Update, June 10:  With our contract set to expire in November, the BANG-East Bay bargaining committee is already preparing for upcoming negotiations. That means we need to hear what your goals and priorities are for our next agreement with the company.

You may have already received a copy of a bargaining survey from your shop steward. If not, your steward will be approaching you in the coming days to fill out a copy of this short, anonymous survey. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to complete and return this to your steward, and help our unit get ready for negotiations.

Also in this update:

• Online filing
• Membership clarification
• San Francisco Chronicle bargaining update
• Sacramento Bee tentative agreement
• Hawaii Newspaper Guild merger

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Update, March 26: As we noted in our bargaining bulletin Tuesday, talks exploring the possibility of merging the BANG-EB bargaining unit with the unit representing the Mercury News have failed to reach agreement.

So all parties now return to expedited bargaining to secure separate contracts. In our case, that means we’ll be back at the table with the company next week, continuing to negotiate a first contract for BANG-East Bay.

At the request of both the Guild and the company, David Weinberg, a federal mediator with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, will remain involved in the talks.

We look forward to continuing our productive relationship with management. Our top goal is to reach agreement as soon as possible on a tentative contract, which must then be ratified by a vote of our members. Previous bargaining sessions have led t tentative agreement on many non-economic items, and our bargaining team also has offered comprehensive proposals on pay and benefits.

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March 24: Bargaining committees representing the two largest MediaNews Group Guild units in the Bay Area will resume expedited negotiations for individual contracts after talks about a proposed merger of the units failed to produce an agreement Monday.

A meeting of the Guild and management committees was held Monday with David Weinberg, a federal mediator with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.

Negotiations for a Guild contract with the Mercury News will resume Thursday, while talks for a contract covering BANG-EB employees will resume next week. Weinberg will remain involved at the behest of both the Guild and the company in order to help us reach separate contracts as soon as possible.

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Bargaining bulletin, Feb. 25: After meeting with company representatives Tuesday, Guild bargaining teams agreed to enter federal meditation talks to explore the possibility of merging the existing BANG-EB and San Jose Mercury News guild units.

Our expedited bargaining period was supposed to end this week, but we agreed to extend it to discuss the company’s suggestion that we explore merged units. We also established that if we fail to reach an agreement, we will return to positions taken before mediation talks.

Mediation talks, scheduled to begin March 5, will focus on what a merged unit could look like and how it might affect daily operations of the newsroom and, potentially, other departments. We want to hear your responses to this idea, and our next Saturday unit meeting will focus specifically on the proposed merger.
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Weekly update, Nov. 6: For a longtime journalist, sitting out a major election day is the strangest feeling in the world. No wheedling quotes from harried moms outside the polls. No working the crowd at the victory party of some random candidate. No scarfing cold pizza between bouts of frantic typing, revising and re-revising the same 12-incher on an obscure ballot measure.

Outside the newsroom, election nights make no sense. What do ordinary people do after the polls close anyway? Sit and wait for someone to tell them what happened?

Bear with me: I do have a point here.

Many of you have told me that things have been pretty lousy for you in the newsroom lately. Lousy enough to make you wonder why you stay in this heartbreaking business anyway.

Here’s hoping Tuesday night reminded you.

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Weekly update, Oct. 1: None of you could have escaped this week’s big news, the ouster of BANG-EB Publisher John Armstrong and the installment of David Rounds, a Mercury News circulation VP, to replace him.

Both the announcement and resulting coverage were surprisingly candid, with no pretense that Armstrong simply chose to retire. Instead, he told employees Tuesday, MediaNews simply felt that his “skill set” didn’t match the challenges ahead.

Here’s the Times’ own coverage, by reporter John Simerman, the AP’s version, and Editor and Publisher’s take.

Armstrong’s last day will be Oct. 17.

In the meantime, we’ve been Googling David Rounds, who does not seem to have any online pictures.

Our searches paused at this blast from the past — a 1999 AJR piece by reporter Cynthia Gorney that provides an amazing time capsule of the East Bay newspaper scene in its boom years:

“Slow down, John,” David Rounds said from the rear seat of the black Mercedes in which three of us, me and two mid-level officials of the Evil Empire, were driving around the back roads of Contra Costa County. Rounds, a tall pale-haired man whose long legs made him look somewhat cramped even in the back of such a fancy car, is vice president for circulation for the Contra Costa Newspapers. John Armstrong, who was driving, is editor of the Contra Costa papers, and as he slowed down Armstrong nodded for my benefit toward the hills that stretched out to either side of his car.
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