After budget slashing, more newspaper journalists plan one-day strikes

A wave of union walkouts at media companies nationwide has now reached several Pulitzer-winning regional newspapers owned by a firm known for slashing the operations of the hundreds of local newsrooms it has acquired in recent years.

On Thursday, employees at seven newsrooms, including the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the Virginian-Pilot, plan to walk off the job to protest management’s refusal to offer cost-of-living raises and threats to end their 401(k) matches.

It’s the largest collective action by staff at the former Tribune Publishing chain since it was purchased in 2021 by Alden Global Capital, criticized by some employees for what they see as “vulture capitalist” practices, such as selling off real estate assets.

But while most of the recent media walkouts — from the New York Times just over a year ago to Condé Nast last week — have largely been PR exercises, aimed at pressuring owners in the court of public opinion, union members believe their action could seriously disrupt the Tribune newspapers’ production this week.

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“I presume a paper will get out,” said Dave Roknic, a print production specialist in the Tribune unit that oversees the entire chain’s print publication, from which 90 percent of unionized employees plan to walk out alongside editorial staffers. “But I can’t speak to how those papers are going to look.”

Gregory Royal Pratt, an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune, said Thursday’s strike is just the beginning of the staffs’ attempt to confront management over practices they believe are undermining coverage of their communities. Journalists at the New York Daily News, another Alden paper acquired with the Tribune purchase, conducted a walkout last week.

“This is not a one-time thing where we’re going to go away if they ignore us,” Pratt said. “This is something that we’re going to continue to fight over.”

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At the Tribune papers, the reporting corps is now less than half the size it was when Alden first took seats on Tribune Publishing’s board in 2019, according to the NewsGuild, the union representing the media workers. Within a year of Alden acquiring the company in 2021, every news or feature columnist at the Chicago Tribune had left the paper, said Stacy St. Clair, a veteran reporter there. At the Orlando Sentinel, a newsroom of roughly 55 reporters and photographers has shriveled to 32 unionized members, said reporter Amanda Rabines.

“We’re seeing staff leave because they can no longer afford to live here, and we’re not seeing those positions filled,” Rabines said. “We had someone leave because they couldn’t afford their water bill. We had a theme parks reporter leave because [the company] did not offer paid parental leave and she was pregnant.”

The Orlando area’s numerous theme parks play a massive role in the region’s economy, and the Sentinel traditionally had a reporter dedicated to covering the tourism and theme park industry. But since May, that position has been open.

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Rabines said an overworked general assignment reporter has had to cover how the theme park business operates. She said management has declined to fill open positions ever since it offered existing Sentinel staffers buyouts and no one took them.

“In a tumultuous year where we have a governor fighting with one of the biggest theme parks in our area, we do not have a theme parks reporter,” Rabines said, referring to Ron DeSantis’s feud with Disney.

The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and its Newport News-based sister paper, the Daily Press, have weathered steep cuts as well. Between 2018 and June 2021, their combined staff dropped from 101 to 46. Another round of buyouts in June 2021 chipped away eight more reporters.

Staffers say that they’re working in already sparse newsrooms, and that Alden is finding new ways to cut to the bone.

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“We are walking out over their proposal to eliminate our 401(k) match, which is essentially a 4 percent pay cut. It’s 4 percent of our benefits being cut,” St. Clair said. “If you go six years without giving people even cost-of-living raises, and you have a policy of not matching 401(k), it becomes a less attractive place to work. How do you build toward a future retirement if you’re falling behind every year?”

The enthusiasm for the walkouts has been especially striking at the Chicago Tribune, whose staff didn’t unionize until 2018. About 97 percent of the NewsGuild-covered unit voted in favor of the one-day strike. “Even some people who have always kind of expressed some reluctance against taking public stands were like, ‘Okay, yeah, I’m in,’” St. Clair said. “Every department has its own issues and concerns, and so to have everyone on the same page was just incredible.”

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The news industry has faced complicated challenges in recent years: loss of advertising revenue, declining subscriptions, rounds of layoffs. (The Post offered buyouts to roughly 240 employees late last year, to reduce staff by nearly 10 percent.) But the bloodletting at Alden-owned papers has been more aggressive, according to a 2018 report by the University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, which found that the firm posted an operating profit margin of 17 percent in 2017, when other major newspaper chains struggled to maintain single-digit margins, “apparently by cutting newsroom staffing by as much as twice the industry average.”

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A spokesman for Alden responded: “Perhaps a reason The Washington Post has been hemorrhaging readers and its credibility is its reliance on outdated six-year-old studies.”

For the most part, the crescendo of one-day walkouts at media companies, including The Post in December, didn’t substantially hinder production. Reporters withheld their bylines for work completed before the strike began, while managers and other nonunion employees scrambled to update websites and publish print editions. These strikes aimed more to call public attention to what staffers see as failures of corporate owners than to play hardball in contract fights, the strategy in longer-term strikes.

But Alden — dubbed “the grim reaper of American newspapers” by Vanity Fair and “the hedge fund killing newspapers” by the Atlantic — has already endured years of public criticism, including a warning from U.S. senators decrying its “reckless acquisition and destruction of newspapers.”

“You can’t argue the importance of journalism with them. You can’t argue why newspapers matter to a community, because they don’t care,” St. Clair said. “You have to speak to them on an economic level, because that’s what matters to them.”

This story has been updated with comment from a spokesman for Alden Global Capital.

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