Plain Dealer lays off a third of unionized newsroom staff
Posted Apr 1, 4:35 PM
The Plain Dealer
The Plain Dealer's printing and production building on Tiedeman Road
CLEVELAND, Ohio – The Plain Dealer on Monday laid off 14 newsroom employees as part of a staff reduction first announced in December. The 14, most of them reporters and all members of Local 1 of the News Guild of the Communication Workers of America, account for about a third of the unionized news-gathering staff.
One additional journalist will depart later this month. The company had earlier announced plans to eliminate 29 other jobs in May by shifting its page-production work to a centralized outside system. Three of those production staffers will move to the newsroom, however, reducing the net loss of jobs there to 12.
"Today, we share a sense of loss,” Plain Dealer President and Editor George Rodrigue said in a statement. “The essence of any layoff is that good people lose their jobs. We regret that, and we wish our colleagues well.
“In the near future, we will be refocusing our efforts to invest in deeper coverage of key topics that are of high value to our community. We will be sharing more about those plans in the coming weeks.”
Said Ginger Christ, Plain Dealer News Guild unit chair: “Today was an incredibly stressful day. We lost talented colleagues and the community lost important voices. The damage isn’t just the loss of jobs. It’s the loss of information vital to the life of the city.”
Rodrigue blamed the cuts on the continuing decline in advertising revenue that has battered virtually all mass media, including television, radio and digital-first news organizations such as cleveland.com. A Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor statistics from 2008 to 2017 found overall newsroom employment dropped nationally by 23 percent and in newspaper newsrooms employment dropped by 45 percent. More than 2,400 media jobs have been eliminated so far this year, according to Business Insider.
The Guild said in a statement that The Plain Dealer had a unionized staff of 340 journalists two decades ago. That soon will be reduced to 33. "Many of our members volunteered for layoffs to save the job of another, which speaks volumes about the respect those in our union have for each other,” Christ said. “We find some relief that editor George Rodrigue allowed members to volunteer for this layoff.”
The Guild unit, meanwhile, voted over the weekend to extend its contract with The Plain Dealer through Feb. 28, 2021. The Guild said the agreement “continues protections for overtime, vacation and severance pay" and eliminates unpaid furlough days that were accepted as part of a pay reduction in 2009. The agreement provides the option for laid-off employees to extend health care benefits.
As part of the agreement, the Guild gave up its grievance over The Plain Dealer’s plan to outsource production jobs to a subsidiary of Advance Publications, the paper’s parent company.
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