Monthly Archives: April 2016

Guild Launches #NewsMatters Campaign

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Source: prnewswire.com

WASHINGTON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ –

Nearly 1,000 news workers at Digital First Media have launched a nationwide revolt against job cuts and profiteering they say are threatening local journalism at the nation’s second-largest newspaper company, The NewsGuild, TNG-CWA, announced today.

Alden Global Capital, the New York-based hedge fund that owns Digital First Media, employs a business strategy based on buying up newspapers, stripping them of their tangible assets, consolidating and outsourcing critical operations, and slashing staffing levels without regard to the harm its actions do to the newspapers, service, and the employees who make those newspapers profitable.

Guild members work at 13 Digital First bargaining units in cities including Denver, Colo.; San Jose, the East Bay and Long Beach, Calif.; Kingston, N.Y., and suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia. They have joined together nationwide in a coordinated campaign, under the theme “News Matters,” to defend journalism and achieve fair labor contracts.

Tactics so far have included a petition drive that produced more than 400 signatures delivered to DFM executives. Essays, news stories and photos about the campaign are being posted online (dfmworkers.org) and social media (facebook.com/dfmworkers/ or on Twitter #NewsMatters, @dfmworkers.)

Organizers now seek community allies in a broader campaign. The first “News Matters Day” will be on Friday, May 6. “We need to defend quality journalism against corporate attack,” said Carl Hall, executive officer of the San Francisco-based Pacific Media Workers Guild, one of the Guild locals involved in the “News Matters” project.

Guild-represented employees at DFM newspapers have gone without pay raises for years – some as long as a decade. Scores have been laid off or quit in frustration. The ever-increasing workload on those who remain has led to burnout and rock-bottom morale in the workplace.

The campaign represents the first time so many news workers have come together across multiple bargaining units in a coordinated effort.

Funded through a grant from the Communications Workers of America, the Digital First Media Workers Group said it is bringing the “News Matters” message to everyone.

Why News Matters?

  • Because journalists hold the powerful accountable.
  • Because a community watchdog is needed.
  • Because democracy depends on journalism.

“We are asking the public to join in our fight for the quality journalism communities served by DFM newspapers are entitled to and for the fair salaries and workplace dignity DFM employees deserve,” said Patricia Doxsey, national campaign spokesperson for the Digital First Media Workers Group.

To learn more about this campaign, visit our website at dfmworkers.org; or follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/dfmworkers/, or on Twitter @dfmworkers.

Press contacts:

NATIONAL SPOKESPERSON:  PATRICIA DOXSEY at pdoxsey@gmail.com

REGIONAL SPOKESPERSONS:

CALIFORNIA:  CARL HALL at chall@mediaworkers.org

MINNESOTA: CANDACE LUND at candace@mnguild.org

MICHIGAN:  LOU GRIECO at lgrieco@cwa-union.org

PENNSYLVANIA: BILL ROSS at bross@local-10.com

NEW YORK: PATRICIA DOXSEY at pdoxsey@gmail.com

DENVER: KIERNAN NICHOLSON, knicholson@denverpost.com

 

SOURCE The NewGuild-Communications Workers of America

Why does Black Press buy and then close small BC papers?

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SOURCE: j-source.ca

Three of the newspapers Black Press has closed: The Nainamo Daily News, The Alberni Valley Times and the Campbell River Courier-Islander. Image by J-Source.

This story was funded by the J-Source Patreon campaign.

By Megan Devlin

Eric Plummer, editor of the Alberni Valley Times, remembers the day last September when two representatives from Black Press told him his paper was closing.

“They came in, I think it was like 4:00 or 4:30,” he said. “I don’t think that we’d even finished the paper yet, actually.”

The daily paper, which served the 25,000 people of Alberni Valley on Vancouver Island from 1967 to 2015, was one of 11 British Columbia community newspapers that Black Press bought from Glacier Media in 2014.

“I won’t contend that the paper wasn’t losing money,” Plummer said. “I think at that point I was just so hellbent on keeping the paper going that I refused to believe that we were going to be dying just yet.”

On Oct. 9, 2015, Plummer published the paper’s last edition.

Three months later, the Nanaimo Daily News—also part of Black Press’s package of papers bought from Glacier—was closed as well.

The buying and subsequent closing of newspapers is a story that repeats over and over again in small BC communities. Since 2010, Black Press has eliminated 10 papers and Glacier Media has shuttered seven. Several others have had their publication schedules reduced.

– See more at: http://www.j-source.ca/article/why-does-black-press-buy-and-then-close-small-bc-papers#sthash.DIdfMT07.dpuf

Postmedia’s relationship with the CTF

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MAR 29, 2016

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation and Postmedia Network Canada Corp. enjoy a cozy symbiotic relationship nowadays.

The CTF supplies Postmedia’s newspapers and their online editions, including Alberta’s four-headed Frankendaily, with reams of free editorial copy produced by the secretive organization, most of it in this province attacking the Liberal government in Ottawa and the NDP government in Edmonton.

In return, Postmedia supplies the CTF with unprecedented direct access to thousands of readers, a mass readership that despite the corporation’s potentially fatal financial difficulties remains among the largest in English Canada.

In addition, in almost any story published in a Postmedia newspaper about government spending, especially where Liberal and NDP governments are involved, a call for comment goes out to one of the CTF’s many directors. (Except for the occasional vice-president, almost all CTF employees appear to be a “director” of something.)

Despite the CTF’s protestations to the contrary, based on what they publish and distribute it can be said fairly argued both parties share the highly partisan goal of obstructing and defeating Liberal and especially New Democrat governments wherever they spring up. In addition, they share an open, aggressive hostility to public sector unions.

Read Morehttp://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/djclimenhaga/2016/03/postmedias-symbiotic-relationship-canadian-taxpayers-federation-