While union battles at Amazon and Starbucks may make the news, the labor struggle within America’s newsrooms is often ignored by the corporate news media. The issues of low wages, job insecurity and long hours strike too close to home and those mass media gatekeepers don’t want their workers to get any radical ideas about organizing. 

Better to keep the notion that unions only belong at a retail location, a factory, on the railroad or in a warehouse and not on a hot TV news set. 

A case in point would be the campaign being waged by journalists with the CWA’s NewsGuild at more than 50 newspapers owned by Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, to get management to negotiate in good faith after years of resistance and obfuscation. 

Gannett’s Wall Street predatory business model has been to assume over a billion dollars in debt to buy up local newspapers, shrink their newsrooms, then mine their physical assets like their real estate, all while paying out millions of dollars to their CEO  and hundreds of millions in debt payments.

And when their business model faltered, the C-Suite antidote was to float talk of a $100 million stock buyback, which satiated the wolves of Wall Street for a while until the next round of bad news. In between SEC filings, Gannett squanders a small fortune on an army of anti-union lawyers that quarterback the company’s union busting tactics that land it in front of the National Labor Relations Board where it has several pending cases.

Gannett has newspapers in almost every state and owns USA Today as well as titles in the United Kingdom. It’s a major player in New Jersey where it owns the Asbury Park Press, the Bergen Record, the Courier News, the Courier Post, the Daily Record, the Home News Tribune, NJBIZ, Pet Age, the Daily Journal and the Burlington County Times.

This summer, Gannett reported it lost $54 million after it made a bad bet on a partnership with European internet gambling sports book operator Tipico. Gannett’s CEO Mike Reed, who took home over $7 million last year,  blamed a 31 percent spike in newsprint costs combined with declines in print circulation as well as advertising revenues. He also conceded that the much hyped wager on Tipico had not panned out.

When selling the strategic alliance last year, Reed told analysts that it was sure to be a home run because Gannett’s “highly engaged audience of more than 46 million sports fans crave analysis, betting insights, odds and unique features which we will provide with our Tipico alliance.”

As it turned out, Tipico, which was supposed to be a national partner, was only licensed to operate in two states, Colorado and New Jersey.

In response, instead of firing their CEO, Gannett laid off 3 percent of its workforce.

“In the days leading up to the layoffs, the Gannett caucus of the NewsGuild, which represents 1,500 journalists across more than 50 newsrooms, called on the company to reduce executive compensation instead of cutting jobs,” reported Angela Fu for Poynter, a non-profit journalism website. “They drew attention to the fact that Reed had been paid $7.7 million in 2021 while Gannett’s median salary was $48,419. Reed had also bought $1.2 million worth of Gannett stock, or 500,000 shares, immediately before the layoffs.”

“The company has been steadfast that we should somehow be grateful for what they’ve given us — like wages so low that members have food and housing security issues and absolutely no job security,” said Mike Davis, Journalist and Vice-Chair of the APP-MCJ Guild, which represents journalists at the Asbury Park Press, Courier News and the Home News Tribune in New Jersey. “If Gannett is serious about settling contracts by the end of the year, they need to understand that we’re not going to settle for less than what we deserve.”

“Unionized Gannett journalists across the country assert that the financial austerity at Gannett is a result of financial mismanagement on the part of the company, as it continues to spend millions on union-busting law firms, CEO bonuses and stock buybacks, while violating labor and wage and hour laws, paying poverty wages, slashing newsroom staff and failing on diversity goals,” according to a NewsGuild press release announcing an Oct. 6 online rally. The event will feature Florida Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and New York State Senator James Skoufis, as well as musician and activist Billy Bragg.

“Workers at Gannett are unionizing to save their publications for the communities while executives push layoffs and line their pockets with gold,” said Jon Schleuss, President, The NewsGuild-CWA. “The NewsGuild continues to grow because thousands of us are dedicated to helping every journalist fight to save local news. It is a righteous fight because we are fighting to save the very foundation of our democracy in a free press and community news.”

“Gannett newsrooms have found strength and support in each other where our company’s leadership has failed us,” said Veronica Serrano, Editorial Assistant, Austin American- Statesman, Bargaining Committee Chair, Austin NewsGuild “Mike Reed, Maribel Wadsworth-Perez, Doug Horne and the executives making millions should be ashamed of how they treat not only their underpaid employees, but also how they treat the communities they serve.” 

Serrano continued. “They’ve slashed jobs and content, hurting employees and loyal subscribers alike. It’s our responsibility as journalists to inform the public and that is the goal of this rally, to bring this information to light and to explore how we can work together with the community to right the wrongs that have been committed under Gannett’s callous leadership.”

Think of Gannett like a paper shredder that chews up newspapers and spits out hundreds of millions of dollars for Wall Street, leaving vast swaths of America as information deserts without local newspapers where reporters still authenticate information. This vast void is then filled by free content curated by artificial intelligence disseminated over social media via analytics that aim to enrage you all while mugging you for your inner thoughts and desires.

Just what you want amidst a pandemic and ongoing insurrection.