By The River

Today's editorial in the Patriot-News launches an unfortunate attack on local bloggers (including, by implication, this one) for supposedly publishing racist and hateful comments about Mayor Linda Thompson.

But one of the two comments attributed to blogs in the editorial--"Harrisburg is no longer a city! It is now Slumbville!! Gang Wars and Mass Killings Drive By's are on the rise!. The Dawgs are out in full force. Move out now!!! Perry County here we come"--was actually published in the PennLive Forum section on Nov. 4, 2009. I couldn't find the other one, "Where does she get her hair done, PetSmart?" via Google, but suspect it was also from PennLive.

PennLive is owned by the same people who own the Patriot-News. Think of them as different pockets in the same suit. The newspaper editors do not have complete control over the website--a source of great frustration to the staff when stories they wrote for the print edition inexplicably fail to appear on PennLive. Editors can have Forum comments removed if someone complains, but don't really want to do so, for legal reasons. We were always told that an unedited comments section has more legal protection than an edited one. Go figure, but it's apparently true.

The Patriot-News could eliminate a lot of the racial garbage by ending anonymous posting. Anonymous letters-to-the-editor aren't allowed. Why should Forum posts be? As for comments on my blog, I regretfully get very few of them. I allow nearly all to be published, but read each one before I do and weed out ones that are illogical or offensive. As with New York Times letters-to-the-editor, you have to make your case, or at least have an interesting opinion. I have allowed anonymous posts, but since I don't allow cheap shots, it is not a critical issue.

What I gather from some of the comments posted on PennLive is yes, there are still racists in America. But I also see that robust political dialogue is alive and well in America. Most of the criticism of Thompson--and all of it in this blog--has been based on facts and observations, not stereotypes.

One would need a psychiatrist and a couch to get to the deepest motivations of the person who wrote that editorial, but I suspect part of it stems from frustration by the newspaper that it is no longer in control of the news agenda in Harrisburg. The Patriot-News tried to portray Thompson sort of as Martin Luther King set upon by Bull Connor and his police dogs, but bloggers and the public weren't buying that. They saw a deeply flawed and divisive candidate with a taste for the high life, questionable personal finances, and a fundamentalist religious fervor that led her to believe she had been called by God to save Harrisburg.

Bloggers, including this one, wrote about the facts and contradictions in Thompson's record, treating her as they would any other serious candidate, and the newspaper, reluctantly it seemed, followed in our wake (at least until five days before the election, when coverage in the newspaper mysteriously ceased). Thompson received the votes of about 12 percent of registered voters in the city, but that was enough when the vast majority of voters stayed home.

Like I said in a previous post, we're stuck with her now, and those of us who own property in Harrisburg (and aren't leaving, like the Patriot-News), have a stake in her success in dealing with the city's monumental problems. Both Linda Thompson in her former role as city council president and former Mayor Stephen R. Reed had a hand in creating those problems. Let's hope someone can find a solution. In the meantime, I don't plan to cease my coverage.

Posted by David at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Patriot-News publisher John Kirkpatrick made public today what the staff has been expecting for two years, that the newspaper is leaving the city of Harrisburg for an office building near its printing plant in Hampden Twp.

Why are they leaving? A primary reason is that their current building at 812 Market Street is in bad shape. Built in 1953, and added to over the years, it is a heating and cooling nightmare that is perpetually in danger from flooding by nearby Paxton Creek. The worst incidence of that was in the Agnes Flood in 1972, when the entire first floor and all of the printing presses were flooded. One employee drowned during the evacuation, and the old presses never ran quite right afterward. Heating and cooling inside the building could fluctuate wildly, and the HVAC crew was there more than the copier technicians.

At the beginning of the decade, the paper acquired land near Interstate 81 in Hampden Twp. and built a new building for new printing presses that enabled it to print the spectacular color that is its hallmark today. At the time, I wondered if the printing plant was the 21st century equivalent of the last and best buggy factory in the early 20th century, about to be displaced by the automobile (Internet). So far, that hasn't happened, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the paper went all on-line in 2-3 years.

The other reason for the move, as any staff member can tell you, is that the paper sees the suburbs as its future. A couple of years ago, the paper categorized area communities as Tier 1 or Tier 2. Tier 1 communities, which included high-growth suburbs like East Pennsboro Twp. and Hampden Twp., were supposed to get beefed up coverage at the expense of the city of Harrisburg and some other places. The problem with that scenario is that the big news tends to happen in Harrisburg and the Capitol, not in Enola.

When management first began discussing the move 2-3 years ago (dates blur), the plan was to move to either the cavernous former PHICO building in Silver Spring Twp. or to a new building that was to be erected on the site of the Arches Restaurant in Susquehanna Twp. They looked at and rejected the Ghost Building on Cameron Street. The PHICO site would have been a disaster, too far from downtown to make it easy for newsmakers to come out for editorial board meetings, and too far from downtown over traffic-choked roads for reporters to get down there very easily to cover breaking stories in the city, after they find a place to park. Heck, it's almost in Carlisle. But if the state's capital city is no longer your number one priority, maybe it wouldn't have mattered.

What will happen to the old building at 812 Market Street? I'm quite sure demolition is in its future. Trust me, no one would want to buy it as an office building. The story has been that Harrisburg University wants the Post Office site across the street for expansion, and that the Postal Service is amenable, but wants part of the Patriot-News tract for a branch station. That will still leave a lot of ground unused. That area will always be flood-prone. Maybe it would be better as a nicely landscaped city park.

Heck, call it Patriot-News Park in honor of all the men and women who spent their lives there reporting the important news of the city and its suburbs. The ones who stayed during the TMI accident, who went out in boats during Agnes and walked to work during the Blizzard of '96, the ones who covered state Treasurer Budd Dwyer's final press conference in 1986 and staggered back to the paper in shock after Dwyer pulled out a gun and blew his brains out. They will be missed.

Posted by David at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My old boss at the Patriot-News, John Troutman, used to argue that nearly every big news story had a midstate connection if you looked hard enough. And this wasn't Six Degrees of Separation stuff. It really did seem like someone from central Pennsylvania turned up in world news stories, though typically as a victim of a tsunami or something like that.

Here's some more proof: Susan Gailey, the mother of Samantha Gailey Geimer, the 13-year-old girl film director Roman Polanski drugged and raped in 1978, is from York, Pa., and now lives in Hawaii. According to the Washington Post, Gailey was famous in the D.C. area in the 1970s and 1980s for appearing in many TV ads for a local Chevy dealership in Washington. Samantha grew up in York. Her step-father was Jack Gailey, a York lawyer and one-time member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly.

The Polanski case is an odd one, combining reckless stupidity by a very talented director, apparent judicial misconduct in Los Angeles, and a public declaration of forgiveness of Polanski by Geimer, who now is in her 40s. Gailey, the mom, was dating a friend of Polanski in 1978 and allowed her daughter to meet with the director alone for a photo session at actor Jack Nicholson's house.

Polanski entered a guilty plea after receiving a plea agreement from prosecutors that set his jail time at the 42 days he served in prison during his psychiatric evaluation. He fled the country after the judge in the case, said by many to be a publicity hound, rejected the plea agreement and said he would send a stern message with the new sentence. The case has been the subject of a documentary, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," that raised serious questions about the judge's conduct.

So don't be too surprised if Polanski ends up a free man who can finally travel to the Oscar ceremony to pick up his Best Director statuette for "The Pianist." The Los Angeles Times published a commentary last night excoriating the L.A. district attorney for wasting taxpayer money to pursue Polanski, who is now 76. He may not even be extradited from Switzerland, where he was arrested yesterday.

York, Pennsylvania. Who would have thought?

Posted by David at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., needs to be more careful in the letters from readers it allows to be printed. There is one in Wednesday's paper that can be read, without too much trouble, as a call to assassinate President Obama.

After fulminating against "liberal" attempts to take over health care, the writer's rhetoric takes an apocalyptic turn. "It is so frightening to see what is happening in our country and the pace in which it is spinning out of control. Our forefathers must be churning in their graves. What they built and the bloodshed (sic) we spilled to protect and defend us is rapidly turning to sand."

And then the payoff line: "Someone has to stop all the takeovers and giveaways and do it quickly."

Someone.

The writer will no doubt say assassination wasn't the intent, but in the context of the rest of the letter this can be read as a call to murder and should not have been published. A weak-minded rightist, a Timothy McVeigh type, could be moved to action by words like that. Especially amid growing calls among the more dangerous elements of the right to do away with the President. Pennsylvania is not immune from that sort of thinking, or lack thereof. Newspapers need to be careful.

The Warren Times-Observer in Warren, Pennsylvania, actually ran a classified ad in May that expressed the hope that Obama would follow in the footsteps of "Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy," the four murdered U.S. presidents. No one on the classified ad staff apparently made the connection, and the publisher issued a public apology. The Secret Service is said to be investigating.

This is not a free speech issue. No one has the right under the First Amendment to publicly advocate the murder of another person, whether they use carefully coded language or not.

So Patriot-News, screen your letters more carefully. The editorial page and op-ed page are something I never fail to read, but I don't want to read rightwing garbage like today's letter.

Posted by David at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The drinks flowed freely last ngiht and so did the talk. What else would you expect at a gathering of journalists, many of whom won't be journalists for very much longer?

The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., will lose many longtime members of its newsroom staff to buy-outs between now and the end of the year. I'm leaving. So is the entire editorial board--Dale Davenport, Herb Field, John Goodrich and John Troutman. So are reporters Jim Lewis, Jerry Gleason, Frank Cozzoli, Ellen Lyon, Mary Bradley, Gerry Lenton, and Mary Warner. Nancy Eshelman, columnist, and Alan Hayakawa, online editor, are leaving. I don't talk much to the people in sports, and none were at the party--nighttime is sports time--but it is likely some of them are leaving, too. I'm probably missing a few others, too, especially on the copy desk, but you get the idea. The Patriot-News will be a very different place after Jan. 1 with so much talent going out the door.

The party was hosted by Mary Warner, who last covered religion and values for the paper, and her husband, Lebanon Valley College president Steve MacDonald, at their home in Bellevue Park. I've never seen a group of people so happy about losing their jobs. Indeed, the talk was more of the unlucky few who asked for buy-outs but who were told they had to stay.

Newspapers are dying, faster than anyone outside the industry realizes. Large cities, including in Pennsylvania, could be left with no newspaper at all before too long. There will always be journalism, but it will increasingly be delivered by television or online. Indeed, I hope to go to documentary film school so I will still have a venue for doing the kind of journalism I love. Plus some book and magazine writing. Maybe someone will start a credible new online newspaper in Harrisburg. It wouldn't be hard to staff.

It's a shame about newspapers, really is. I was in the Watergate Class of journalists who entered the profession in the mid-1970s after our heroes Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post brought down President Richard Nixon with their reporting of the Watergate scandal. And oh, the things we accomplished! Everything from the Philadelphia Inquirer's series exposing the abuses at Farview State Hospital in Pennsylvania to the Boston Globe's reporting of the Catholic Church sex scandals. And other stories too numerous to mention.My own reporting of the Centralia mine fire and its threat to the people of that small Pennsylvania town, which eventually led to the relocation of nearly everyone in the town at government expense, was in that same spirit. It was the golden age of investigative reporting.

I could talk about that for hours, and maybe those of us leaving the Patriot-News will eventually be sad we did. But like the people of Centralia, we have been given the opportunity for new lives, and I hope, better ones.

Posted by David at 05:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I received word yesterday that I've been approved for the buy-out at the Patriot-News, the newspaper in Harrisburg, Pa. where I've worked since 1987. Never having been down this road before, I'm not sure how one is supposed to feel. My family and I went out to celebrate the buy-out over some tasty ribs at DaPits, which still seems weird. Do you really celebrate losing a job you've had for 21 years, even if it gives you an opportunity--and a financial base--to do something different with your life? I guess I can say I was relieved, but with a tinge of anxiety, given the current economy.

A lot of the newsroom will be leaving, including some of the paper's best reporters. Maybe it will be like the Biblical rapture, where the Elect suddenly vanish from the newsroom and are assumed into their new lives, just like that. I'll try not to be pouring a cup of coffee when it happens.

Just as those Left Behind will need to adjust, so too will the community, especially the local governments and police departments accustomed to dealing with reporters who in some instances have covered them for years.

After dinner at DaPits I dropped off my wife at home and took my daughters to see the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace ( I still don't know what that title is supposed to mean--give me Goldfinger or You Only Live Twice anyday). On the way out, we ran into Dennis and Angie McMaster. He is chief of police in East Pennsboro Twp. and she is president of the school board.

I had covered East Pennsboro Twp. for a year after being moved off the business staff in September 2007. My assignment changed abruptly again in early October when I was shifted to night cops after the early buy-out approval of another reporter. Chief McMaster gave me a timely call one night after they arrested a man for the murder of his aunt.

So I mentioned I would be leaving the newspaper, and the McMasters said my colleague Jerry Gleason, who had covered East Pennsboro for years before I took it over, had told them he was leaving, too, which he is. Angie mentioned that Gerry Lenton of our staff had covered a couple of their school board meetings since I left. Oops. He's leaving, too, I told her. The chief is a big newspaper fan, but told me his younger officers don't read the Patriot-News, preferring to get their news online or via television. That kind of sums up the problem the newspaper faces.

They wished me the best and continued on out to the parking lot. The chief didn't like the Bond movie, by the way. I thought it was okay, apart from the weird title, but not a top-tier Bond.

So now I'm throwing myself into finishing my last big project for the Patriot-News, a story on the unsolved murder of Betsy Aardsma. She was from my hometown of Holland, Michigan, and went to my high school, and was stabbed to death Nov. 28, 1969, in the library at Penn State University up in State College. Fascinating story, and you can read it Nov. 23 in the Patriot-News or at the PennLive.com website.

Posted by David at 05:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No matter how it's spun, it's never a positive development when a candidate dumps her campaign manager in the middle of a hard-fought fight.

Hillary Clinton did that over the weekend, replacing campaign manager Patti Solis Doye with her longtime aide and confidante Maggie Williams. That came on the heels of losses to Barack Obama in caucuses or primaries in Washington state, Nebraska, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Maine, and Louisiana. Because of the Democratic Party's proportional representation rules, Clinton will still pick up some delegates in each state. But the momentum is clearly with Obama.

Running for President is both the ultimate ego trip and the ultimate gamble. You do it because you believe you are better than anyone else to run the country, but you do it knowing that only one person can get your party's nomination, and only one person can become President. Somebody suffers a crushing personal defeat, the ultimate rejection, and it might be you. For the rest of your life and throughout history, you will carry the "loser" tag. Yet you push on because you've been preparing for this your entire life. How can they deny me?

Clinton has to be thinking those thoughts about now. Her best bets are in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where Gov. Ed Rendell has endorsed her. She still has a narrow lead in delegates if the so-called "super delegates"--party officials--are counted. But how would it look if the super delegates thwarted the will of the people?

Posted by David at 06:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We had a much anticipated and dreaded staff meeting yesterday at The Patriot-News, the newspaper in Harrisburg, Pa., where I have worked as a reporter for 20 years. About half the rumors turned out to be true, and about half, thankfully, were not.

The meeting was led by executive editor David Newhouse, a man whom I've had differences with in the past. I was the last union president at the paper, and he and I have differing opinions about the value of certain types of reporting. I'll leave it at that. Newhouse is part of the family that owns The Patriot-News and many other newspapers around the country, including the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger. He handled the meeting pretty well, but seemed nervous at times.

Given the state of American newspaper journalism, and an unfortunate tendency at the Patriot-News to grasp at popular industry trends whether they make sense or not, I had feared the worst. The big rumor was that no story in the future would ever be longer than 10 inches (relatively short by newspaper standards) and many would be reduced to two or three-inch briefs. Not true, Newhouse said. At least not for everything.

He said the paper's own central Pennsylvania studies had shown that readers want quick summaries of the daily news, but also want more in-depth and investigative reporting of stories they won't find on television or the Internet. So some stories in the future, perhaps more than half, will be shorter, especially municipal meeting coverage. But the Patriot-News will encourage reporters to do longer ("20, 30, 40, 60 inches") stories on important topics that warrant the longer treatment. Perhaps not always as long as the multi-page extravaganza on the Harrisburg incinerator last year written by my colleagues John Luciew and Tom Dochat, but you get the idea. This is the kind of reporting I like to do, so I was naturally pleased.

I'm not sure what to make of Newhouse's comments about the Patriot-News Penn Live website on the Internet. The staff hates the website, which is so poorly organized that we have to give callers detailed instructions on how to find particular stories (if we can find them at all--stories frequently never appear). Everyone knows it's a lousy website, but no one seems able to do anything about it. Based on Newhouse's comments yesterday, that seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

The problem is that the Patriot-News doesn't control the Penn Live website. It provides news content, but has no control over the website itself, which is run by a different branch of Advance Publications, the Newhouse family company that owns the Patriot-News. It's a weird set-up, and it works poorly in practice because the newspaper and the website seem to have different goals and priorities. The disconnect is hurting the Patriot-News.

Newhouse seemed to be distancing himself from Penn Live yesterday. He pointed out how little advertising revenue is generated by even the biggest and best newspaper websites. That could change, and I think it will, but I agree with him that it won't be soon. So for the foreseeable future, the Patriot-News will throw its energy and talents into the paper-and-ink newspaper. I have to admit this left me uneasy, and I wondered if there were carriage makers a hundred years ago who told their skilled craftsmen that automobiles weren't going to be profitable for a long, long time. I've often mused that the Patriot-News printing plant built in Hampden Twp. a few years ago might be the last, best carriage factory of them all. We shall see what we shall see, as my German grandfather was fond of saying.

The other big news is that the Patriot-News will likely be moving out of its longtime headquarters (since the 1950s, I believe) at 812 Market Street in downtown Harrisburg. Our new home has yet to be determined, but sites in Susquehanna Twp. and Silver Spring Twp. are on the short list. The former is more likely, from all indications. I'm told that no suitable sites in the city of Harrisburg can be found, but one wonders if higher property taxes in the city are a factor as well. A suburban headquarters will pose a problem for covering stories at the Capitol Complex, where parking is almost non-existent during the workday. That's not a problem now, because we can walk from 812 Market. Newhouse said early 2009 seems to be the most likely time for the move.

Update: Monday, Jan. 28: In a memo to the editorial staff, David Newhouse says he didn't mean to sound as negative about the Internet as, well, he sounded at the staff meeting last Thursday. "Everyone can see that the Internet is our future," he said.

Posted by David at 06:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Local 38016 of The Newspaper Guild lost the decertification election, 63-43. We fought hard to the end, but we couldn't overcome the financial enticements the company dangled in front of members--The Patriot-News essentially bought this election--and the irrational hatred of us by Nick Horvath's -company-pampered sports department. Or perhaps not so irrational: the sports department has long gotten special treatment from the company, allowed nearly unlimited travel when every other part of the newsroom was on an austerity budget. It was a long-term investment for the company and it paid off for them today. Yes, it was all perfectly legal in George W. Bush's America. After 72 years, a good and gentle union founded in the fervor of the New Deal in 1934 is no more. The worst part of this is knowing that colleagues lied to us about their support for the union. I'll be drinking myself blotto tonight.

Posted by David at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is the decertification election for The Newspaper Guild union at The Patriiot-News. As I've mentioned before, I am president of the Guild local here, the latest but hopefully not the last in the local's 72-year history. We must get 50 percent plus one of the bargaining unit members voting to stay in existence. We are confident we will win, but it will be close and every vote will count. Some of our members have cut vacations short to come back to vote in this life-or-death election. Having a union during troubled times for the newspaper industry is comforting protection for many of us. Newspapers without unions may command a premium price on the market when put up for sale, but their reporters and editors pay the real price.

The officers of the Guild have had to deal with ancient, forgotten grievances during this decert campaign, issues that long predated their own volunteer service to their co-workers. Perhaps the most inflammatory and hurtful was the accusation by one of our enemies that we had once tried to equate a staff member with substance abuse problems to staff members who died of cancer, a story that dates back to the early-1990s. We supposedly did this to muster support for saving her job. It simply never happened, but when a slur like that is dumped in your lap, it knocks you off kilter. You wrack your brain trying to remember what really happened, and wonder how you can prove a negative.

By chance last night, I ran into Irwin Aronson, a local labor lawyer. He was receiving an award from the Keystone Research Council. I was there to cover New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's speech. He was the Guild's lawyer years ago before his law firm split and he moved to a different firm. I told him about the decert election today, and he told me about some of the company's attempts to decertify the Guild and other unions at the paper in the early 1980s. The other unions are gone, but we have always survived. He wished us the best in our efforts to stay alive.

I want to publicly thank the international staff of The Newspaper Guild in Washington, D.C., especially Bruce Nelson, for the untiring help and assistance they have given us during these trying weeks. I would also like to thank the Guild members at the York Daily Record, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who took time to come to Harrisburg to meet with bargaining unit members here and spread the good word. The Communication Workers of America, our parent union, has also been very supportive, especially organizer Pam Tronsor. My fellow Guild officers Chris Millette, Janet Pickel, Chris Courogen, and Andy Isaacs, and former Guild president Mary Klaus have worked hard to stop decertification from happening. Guild members Jim Brown, Mike Fernandez, and Steve Farley have also contributed much to the cause.

Now, on to the election. I have people to get to the polls. We will win this, and preserve our stake in our own destiny. To me, it's a no-brainer.

Posted by David at 07:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Patriot-News took a break from its fratricidal war over union decertification to receive a whole bunch of journalism awards this past weekend in State College. I myself won first place awards from the AP Managing Editors and in the Keystone Press Awards for my coverage of the impact of the 2004 state law that made it easier for utilities to shut off service to people behind in their bills. The law led directly to five deaths and as many or more serious injuries in fires and carbon monoxide incidents in houses where the power had been turned off. Ford Turner won for feature writing, Jan Murphy for her capital coverage, Joe Hermitt for photography, and many more. The Patriot-News won the Division I sweepstakes in the Keystone Press Awards, beating out the Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

We aren't the only newspaper people whose papers have declared war on them because they want to be represented by a union. At the York Daily Record, which won the sweepstakes in Division II, the Guild local is in a death struggle with newspaper magnate Dean Singleton of Media News. Singleton acquired the Daily Record a couple of years ago in a strange deal that the Newspaper Guild is pushing to have investigated by the U.S. Justice Department. Singleton is a hardball publisher. He hired King & Ballow, the Tennessee law firm which specializes in newspaper union busting, to "negotiate" a new contract with the Guild at the Daily Record. When a new owner acquires a newspaper, they must negotiate with the existing union but can force them to renegotiate the entire contract from scratch. That is a long--in many cases, years long--process. And when King & Ballow is involved, expect a war of attrition.

During the cocktail hour after the APME Awards, I chatted with Lauri Lebo, who is active with the Guild at the Daily Record. She was the lead reporter for the Daily Record on the Intelligent Design controversy at the Dover, Pa., school district, and is writing a book about that. She told me how the Daily Record, apparently at the advice of King & Ballow, won't let members of the Guild contract negotiating team, including herself, take unpaid time off to negotiate the new contract. They are forced to use up their vacation days. That's virtually unheard of in labor negotiations, and arguably a violation of federal labor law, but whether the National Labor Relations Board will do anything about it is hard to say. That's the reality unions face after 25 years of Reagan and Bush union bashing (Clinton could ease it only a little because of his weak influence on the Congress). The NLRB might rule that what the Daily Record did was an unfair labor practice, but it might take 1-2 years to issue that ruling. Labor law is meaningless without strong enforcement.

The Patriot-News has taken a different approach to union busting, dangling economic incentives in front of members to entice them to vote out the Guild on June 2. If that happens, everything the union has negotiated since 1934 will go in the trash. Some of the decert proponents are saying, we can always vote the Guild back in if the company doesn't live up to its promises. Fat chance of that. The company can do much to make sure that never happens. And if we did vote the Guild out and vote it back in, we would start from zero in negotiating a new contract. Just like the Guild at the Daily Record.

Newspapers face a host of economic and cultural challenges, most of which stem from a perception that they are irrelevent in the Internet Age. But instead of working together with their talented professional newsroom staffs to showcase the real value newspapers still have, they pursue ancient vendettas against the Newspaper Guild.

Posted by David at 06:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today comes news that teachers in Carlisle, Pa., have voted to go on strike rather than submit to a demand by the school board that they pay one-quarter of the cost of their health insurance. They pay nothing now, which is how it was for nearly all workers 15 years ago. Similarly, teachers in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, are fighting attempts by the school board there to move them into an inferior health plan to save money.

It's happening everywhere. The main issue in the contract negotiations between my union, The Newspaper Guild, and the Patriot-News is health insurance. The company demands that we pay one-third of the cost of our premiums, which would mean several hundred dollars a month for family coverage and would likely force a few people into bankruptcy. Publisher John Kirkpatrick used this as a cynical tool to induce a decertification vote to throw out our union. The vote will take place on June 2. He made clear for months that while union members would have to pay these onerous sums, non-union departments at the newspaper would continue to pay nothing. Now he's furiously backpedaling on that "pledge" to the non-reps, as they're known here, saying they'll likely have to pay something as well.

What a different world we live in than 15 years ago. A generation of business executives has come to power which sees health insurance as merely a cost item on the balance sheet, not a moral responsibility to their employees. They look at the books, and if they screwed up somewhere else, they try to squeeze it out of employee wages and benefits to make up for it. Cutting health insurance or forcing employees to pay more and more of the premium cost has become a manhood test for too many business executives. We in the newsroom at the Patriot-News report the news every day and do it well. This weekend, many of us, including me, will receive awards from our peers for our work last year. But if management can't bring the new printing plant in on time, or goes off on a half-baked crusade to publish a compact edition of the paper that almost no one wanted, or can't persuade advertisers that we are the place to be, that's not our fault. Yet we are being asked, in effect, to pony up for the losses.

What a different world this would be if America had a Canadian-style health system--which no matter what propaganda you hear, is very popular in Canada--or if the Clinton health plan had not been shouted down by Republicans and the insurance lobby in 1994. This is tearing the country apart and ruining American economic competitiveness.

Posted by David at 07:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I am here in Germany on a trip long planned and paid for, the Patriot-News is moving forward with its plan to decertify the Newspaper Guild local that has represented reporters, editors, and other newsroom employees there since the late 1930s. Our strong effort to fight decertification is in the capable hands of Guild officers Chris Millette, Janet Pickel, and Chris Courogen, as well as Bruce Nelson, who is with the national staff of The Newspaper Guild.

Oh wait--technically, the decertification effort is being led by Pete Shellem and Fred Sprunk, two former Guild members. Pete has a longstanding personal grievance against the Guild because he was hired too late to qualify for a "retro pay" provision that earlier hires get. He's a contract "notch baby" and can't get over it. This dates from the late 1980s and I won't bore you with the details. The sports department, where Sprunk works under Nick Horvath, has been aggressively anti-Guild for years, and I've always suspected, though have no evidentiary proof, that it's made clear that plum beats and promotions will not go to a Guild member. We lost all our members there over the years.

But to say that Shellem and Sprunk are really in charge of this is a polite fiction for legal reasons. The company has been actively preparing for decert for over a year, softening people up by issuing increasingly scary forecasts of what it planned to charge them for health insurance. We don't pay anything now. Publisher John Kirkpatrick all but said that if we decertified, we wouldn't have to pay anything. He is now backtracking on that "pledge" as fast as he can. In truth, the company has been trying to decertify the Guild since the early 1980s. There used to be several craft unions in the building as well, but they were picked off one by one by the former publisher, Ray Gover.

Why does the newsroom still need a union? For economic security for starters. In an industry driven by crazy men who seem to have forgotten that our purpose is to write news, not entertain people, and who want only to cut costs, I feel a lot better with a contract. But there's another reason as well. If we reporters do our job well, we on occasion make powerful people angry. The Guild contract prevents anyone from being fired except for "just cause." An editor can't fire you on the spot because you disagreed with him over the editing of a story, or because an advertiser called to complain.

So how did we come to this?

By using part-time sports "phoners" (they take info over the phone on game nights) who we don't believe are members of the bargaining unit, the Patriot-News got enough signatures to have a decertification election. Now editor David Newhouse is calling in people in small groups for the full-court press on why they should vote to decertify.

The Guild is fighting back aggressively and will win this election. It's really quite simple why decertification is a bad idea: Here's what I tell people:

--The Patriot-News isn't seeking decertification so they can pay you more. They can do that now, and in fact we are bargaining for a new contract.

--The Patriot-News isn't seeking decertification to give you more control over your personal lives. We have a fair arrangement on that now through the contract, and protections against abuses.

--The Patriot-News isn't seeking to stop bargaining with the Guild so they can negotiate separately with each and every one of you. They will tell you what the terms of your employment are if you decertify, and there won't be a damn thing you can do about it.

--Together we can beat this back and win a new contract. But it takes each and every one of you.

Posted by David at 05:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I work as a reporter at The Patriot-News and am president of the union there. Local 38016 of The Newspaper Guild to be exact. Until the Guild merged with the Communication Workers of America, we were Local 16, the low number reflecting the fact that we've been around since, I think, the late 1930s. Obviously, I'm not the first president! And I hope I won't be the last.

Yesterday afternoon, as I was preparing that Vietnamese chicken recipe, I received a two phone calls and a text message in quick succession that a city-side reporter at the newspaper, Pete Shellem, and a sports copy editor, Fred Sprunk, had launched an attempt to decertify the union. If they succeed, our union, our contract, and the limitations it places on the company's ability to control our lives 24/7 will disappear. We have good pay and benefits, including fully-paid health insurance that the company is trying to take away. The trick is that they have promised, sort of, to keep it free for the non-union departments in the building. That's the decertification carrot.

Why did Shellem and Sprunk do this? I don't know what Sprunk's problem is. Shellem, I'm told, has a personal grievance with a former Guild president dating back several years, which he didn't disclose in his letter seeking signatures on a decert petition. He says it's not about health insurance, because he has coverage through his wife, who works for the Capital Area Intermediate Unit. Ironically, she--and he--got that coverage through the union representing teachers and other professionals at the I.U. Now Shellem argues that we'll do better without a union.

So the Guild executive committee is having an emergency meeting tonight to finalize a strategy for defeating this petition and protecting our members. I don't think they'll get more than a handful of signatures, but we won't leave anything to chance. All I know for sure is that this will tear the newsroom apart and be a great cause of stress for a lot of people. And for what?

Posted by David at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)