a published newspaper.
The Guild was the largest unit of Local 1, the first charter handed out as part of the establishment of the American Newspaper Guild in the 1930s. Local 1 previously had five units. The remaining roughly 130 members now come from The Canton Repository, the Akron Beacon Journal, and the Massillon Independent, according to Edd Pritchard, president of Local 1.
The Guild’s final statement read: “To those Guild members who came before us: We are sorry. To the city and people of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio: We will miss you. We did our best.”
Even before the pandemic began to put pressure on journalism outlets across the country, management at The Plain Dealer announced layoffs in Cleveland. The first round came on April 8, when half of the remaining 32 Guild members lost their jobs. A week later, then–Plain Dealer Editor Tim Warsinskey announced that the remaining 14 Guild members were being forced off of their beats: Guild journalists could either begin covering the outlying counties of Greater Cleveland after decades of covering health or City Hall in Cleveland, or they could elect to be part of another round of layoffs. Ten more journalists chose the layoffs, leaving just four in the Guild.
Management framed these as “voluntary” departures, but the community and the Guild saw it differently.
PD Editor Warsinskey did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
For several weeks, the Guild and the PD management bargained for the life of the PD unit and for the remaining four Guild jobs. On May 12, the Guild announced that it had agreed to decertify and that the Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild would not engage in organizing efforts in the non-union cleveland.com newsroom for one year—though the bar does not preclude organizing efforts from the International or from other unions.
Cleveland.com extended job offers to the four remaining Guild members as part of Guild negotiations, but cleveland.com Editor Chris Quinn’s announcement of the new members of the newsroom differed from the Guild’s. “I heard that Local 1 of the News Guild … expressed its disinterest in representing the bargaining unit and its desire to terminate the collective bargaining agreement,” Quinn wrote, reviving language that the Guild says it rejected in bargaining four times.
Quinn further implied that the confusion in the community generated by having two newsrooms was the Guild’s fault, and that the Guild was also the reason for Advance’s slow pivot to digital in Cleveland. The Guild rejected this, and added in a statement, “The Guild did not cause the confusion. The owners of The Plain Dealer and Advance Ohio did.”
Quinn did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Both Quinn and Warsinskey are former members of the PD Guild.
As the Guild noted in its press release, the end of the Guild likely began in 2013 with the creation of a non-union competing newsroom, cleveland.com, owned by the same company, Advance Local. According to several PD journalists I spoke with, the two newsrooms rarely shared resources effectively, even sending journalists from the PD and cleveland.com to the same event.
“In this case, the Guild has been in Cleveland for a long time [and] Advance and the Newhouse family have been engaged in pretty clear union busting,” said Jon Schleuss, president of the News Guild, which is part of the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
(Disclosure: The Prospect is unionized as part of the Washington-Baltimore local of the News Guild.)
“It became really clear that at that time it was two separate newsrooms. A union newsroom and a non-union newsroom,” said Harlan Spector in an April 15 interview. Spector was unit chair at the time of the newsroom split when the Guild secured a no-layoffs clause that expired in 2019, just before the two rounds of April layoffs.
“It was a very peculiar place to work,” said Mike Sangiacomo, a former PD reporter. “The whole thing never made sense. We’re writing the paper with you but we’re a separate company. That doesn’t even make sense. How could you do that?”
Because of Guild membership, those laid off received severance equal to two weeks’ pay for every year worked at The Plain Dealer and health care fully paid for ten months. Guild leaders are proud of this. These “enhanced benefits” are attached to the signing of a non-disparagement letter, as several Guild members told me. Since at least 2013, these non-disparagement letters have been part of layoffs at The Plain Dealer, according to several Guild members.
The Guild was important for young reporters and for increasing diversity in the newsroom.
In a May 5 email, Olivera Perkins expressed worry about the lack of diversity on staff—especially in covering the pandemic in Cleveland, a majority-black city, when COVID-19 has so disproportionately impacted black communities. “This is not only disturbing to me as a black journalist, but also as a resident of Greater Cleveland, which is a racially diverse community,” she wrote. “The region is the lesser for this lack of newsroom diversity.”
Ginger Christ, the last chair of the PD Guild, said in an April 22 interview that being in the Guild helped build her confidence as a young journalist and fight for stories that mattered. “It really helped me with standing up for myself and understanding my value as a writer,” she said. “It helped me gain a lot more confidence in my judgement.”
