Newspaper Guild

As the media landscape shifts, so too have newsroom resources. One looming question is where people can find coverage of local news subjects, particularly government and public affairs. A new comprehensive and highly anticipated university study of local news from communities across the country offers a piece of the answer: Newspapers were much more likely to cover government than any other news medium.

The Guild and Time Inc. have agreed on final language for a three-year contract that extends through Feb. 1, 2013. The new contract provides for guaranteed yearly raises of 1.5%, 2% and 2%, to be given upon ratification, on Feb. 1, 2011, and on Feb. 1, 2012, respectively. The contract will be voted upon at 1 p.m. on Thursday, with ratification unanimously recommended by the negotiating committee.

The New York Guild has obtained the support of nearly a dozen top city labor leaders in its fight with Thomson Reuters, in the form of a letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg asking him to block a Thomson Reuters application for tax breaks. The tax benefit was conditioned on Thomson Reuters creating new jobs for New Yorkers, but as the labor leaders point out, the company has "failed miserably to follow through" on its end of the bargain.

New York Guild members voted overwhelmingly Thursday to ratify a new three-year agreement with Standard & Poor’s. The ratification vote marked the culmination of 20 sessions that spanned five months of difficult negotiations that were brief compared to prior contracts. The new contract calls for a 2.25% general wage increase retroactive to April 1, followed by a combination of increases and merit pool raises in subsequent years.

There are few professional relationships that seesaw between love and hate more than those of public relations people and journalists. While they provide valuable help to each other at times, they rarely need the same things at the same time. NewsBasis, a start-up opening today, wants to change that with an online marketplace to match businesses and organizations that want to broadcast their messages with journalists working on topical articles.

Today I look at the world of magazine and newspaper publishing and I see no photojournalism being produced. Should we care? Well yes we should. The photojournalists were the first to go, but once the destruction of the printed media business model is complete and still no-one has come up with a new one, then the writers will have to go as well. So we’ll end up with a couple of sub-editors re-phrasing press-releases and dropping in supplied photos. Hell, that’s happening already!

Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters could be opening themselves up to lawsuits by taking on unpaid interns, according to a report published in the United Kingdom today. The report warns that in the private sector, all those who work have the right to be paid at least the minimum wage — but that many employers "don’t understand the law when it comes to hiring interns." As a result, ""We now have entire industries that rely on the willingness of young people to work for free."

A pair of contentious resolutions marked the Communications Workers convention in the capital this week. One highlighted widespread discontent among local leaders and activists over fragmented bargaining and concessions in telecommunications bargaining last year, and the other shifted conventions from every year to every two, reflecting the union’s financial troubles.

Delegates to back-to-back conventions of the Newspaper Guild and its parent union, CWA, approved several measures this past week that will affect how the unions govern themselves, communicate with members and allocate resources. Driven largely by declining revenues because of continued membership erosion, the new measures promise greater efficiency and cost-savings, but at a possible loss of membership involvement.

Tribune Co. has proposed paying its top 43 executives a severance package of cash and benefits if they are asked by a new board to leave the company after the Chicago-based media conglomerate emerges from bankruptcy. This follows the filing last week of a 2010 management incentive plan that could potentially add another $42.9 million in payments from the company, which has been in bankruptcy since December 2008.

Saying labor’s current struggle “is not hopeless, just hard,” CWA President Larry Cohen this week laid out a long list of challenges in the months and years ahead. From declining numbers due to the Great Recession to lack of labor unity, from Senate GOP filibusters bringing government to a halt to the apparent death — for that very reason — of the Employee Free Choice Act, Cohen warned his union convention’s delegates they and other unionists have a hard row to hoe.

Several labor organizations joined 57 other groups yesterday to unveil a mass movement to protect Social Security from an Obama administration-named deficit-cutting commission. Speakers at a Washington press conference of the coalition emphasized that the nation’s main retirement system has a cumulative $2.6 trillion surplus — which the rest of the government has borrowed to offset part of its deficit — and that the surplus should be protected from raiding.

A federal bankruptcy judge on Thursday allowed some parties in the Tribune Co. bankruptcy case to look at the full version of a court-appointed examiner’s report, but a decision on whether the public will have full access will be discussed Tuesday. The report concludes that talks leading up to the buyout of Tribune had bordered on fraud. The publicly released version of the report is missing hundreds of pages because some bank lenders said it included confidential information.

In prepping to launch new media businesses, entrepreneurial journalists are disproving five common myths: that journalists lack entrepreneurial skills and spark; that start-up revenue is all about subscribers and ads; that young upstarts dominate the field; that it’s "us against them, David vs. Goliath;" and that to succeed, journalism start-ups have to go big or go home.

As the Washington Post Company prepares to sell Newsweek, it seems to be most receptive to an offer from California billionaire Sidney Harman because it proposes to keep the vast majority of Newsweek’s 325 employees in their jobs. But at least two other parties remain in the mix: Fred Drasner, who was a part owner of the Washington Redskins and a publisher of The Daily News of New York, and Marc Lasry, a hedge fund owner and major Democratic Party donor.

Meetings of the Industrial Development Agency — the New York City agency in charge of approving discretionary tax subsidies to local businesses — are generally sleepy affairs. But yesterday’s hearing was entirely different, due to a Thomson Reuters request for $24 million in sales tax breaks on office and building materials — not because of the subsidy proposal, which is unremarkable in the annals of city tax breaks — but because of Guild opposition.

Guild member Nancy Trejos kicked off the Washington Post Newspaper Guild’s new Outreach program with a book signing July 21. Trejos, a long-standing Guild member and veteran Post reporter, talked about her book, “Hot (broke) Messes: How to Have Your Latte and Drink It, Too,” and the struggle with her own personal finances that prompted her to write on the subject. The Outreach program was created to promote the talents of Guild members and to raise the Guild’s profile.

The McClatchy Co. reported a lower second-quarter profit Thursday on a revenue decline that slowed to the lowest rate in the past three reporting periods. Advertising revenue declined 8.2% year-over-year in the quarter, compared to declines of 11.2% in the first quarter of 2010 and 20.5% in the fourth quarter of 2009. Overall revenue dropped 6%, compared to an 8% drop in the first quarter of the year.

The Foreign Press Association in Israel has issued a statement condemning what it sees as a change in Israel Defence Forces policy toward journalists covering West Bank protests against Israel’s separation barrier, illegal settlements and land expropriation. The statement followed an attack on three journalists as they covered a protest march near an Israeli settlement built illegally on land belonging to the Palestinian village Beir Ummar.

United States lawmakers have passed legislation countering the threat to freedom of speech posed by ‘libel tourists’ who use the United Kingdom’s tough libel laws to take action over articles primarily published in the U.S. The SPEECH Act — Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act — has been approved by the House of Representatives and will now be signed into law by President Obama in the next 30 days.