More than 200 reporters, photographers and other staff members from the Chicago Tribune and six other news outlets across the country took to the streets Thursday to protest years of “slow-moving” contract negotiations and demand fair pay. began a 24-hour strike.
The strike included 76 members of the Chicago Tribune’s news staff, photographers and editors and began at 5 a.m., said Caroline Kubzanski, a Chicago Tribune Guild member and general assignment reporter for the paper. It is said that it was done.
This is the latest strike in the US news industry.
The striking workers are employees of Alden Global Capital, a New York hedge fund that has bought newspapers across the country and has come under fire for budget cuts and layoffs.
NewsGuild-CWA, which represents employees, said the workers on the 24-hour strike are demanding fair wages and that management should not eliminate 401(k) match benefits. .
The employees say they have been fighting for a contract through their union for five years.
Last week, staff at Alden’s New York Daily News went on another 24-hour strike.
The strike is the “largest single move by Alden Global Capital’s journalists against Tribune Publishing since hedge funds acquired the company in 2021, leaving Tribune Publishing with $278 million in debt.” This is a coordinated action by the News Guild-CWA on Wednesday. news release.
The union says the cuts imposed by Alden Global Capital have “decimated the newsroom,” including cutting the Chicago Tribune’s staff from 111 to 76 people starting in June 2021. He said it also includes doing so.
The cuts “hurt the ability of journalists to provide quality public information and hold them accountable,” the News Guild CWA said.
The union’s president, John Schleuss, said Alden Global Capital is a “very greedy” corporate hedge fund that is “dedicated to destroying American newsrooms.”
“They’re siphoning money out of the backs of all these journalists who are barely living paycheck to paycheck,” he said at a Thursday news conference about the strike. “Corporate greed in the media is out of control, and hedge funds are at the heart of that corporate greed.”
An e-mail message seeking comment on the strike was sent to Chicago Tribune Editor-in-Chief Mitch Pugh, who responded that all inquiries should be directed to Goldin Solutions.
A message seeking comment was sent to Goldin Solutions by The Associated Press on Thursday morning.
The one-day strike comes at a turbulent time for media companies, many of which are owned by billionaires and have recently suffered layoffs.
Last week, Time magazine and Condé Nast, publishers of Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and other big-name magazines, both important announcement Staff reduction.
The Los Angeles Times also announced last week that it would lay off at least 115 employees, more than 20% of its newsroom, in one of the largest layoffs in the paper’s 143-year history.
And in late 2023, more than 200 employees at The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, accepted the deal.
An estimated 2,681 news industry jobs will be lost by the end of November 2023, according to employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. This was more than the entire years of 2022 and 2021.
Aside from the Chicago Tribune and its four sister newspapers in suburban Chicago, other striking workers include staff from the Orlando Sentinel. Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Virginian pilot. Virginia Daily Press. Virginia Gazette. According to NewsGuild-CWA, Tidewater Review.
