By Josh Richman:

BETTER TO LIGHT A CANDLE…than to curse the darkness, so they say.

There’s plenty of darkness. The Minneapolis Star Tribune is laying off 58 employees -
mostly in circulation, none in the newsroom – and freezing the wages of all 600 of its,
nonunion employees; the North County Times is seeking up to 20 staff members to
volunteer for buyouts; The Tribune Co. plans to cut 400 to 500 jobs companywide,
including about 100 each at the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times; and
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller says he intends to cut 100 newsroom
jobs this year, primarily through attrition and buyouts but possibly with layoffs too.

And where the news hasn’t come, rumors abound. Don’t forget what John Armstrong
told us in that letter he sent to your home recently: The company is looking at ways
to reduce costs and shrink our workforce. “If we turn to layoffs, we assure you it will
be because we see no alternative.”

Wouldn’t this be a good time to have contract language dealing with layoffs and
severance? Wouldn’t this be a good time to be part of an organization that is working
with management to find ways to cut costs and improve our products without
sacrificing jobs and quality?

All this and a lot more is within our grasp, if we “light our candle” by organizing. Time
is a luxury we don’t have, as our industry struggles all around us; we’ll soon be at a
point where fence-sitting is no longer an option.

Will you take an active role in protecting our jobs and saving our industry, or will you
trust company executives in Denver to do it for you?

ON A RELATED NOTE: Organizing Committee co-chair Sara Steffens recounted to
her CCT peers a lunch she and two others had with John Armstrong and Kevin Keane
this past Monday:

So, Karl, Mary and I had lunch Monday with John Armstrong and Kevin Keane. None
of us walked in expecting to change each other’s minds.

We were hoping to share our core goal, one we hope everyone will support: To organize
our newsroom in the most respectful, least divisive way possible, without insulting our
colleagues, our newspaper or its managers. We want to bring people together, not tear
them apart.

John and Kevin doubt this is possible. They already feel stung, they said, to hear that
we think our papers are getting worse, that our newsroom staffing is suffering, that
our managers have limited power in the face of the profit expectations and business
model of the MediaNews corporation.

If we trust them, they asked, why do we need a union?

It’s an interesting question, and one that gets to the heart of why we are all doing this.

In my years at the Times, I’ve always jumped in headfirst to things I believe are good
for the paper, good for the community, and good for journalism.

Never before have I been accused of stepping up because I didn’t trust the company to
do the right thing. Always, my managers have understood what I do: Good ideas come
from all of us. Work gets done by those willing to do it.

Here’s how I see it: John and Kevin probably want better for us than what MediaNews
has offered. But just as I have no power to negotiate a lower co-pay for my prescriptions,
they have no power to convince the company that the new health plan is a mistake –
one of many small aggravations that will over time drive away the talent we need to
survive these turbulent times.

We like our managers. We want to help them do what’s right for us, and for journalism.

NEW, IMPROVED WEB SITE: Please take a minute to visit our newly redesigned site,
onebigbang.org, the information clearinghouse for our drive to organize BANG-EB. My
favorite part? The photos. But seriously, there’s a lot of information there on what we’re
doing, and why.

And we’d like to hear from you, too. You’ll notice the site includes testimonials and photos
from your peers about why they’re supporting our drive. Please send us your own story of
why you’re ready to “Go Guild,” and we’ll put it on the site as well. Send ‘em on to me at
joshrichman@comcast.net.

FOUR COMPANIES FORM ONLINE AD NETWORK: From the Chicago Tribune this week:

Four of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers have created an online ad network
designed to compete for national advertising dollars against Internet powerhouses Yahoo,
Google, America Online and Microsoft Network.

Tribune Co., Gannett Co., The New York Times Co. and Hearst Corp. said they formed a new
company called quadrantOne to sell ad space on their local newspaper and broadcasting
Web sites.

The idea is to provide one-stop shopping for advertisers looking to tap a national network
of local audiences via well-trusted media brands such as the Chicago Tribune and the
Houston Chronicle.

The new venture will both overlap and compete with a similar network set up last year by
Yahoo; Hearst participates in both groups.

The idea of a new newspaper company network to compete with Yahoo was hatched late
last year by Tribune Co. and Gannett, who have worked together in the past.

The talks originally included MediaNews Group and Cox Newspapers, two other publishers
in the Yahoo consortium. But Hayes said those companies decided not to join as equity partners.

See the full story.

EXPAND YOUR MIND: A reminder from last week’s update – at 6:30 p.m. this Wednesday,
Feb. 20 is “The Future of the Newsroom: New opportunities, collateral damage, and effects on
journalists in the digital era,” in the University of California, Berkeley’s North Gate Graduate
School of Journalism, on the campus’ north side near Hearst Street and Euclid Avenue.

Featured speakers at this free event include Salon.com Managing Editor Jeanne Carstensen;
California Media Project Director and former San Francisco Chronicle editorial writer Louis
Freedberg; San Jose Newspaper Guild Executive Officer Luther Jackson; and San Jose Mercury
News Deputy Managing Editor Matt Mansfield.

Also, March 9 is the application deadline for the next class of World Affairs Journalism
Fellowships, an amazing opportunity for editors, senior reporters, commentary writers and
other content “gatekeepers” from U.S. community-based daily newspapers to travel
overseas from one to three weeks and report on stories that matter in their communities.

The WAJF program is funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. Also, the
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is sponsoring one World Affairs Journalism Fellowship this
time around; the Pulitzer Center WAJF Fellow will pursue a project addressing under-reported
international issue through a combination of print and other media outlets. This designated
fellow will receive additional support from the Pulitzer Center staff and the resulting project will
be highlighted on the Pulitzer Center’s website.

Here’s more information.

The International Center for Journalists also offers the Arthur F. Burns Fellowships, a U.S. -
German exchange program for print, broadcast and freelance journalists. The deadline for this
one is March 1. Here’s more details.

Newsletter edited by Josh Richman. Here’s our contact information.

Hope you’re doing well. We’ve been pretty busy the last couple weeks as the
guild organizing effort has picked up steam. And if last week’s scary letter
home summarizing the recent roadshows was any indication, management
has been pretty busy too (5 grafs of gloom and doom; 11 grafs about the
dangers of joining the guild).

So newsroom layoffs are getting discussed here as a possibility. I figured that
would happen sooner or later, and we should expect the gloom and doom to
continue and worsen as weeks pass. It really could happen — could always
have happened, at any time — but we have no real way of knowing what the
company plans to do at this point.

Our industry is growing increasingly inhospitable, and not even a strong guild
can do a thing to prevent layoffs driven by economic necessity and change.
Don’t look here for that kind of protection. The guild can only help around the
edges – by negotiating for contract language that influences the layoff process,
such as advance notice, severance pay, rehire benefits and seniority.

One argument against the guild that we sometimes hear is that it cannot
guarantee that everyone will keep their jobs. But what kind of an argument is
that? Is the company promising no layoffs if we reject the guild? Doesn’t sound
that way to me. Right now they do whatever they feel they need to do, without
our input. If they feel they need to lay off some employees for whatever reason,
they will do it. Their decisions change with their business needs.

But I don’t think we can assume an inverse relationship between worker
compensation and the number of workers. The Bay Area is an important market
for MediaNews. There are several MediaNews papers around the country that
have negotiated excellent contracts (see Denver and St. Paul). We know that
times are hard, but corporate is still profiting from our labor. The question is
whether MediaNews would, if forced, invest more here. I don’t think there’s
enough information on the table to know. But I also know we’ll never find out
if we don’t explore our options.

LUNCH WITH THE BOSS (by Sara Steffens):

So, Karl, Mary and I had lunch Monday with John Armstrong and Kevin Keane.
None of us walked in expecting to change each other’s minds.

We were hoping to share our core goal, one we hope everyone will support:
To organize our newsroom in the most respectful, least divisive way possible,
without insulting our colleagues, our newspaper or its managers. We want to
bring people together, not tear them apart.

John and Kevin doubt this is possible. They already feel stung, they said, to
hear that we think our papers are getting worse, that our newsroom staffing
is suffering, that our managers have limited power in the face of the profit
expectations and business model of the MediaNews corporation.

If we trust them, they asked, why do we need a union?

It’s an interesting question, and one that gets to the heart of why we are all
doing this.

In my years at the Times, I’ve always jumped in headfirst to things I believe
are good for the paper, good for the community, and good for journalism.

In my early days at the paper, I started a little committee to find ways to
keep reporters from leaving for dot-coms. Radical stuff like offering free
cleaning supplies for our desks. I founded the Times’ annual school-supply
drive, and soon found myself personally lugging mountains of backpacks to
and fro. I signed on to help a reporter run a brown-bag writers’ group, and
when that group died, I signed on to help with the next one. I chaired a
strategic planning subcommittee on youth readership. I helped plan Chris
Lopez’s company Christmas party, lugging booze through a very miserable
rainstorm while several months pregnant.

Never before have I been accused of stepping up because I didn’t trust the
company to do the right thing. Always, my managers have understood what
I do: Good ideas come from all of us. Work gets done by those willing to do it.

Here’s how I see it: John and Kevin probably want better for us than what
MediaNews has offered. But just as I have no power to negotiate a lower
co-pay for my prescriptions, they have no power to convince the company
that the new health plan is a mistake – one of many small aggravations that
will over time drive away the talent we need to survive these turbulent times.

We like our managers. We want to help them do what’s right for us, and for
journalism.

EATIN’ CROW (by Karl Fischer):

I made an error last week in a message I wrote to you, the one responding
to the roadshow “scary letter” that got mailed home.

Both John Armstrong and another particularly savvy co-worker pointed it out
to me Monday. Here is the suspect sentence:

“While a guild cannot prevent layoffs if it really comes to that, a guild does
have extensive legal rights to information — they have to open the books –
and we can know better whether it really needs to come to that.”

That bit in the middle about opening the books is inaccurate. Even with a guild,
the company does not need to open its books — at least not completely — to
the guild. It would only need to do so if it claimed that financial hardship were
the reason they were unable to meet the guild’s economic demands, and that
typically does not happen.

The point I was trying to make was that the company does legally have to
provide information needed for the guild to bargain effectively. For example,
if there’s a takeaway proposal on the table, the guild can ask for relevant
information relating to the issue. What is relevant and how much information
must be given are sometimes points of contention, but at least the guild has
rights to more information when bargaining than non-union employees do
when trying to cut their own deals individually.

In the near future I’ll send out some examples of the kinds of information
some local guilds have requested recently during contract talks, along with
more discussion about how the bargaining process works.

LUNCH REDUX II (by Sara):

Any of you frightened by the letters mailed to your homes last week may be
relieved by John’s clarification on Monday, supplied to us at lunch.

The paragraph on potential layoffs, he said, just happened to directly precede
the 11 following paragraphs on the “unfortunate” aspects of our organizing
effort. John assured us, on the record, that any determination of whether to
pursue layoffs will have nothing to do with whether the newsroom chooses to
organize.

In other words: what’s going to happen is going to happen. The question then
becomes: in these uncertain times, will we benefit from a legal structure that
represents our interests as employees and journalists?

Obviously, we think the answer is “yes.”

For the record, John also was offended by our characterization of the letter as
a scare tactic. He told us he didn’t mean to scare you, or your families.

ONE BIG BANG IS ONLINE:

Check out our retooled web site at onebigbang.org. We hope you’ll find the new
content more useful, particularly for those of us at the Contra Costa papers.

We plan to add photos, messages from your co-workers and news about the
organizing drive every week, all written by people you know. We’d like the
site to become a place for nuts-and-bolts answers and we think we’re off to a
pretty good start. Let us know what you think…

Keep an eye out for the anonymous salary survey, which we hope will go live
in about a week. I hope you will participate, because we in the newsroom have
never had a good grasp of relative compensation at the Contra Costa papers —
how much money people who do what you do should expect to earn. Informally,
we’re finding that salaries are all over the map.

JOIN US (by Karl):

If you’re feeling especially brave today, go see Sara Steffens (or me) for a
“Go Guild” button. Then wear it at work.

Nothing bad happens to people who do this. I know, I’ve worn one. It’s allowed,
and if management were to bug you about it, you would want to let us know
immediately.

If you’re feeling less brave but still want to help, you can always do something
small but important like forwarding this message along (on personal email
accounts) to your friends who don’t now get this update, or getting their email
addresses to pass along to me. Just a hair fewer than half of guild-eligible CCT
employees are on my list, in large part because you folks actually do this every
week. So thank you, lots. But we still need more help.

If you’re interested in talking, or if you have specific questions, call or write me
or Sara.

And if you’d like to see what we’re doing up close, we’re always happy to see
you at our 10 a.m. Saturday meetings at the Media Workers Hall, 1831 Park
Boulevard in Oakland.

ARTIE’S (by Karl):

I will be drinking at Artie’s, the bar over in the Countrywood Shopping Center
in Walnut Creek, for the next few Friday nights starting around 11 p.m. I’d like
to have a beer with anyone who’d like to come by, particularly desk and sports
people who want to know more about the guild but haven’t gotten a chance to
talk with organizers because of our differing shifts.

So come out, and tell your friends.

CAL J-SCHOOL, THE FUTURE OF THE NEWSROOM, 2/20:

Anyone with time should check out a discussion February 20 at UC Berkeley,
“The Future of the Newsroom: New opportunities, collateral damage, and effects
on journalists in the digital era.”

The event, presented by the journalism grad school, runs from 6:30 to 8 p.m.
at North Gate Hall, Room 105. It’s free. Here’s a description by the J-School:

“Everyone is talking about the future of the newsroom in this new digital world
where young people get their news from YouTube and Facebook, and traditional
print journalists have seen hundreds of their brethren laid off or bought out.
Join us for a discussion of how these changes are affecting journalists. What can
media workers unions do? Should journalists hurry up and learn how to blog and
podcast before its too late?”

Speakers include Salon.com managing editor Jeanne Carstensen, California Media
Project director Louis Freedberg, San Jose Mercury News guild rep Luther Jackson,
and Matt Mansfield, deputy managing editor at the Merc.

Thanks!

Karl Fischer
Sara Steffens