Monthly Archives: January 2015

TNG-CWA DELEGATES VOTE FOR HISTORIC NAME CHANGE, ELECT OFFICERS AT BIENNIAL CONFERENCE

Posted on by

Source: cwa-union.org

TNG-CWA President Bernie Lunzer was re-elected to a third term last week, but he won’t be known as president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA.

He’s now the president of The NewsGuild-CWA, a name that conference delegates agreed was better suited for the changing news industry and the diversity of Guild units. The new name isn’t exactly a 21st-century innovation. Lunzer purchased the domain name in 1995 – when only 14 percent of Americans had internet access – and expected Guild members would approve it then.

Read more at: http://www.cwa-union.org/news/entry/tng-cwa_delegates_vote_for_historic_name_change

In a column published in The Guild Reporter several weeks before the Orlando meeting Jan. 15-18, Lunzer explained:

“I was convinced that local Guild leaders would vote to drop ‘paper’ from our name. I was wrong. Delegates had strong and passionate feelings about ‘newspapers’ almost as if bracing against the tidal wave of change headed toward their industry and careers. Twenty years later, it is past time. It is inevitable. We are media. We are content producers. Ink may be in our blood but it is no longer essential to our survival.”

In his remarks, CWA President Larry Cohen talked about the importance of journalism and the dangers of the pending TPP trade deal.

Cohen received standing ovations at the beginning and end of his Jan. 15 remarks, in which he praised the Guild for being a vital part of CWA and for fighting for First Amendment principles that matter to all Americans.

“This notion of democracy, a key part of it is journalism – the ability to investigate and write stories,” Cohen said. “What happens to journalism and to everyone in this room matters to our democracies and to our communities.”

TNG-CWA Acting Secretary-Treasurer Sara Steffens said she knows some Guild members have to be mindful of an ethical line but asked j

Read more at: http://www.cwa-union.org/news/entry/tng-cwa_delegates_vote_for_historic_name_change

 

GUILD ESTABLISHES ‘LARRY COHEN MOVEMENT-BUILDING AWARD’

Posted on by
anelle Hartman
January 22, 2015
NewsGuild-CWA

 

An award named for CWA President Larry Cohen in honor of his tireless movement-building efforts will be presented to a Guild member or local staffer every other year at TNG-CWA conferences.

The Guild, meeting in Orlando last week, surprised Cohen with the news at the end of a fiery speech that brought delegates to their feet.

 

Cohen is on a mission, one he plans to continue when he retirees from CWA in June, to building a movement of unions and organizations with different agendas but similar social justice values. He argues fervently that a large-scale people’s movement is the only way to take back political power from billionaires and multinational corporations.

 

“We wanted to honor Larry for the enormous amount of time, energy and passion he has put into this pursuit,” Guild President Bernie Lunzer said. “We also want to encourage our members and locals to expand their movement-building efforts.”

 

The “Larry Cohen Movement-Building Award” will recognize Guild members or local staff members who who do the most to build coalitions of activists. More specific details about the award still need to be hammered out.

 

For journalists in the Guild whose jobs demand strict objectivity, reaching out to community leaders and activist groups can be tricky. But not all Guild members are under those pressures.

 

“Some of our members need to refrain from direct political action because of a conflict of interest, real or perceived,” Lunzer said. “But to different degrees, we believe everyone in the Guild can play a role in strengthening the pursuit of justice. Let’s never forget that freedom of association is enshrined in the First Amendment, just like free speech and a free press.”

In his speech, Cohen made the connection between movement-building and journalism.

“It is our turn,” he said. “We need to build a democracy movement. We need to connect it to inequality. Good journalism. Good information. This is so important as we try to show our communities what a fair-economy looks like. Journalism helps us connect the dots.”

Tom Mulcair promises to reverse funding cuts to CBC

Posted on by

Source: cbc.ca

The NDP is promising to restore $115 million to the CBC.

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair made the election commitment in Montreal on Thursday.

Mulcair said the public broadcaster has been cut by both Liberal and Conservative governments and that an NDP government would commit to restoring the recent cuts made by the Conservatives in the 2012 budget.

That means increasing current funding to CBC/Radio-Canada by $115 million over three fiscal years in hopes it will allow the public broadcaster to evolve in a changing media landscape, Mulcair said.

Mulcair said both the French and English arms of the CBC had a big influence on his life and he grew up watching and listening to both.

“CBC has been my window to this great country,” he said.

In April of last year, the CBC announced it would cut 657 jobs over two years to allow the organization deal with a $130-million budget shortfall. While cuts in the federal budget have affected the corporation’s budget, losing the rights to broadcast NHL hockey to Rogers has also had a serious impact on the bottom line.

read entire story here

Posted in |

CBC to nix paid appearances by on-air journalists

Posted on by

Source: metronews.ca

The CBC announced Thursday it will no longer allow its on-air journalists to make paid appearances, a little over a week after senior business correspondent Amanda Lang publicly faced allegations about potential conflicts of interest for giving paid speeches.

CBC News and Centres editor-in-chief and general manager Jennifer McGuire told Torstar News Service the discussion around paid appearances had been ongoing, but that “the events of the last little while” impacted that discussion.

“The paid activity, just by virtue of being paid, was creating challenges in terms of our reputation,” she said. “So the idea was to just stop that from being the conversation and push our journalistic policies even further. It was creating a perception that we don’t think is right for our brand.”

 

read entire story here

Posted in |

Save the CBC, Stop the TPP: A Call to Action in 2015

Posted on by

By Martin O’Hanlon

President, CWA/SCA Canada

Making New Year’s predictions is risky business.

Last January, I predicted the worst would be over for newspapers in 2014 and things would start to improve.

Well, I may have been half right.

The last year, like the last decade, was not kind to the media industry. We saw more deep and damaging cuts at a number of employers, with the CBC and Halifax Chronicle Herald hardest hit.

In Halifax, a proud and vibrant newsroom was stunned and battered by deep cuts that came with no warning, empathy or delicacy.

At the CBC, we are losing hundreds of colleagues and unless we get a government that will provide adequate funding, the survival of our public broadcaster is in doubt.

As we begin 2015, I remain confident that things will improve, but we can’t just sit back and hope. We must stand up for jobs and journalism, and we must build a movement for social and economic justice. After all, if we don’t, who will?

Each of us has a part to play and once again, I am asking every member of CWA Canada to do something – even just one small thing – to help as we launch two new campaigns.

The first, the “Save the CBC” campaign, is already gearing up under the direction of our biggest local, the Canadian Media Guild.

The goal is to make quality public broadcasting a ballot box issue in this year’s federal election.

For years now, the CBC has been starved of the funds it needs to fulfill its federally legislated mandate.

The Harper Conservatives, while scared to kill the CBC outright, have not been shy about showing their disdain for public broadcasting. Unless they change their position, or unless we have a new government committed to public broadcasting, the CBC will fade away.

That unthinkable prospect would be a huge blow to Canadian culture and it would mean the loss of CBC News, with far fewer journalists to keep an eye on government, politicians and corporate power brokers.

That’s bad for society and democracy and we can’t let it happen.

So what can we do?

Over the coming weeks and months, we will use email, Twitter, Facebook and workplace posters to let you know how you can help.

It could be:

•    Attending a Save the CBC rally

•    Signing an online petition

•    Joining our Facebook page

•    Retweeting Twitter posts

•    Telling your local MP that the CBC matters to you

Our second campaign is to stop Canada from signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a secretive “trade” deal being negotiated behind closed doors.

The TPP isn’t really a trade agreement at all – it’s a cozy arrangement that would give corporations unprecedented new international powers and it’s being negotiated with plenty of input from corporations and almost no involvement from elected officials, never mind labour leaders or environmental experts.

The TPP would have a major impact on Canada, yet almost no one is talking about it. We must change that.

Under the TPP:

·       Foreign corporations would be able to challenge Canadian laws (environment, safety, etc.) bypassing Canadian courts and going directly to closed-door international tribunals that could override Canadian sovereignty.

·       Canada would lose thousands more jobs as companies move production overseas, particularly to Vietnam where garment workers earn just 50 cents an hour.

With both the CBC and TPP campaigns, we have to build a movement, working with other progressives, including community organizations, social groups, student activists, environmentalists, religious leaders – anyone with whom we can find a common interest.

Again, over the coming months, we will use email and social media to let you know how you can help.

One person and one act at a time, working together, we can make a difference.

Let’s each do our part in 2015 to protect quality jobs, defend quality journalism – and make Canada a better place.

LUNZER: WHAT’S IN A NAME? WHY IT’S PAST TIME FOR ‘NEWSGUILD’

Posted on by
Bernie Lunzer, President
December 23, 2014
NewsGuild-CWA
In 1995, when only 14 percent of Americans had internet access, I purchased the web domain name “NewsGuild.org.”

I was convinced that local Guild leaders would vote to drop “paper” from our name at our next meeting. I was wrong. Delegates had strong and passionate feelings about “newspapers,” almost as if bracing against the tidal wave of change headed toward their industry and careers.

Twenty years later, it is past time. It is inevitable. We are media. We are content producers. Ink may be in our blood but it is no longer essential to our survival. That is why a resolution to change our name to “NewsGuild” will be offered at our sector conference in January. Based on reactions at regional conferences this fall, I expect it to pass.

We are rightfully proud to be long associated with newspapers and their investments in and commitments to quality journalism. Yes, hedge funds and other distant owners have hurt those investments and commitments, but it is still true that most news stories and investigative journalism originate with newspapers.

Most stories—but not all—as this year’s Heywood Broun awards illustrate. The top Broun award was shared by the online Center for Public Integrity and ABC News for a phenomenal joint investigation into a coal industry conspiracy to deprive sick miners of medical benefits.

ABC’s Brian Ross accepted the award saying how honored he and the producing team were to receive the award from The Newspaper Guild — even though “we don’t think of ourselves as newspaper people.”

But “In this day and age in journalism, we’re all really one,” he added, all of us sharing the latest technology “to tell important and big stories.”

Members of the Guild’s Executive Council were struck by Ross’ words. They may have never heard anyone say that our name limited journalists from identifying with the Guild.

Our goal isn’t to preserve print — as hard as it is for many baby boomers to imagine a day starting without coffee and the morning paper, emphasis on paper.                     Our mission is to preserve quality journalism and good jobs. On the best of days, this is a challenge. It is even more difficult if we are limited by our name.

Our new name will continue to be linked, proudly, with the Communications Workers of America. CWA is a good case study for us. Our parent union began as the National Federation of Telephone Workers but reorganized in 1947 as the Communications Workers. The name didn’t limit CWA to telephone and telecommunication work. Instead, a forward-thinking organization was born that 50 years later was a natural fit for newspaper and broadcast workers, interpreters and all kinds of customer service representatives.

As the fight for a reliable business model continues for news organizations, the upheaval and uncertainty for workers brings evermore urgency to our work. It’s critical that journalists and other media workers looking for help don’t come across “The Newspaper Guild” and be discouraged by our name. We believe “NewsGuild-CWA” will make a difference.

Unfortunately, journalists are far from the only newspaper workers being hurt as technology forever changes, or kills, jobs. A brazen misassumption in the early years of the internet was that the web would have little effect on newspaper advertising.

No one predicted Craigslist, let along Google, Facebook, and the myriad other high-tech means of separating revenue from content. Google is particularly infuriating to me, so far removed from its “Don’t Be Evil” beginnings. Today, it is a multi-billionaire parasite, using its wealth and power to gain more wealth and power while fighting against compensating the content creators they exploit.

“Tell us to stop searching your sites,” they tell news organizations that complain. I think it’s time for publishers to call their bluff. Some in the media have fantasized about a separate search engine or portal, where visitors would either pay for content up front or advertising revenue would be returned to the content creators. I’m not sure why no one is seriously talking about this yet. Like our name change, it’s past time.

The irony is that even Google needs us to succeed in our fight to save paid journalists and journalism. Well researched, accurately reported, reliable information is the common denominator, whether we’re talking about a search engine’s profits or our democracy’s survival.

NewsGuild-CWA plans to be part of those conversations for many years to come.