![]() ![]() Penguin Random House is expected to have layoffs in January, and the HarperCollins strike is getting ugly. That same day, Sally Buzbee killed the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine, citing “economic headwinds.” On Thursday, there were cuts at Gannett. On Tuesday, James Dolan sent a memo to his employees at AMC Networks about a coming “large-scale layoff.” On Wednesday, Chris Licht cut the cord on more CNN employees, and there were layoffs at CBS Studios, too. On Monday, Bob Iger said he isn’t lifting Disney’s hiring freeze. This winter is shaping up to be a frosty one for everyone in the media as the economy teeters on the edge of a recession. It’s a really bad place for a paper that, relatively speaking in this day and age for a newspaper, is doing quite well and has a pretty well-defined future.”īut the word relatively is key. I had to bring my computer in to get it worked on the other day and the guys up in the computer shop and I were yammering about this, and I talked to the security guards about it, too. (According to an SEC proxy statement, Sulzberger’s total compensation grew nearly 50 percent last year to $3.6 million up from $2.4 million Kopit Levien’s total compensation was $5.8 million, up from $4 million.) Powell says “management’s tactics feel increasingly provocative” and that “there’s a real sense of building anger around this. “We have been lectured about the dire economic future the company faces - even as the company tells Wall Street about a successful corporation that can afford to pay millions in salaries and benefits to its top executives,” states the letter. The staff is steamed because they feel the paper is sitting on a pot of gold. ![]() “Obviously the next step, if we can’t get anywhere at the negotiating table, is to consider things like a strike authorization vote,” says reporter Michael Powell, adding that “none of us want to step into the terra incognita if this isn’t seen as a significant warning shot.” Senior staff editor Tom Coffey has been at the Times since 1997 and says, “I think this is the worst I’ve seen it since the staff mutiny that led to Howell Raines being fired.” It’s the sort of stunt that precedes an actual sustained strike. But the walkout threat is a marked escalation from an ordinarily fissiparous newsroom. (“There will be plenty of photo-ops,” muses one.) Sure, masthead myrmidons will have enough copy in the hopper to keep that homepage humming for a little while, and it’s not as though the app on your phone will suddenly go blank. Reporters tell me they’re ready to picket outside the building, too. (You’d be shocked at how many people it takes to produce one of those things.) Even logging into Oak (that’s their CMS) will be seen as scabby. From midnight to midnight, no reporting, no filing stories, no podcasting, no comment moderating, and definitely no responding to editors’ queries. No one covering the tumult in Guangzhou or inside Buckingham Palace or what our president is saying. Picture it: a full day without the New York Times. What the employees are preparing to do next week would be something not seen at the paper of record since 1978. But those were mostly shows of solidarity. There was a one-hour walkout over a lapsed contract in 2011, and another quick afternoon walkout in 2017 over copy editors being eliminated. If they don’t get enough of a salary bump, they’re going to stop working for 24 hours next Thursday.Ī walkout is technically a strike, though one with an end date. But what the employees really want is permanent increases in base pay. The letter demands a weeklong marathon bargaining session over health-care funds and return-to-office policies and their pension plan. So now they’ve decided to give the boss a hard deadline. For months, the newsroom has been pressing its publisher for a bigger share of the Times’ profits, but it turns out the guy whose predecessors were nicknamed Punch and Pinch is no pushover. ![]() 8, we are walking out.”īack in September, I wrote about how the unionized staff and management hadn’t come to terms on a new labor contract and were threatening to do something like, well, what this letter has finally threatened to do. ![]() Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien received a letter from Bill Baker, unit chair of the Times guild, that was signed by more than 1,000 employees. This morning at 8 a.m., New York Times publisher A.G. ![]()
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