Jeremy Sherman Quoted in Columba Journalism Review
"Labor loses more ground in the newsroom"

The article "Labor loses more ground in the newsroom" in the March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review notes that "According to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 17,809 media jobs were lost last year -- the most since the recession year of 2001. As the chain ownership model fragments and the industry is rocked by diminishing print circulation and advertising revenues, both union and nonunion workers are in a defensive crouch. Knight Ridder, the first of the big media chains to implode, managed its business with "a strategy of attrition -- if attrition is a strategy," said Darren Carroll, executive officer of the Minnesota Newspaper Guild. At the St. Paul Pioneer Press, run by MediaNews, and elsewhere, "we see an acceleration of that trend: more costcutting, more staff reductions, more expense reductions," he said. "It's good for profitability in the short term, bad for the long-term future of a business that relies on depth and breadth of coverage as its competitive advantage." Even the nation's elite newspapers aren't immune to these trends. In a January memorandum, The New York Times called for the guild "to loosen some of the arcane work rules and practices that hamper The Times' ability to swiftly meet the challenges posed by a new multimedia era." As the price of bailing out the union's ailing health care fund, the company was asking to bring newspaper and digital employees under a single contract with a longer work week and language making it easier to dismiss employees for poor performance. The threat of layoffs, which are replacing buyouts, is becoming a powerful tool to extract concessions. At the San Jose Mercury News, another former Knight Ridder property now under MediaNews management, the union agreed in December to higher health insurance premiums and the outsourcing of finance and advertising jobs, reducing guild layoffs from sixty-nine to twenty-eight. During the Philadelphia negotiations, management suggested that Inquirer newsroom layoffs could reach 150. Jeremy P. Sherman, a Chicago-based lawyer at Seyfarth Shaw who has advised management negotiators in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, said newspapers must learn to compete with the "entirely different economic model" of the Web, with its "constellation of different content providers," and more flexible job assignments. "This is a paradigm shift," he said. That isn't to suggest that newspaper managers aren't "passionate about putting out the finest quality consistent with business reality," Sherman added. Where those goals intersect is "the area subject to legitimate debate."