DETROIT, MI — Labor disputes linger around the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Scarcely had Advance Publications, the paper’s owner, resolved a grievance brought by the local chapter of the Newspaper Guild when management opted to reassign three veteran court reporters and move the popular beats to the paper’s digital sibling.
The move, reported soon after it happened by the alt-weekly Cleveland Scene but not explained in a staff-wide announcement, has prompted new questions from the Guild. It has also fueled suspicions within some quarterthres of the Plain Dealer newsroom that management is encouraging reporters to leave the paper, seeking to diminish the union’s influence and accelerate a transition in how the news organization operates. And it appears to have strained the at-times uneasy relationship between the paper and the Northeast Ohio Media Group (NEOMG), the non-union, digital-first company created by Advance in 2013 at the same time a third of The Plain Dealer’s staff was laid off.
The three courts reporters—Rachel Dissell, James F. McCarty, and John Caniglia—heard the news on Sept. 3, when they were called into a meeting with managing editor Thom Fladung and deputy metro editor Kathy Siemon Long. “I’m so naïve, I thought we were going to talk about our performance the past year and our goals for the coming year,” said one of the reporters, who, like other Plain Dealer reporters interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified.
Instead, they learned that their beats would be moved over to NEOMG, which already has responsibility for police coverage. According to Plain Dealer sources, the reporters weren’t offered a chance at the meeting to follow their court beats to the other company, but the beats won’t be taken over by current NEOMG reporters, either. Rather, Advance is hiring new journalists—at least two of them. Job postings for the federal courts reporter and common pleas court reporter are on the company website. The tagline in both postings reads: “Bring your courts coverage experience to a role where you’re empowered to identify stories, write and post them immediately and build a journalism career with a cutting-edge media organization.”
The three reporters will keep working their courts beats until the new hires are made, and then they’ll move to other roles. Their compensation is not affected. Still, for a veteran reporter to be pulled off a beat he or she has cultivated can feel like a demotion.
“We’re getting sympathy notes, calls, and online testimonials as if someone died,” said the courts reporter. Another longtime Plain Dealer reporter described the decision as “brutal.”
Several sources told me that the courts assignments are among the top-read news beats on Cleveland.com, and all three reporters had covered big stories. Dissell, for example, broke the Steubenville High School rape case for the major media and, along with Caniglia, was one of the lead reporters on the recent prison escape of T.J. Lane. McCarty covered the Cuyahoga County corruption trials, the Amish beard-cutting hate crime case, and the recent campaign finance trial of businessman Ben Suarez. Caniglia has covered stories ranging from extortion by a school superintendent to the conviction of an area resident who was a former Nazi.
Once the beats move, the courts coverage will appear, as it does now, on Cleveland.com—both NEOMG and Plain Dealer staff contribute to the same website, and to the print paper, which is now delivered three days a week, plus a “bonus” Saturday edition. So what’s the reason for the change?
Fladung, the Plain Dealer editor, declined to comment for this story. So did Chris Quinn, vice president for content at NEOMG.
One possibility is that management simply wanted to put the cops and courts beats back together under the same roof. Several Plain Dealer staffers I spoke with, though, suspect a different motive: Advance management, which has placed a strong emphasis on pageview growth, wants that Web traffic on the NEOMG side of the ledger. Employees in both newsrooms have ready access to data about online performance. To the extent that NEOMG traffic outperforms The Plain Dealer’s, they say, that vindicates management’s approach to Web journalism. That strategy—marked by frequent incremental posting, lighter editing, aggregation, regular participation in comments and on social media, and more—is in effect to some extent in both newsrooms, but is more associated with, and more widely embraced, at NEOMG.
There’s also a related fear that, as one Plain Dealer reporter put it, “They want us to go away. If we don’t have important beats, we’re not going to want to stay.”
The suspicions are exacerbated by what happened recently with a key sports beat. Two Plain Dealer reporters, Mary Schmitt Boyer and Jodie Valade, had covered the Cleveland Cavaliers, one of the top sources of traffic for Cleveland.com. After LeBron James decided in July to return to the team, local interest is higher than ever.
But Boyer left the paper, and the industry, not long before James’ announcement. Valade was reassigned to others sports coverage, including the recent Gay Games. Advance now has a three-man Cavs reporting team, including a high-profile new hire on the “LeBron James beat”—and it is all at NEOMG. An announcement promoting the reporting team was published Sept. 2, the night before the court reporters were called to their meeting.
Guild withdraws earlier grievance
If the idea of bifurcated newsrooms, one union and one not, producing stories for the same website and print publication seems unusual—well, it is. It was also at the center of a formal labor complaint until recently.
At issue was a dispute over how the company handled the enormous layoffs last summer. Per the terms of a 2012 agreement, Advance was obligated to retain 110 union employees in the Plain Dealer newsroom through February 2019. It did that when it laid off 47 Guild members on July 31, 2013. But within a week, more than a dozen additional union members were offered and accepted jobs at the non-union NEOMG, bringing the bargaining unit to fewer than 100 members. Through attrition, that number has shrunk further. According to Wendy McManamon, a copy editor for The Plain Dealer and the chairwoman of the local Guild chapter, there are currently about 94 Guild members.
The union filed a grievance, as well as a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, arguing that NEOMG and The Plain Dealer were really one company, and that hiring reporters away from the paper without replacing them with union staff was a violation of the contract.
The grievance was headed toward arbitration in mid-August, but earlier in the month the two sides reached a settlement. The union withdrew the NLRB charge and agreed that it will not dispute the two-company model for the duration of its current contract.
What does the Guild get in return? Forty-five thousand dollars, for starters. It will be evenly distributed among 23 members of the Guild who were laid off last July, minus union dues. Five additional agreed-upon layoffs slated for Jan. 1, 2015, will be delayed until next October, and the company is required to seek volunteers, who will receive an enhanced severance package. Advance is now forbidden from offering buyouts to Guild members through February 2019. And the settlement further requires that if NEOMG hires away more than 10 of the current Guild members, The Plain Dealer will replace those employees on a one-to-one basis.
Soon after the formal dispute was settled, the Guild was raising new concerns about the transfer of the courts beats. In a Sept. 5 letter to William Calaiacovo, vice president for labor relations at The Plain Dealer, the Guild sought “a written explanation for why the three court reporters have been removed from their beats and assigned different work.” To date, there has been no response, according to Guild officials. Calaiacovo did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In a separate letter circulated to union members about the courts beats, Dreussi wrote, “We have met with legal counsel to determine what, if any, recourse the Guild may have in response to the changes.” He also urged reporters: “Stay at the PD. Keep your guaranteed job. If offered a job at NEOMG, just say no and don’t go.”
One journalist who made the move from The Plain Dealer to NEOMG, meanwhile, told CJR that he is “a better reporter today” as a result.
“I’ve learned to be more creative, work faster and experiment with video commentary and storytelling,” said Mark Naymik, who was at The Plain Dealer for more than a decade. “I’ve learned more about connecting with an audience and promoting my stories through social media. Reporting and writing to publish first online has freed me from the worry of making a schedule for print, which allows me to stay on a story or column a bit longer if needed, or cut one short without concerns about filling a set space. And I have a better understanding of what readers actually read. My sources have increased, something I partially attribute to the increase of my online presence.”
Naymik added: “The success of our media organizations depends on both producing good stories and experimenting with online and print formats. The last year has left me believing readers in Northeast Ohio continue to look to the Northeast Ohio Media Group and The Plain Dealer for their news.”
Guild official: ‘It smells and looks like union-busting’
At The Plain Dealer, assessments of how the broader changes have affected editorial quality are varied. But for some, a key question is how long the current structure—a non-union, younger, “digital-first” newsroom, and a union, more veteran, “legacy” newsroom—will last, and what the vision behind it is. Those reporters say they have not heard from management a strategy outlining how responsibilities are divided between the two companies, and how they will co-exist in the long run.
The two-company model generally parallels the plan Advance has followed in other markets, as part of an effort to build a culture that’s Web-oriented and digital-first, as the company understands it. Under any circumstances, a shift like that is likely to cause some friction. But Cleveland is unique in at least one key respect: At the company’s other publications, the newsroom is not unionized.
McManamon, the Guild chairwoman, is blunt about how she sees the company’s personnel moves. “It smells and looks like union-busting,” she said. “They will say this is how they do it in other markets, but in no other market do they have union staff and a non-union staff.”
The situation has some reporters wondering what will happen in 2019, when the current Guild contract is up, and when, according to two sources, the lease on the downtown office space to which Plain Dealer staff recently relocated expires. (NEOMG is housed in the former Plain Dealer building.)
Dreussi, the Guild’s executive secretary, noted that even when the contract expires in February 2019, its terms remain in effect unless a new agreement is signed or the existing one is lawfully terminated—the latter being a process that has to go through the NLRB. “The only thing we could say for sure may happen 2/28/2019 is that if the PD is still printing [at least one day a week], we would be in negotiations for a successor agreement,” Dreussi said.
Beyond that, neither he nor McManamon see much worth in speculating about the future. “2019 is five years from now,” Dreussi said. “In the newspaper landscape of today, I can’t tell you what may happen five weeks from now.”
Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in ELLE Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Next City, and other publications. Anna edited A Detroit Anthology, a Michigan Notable Book, and she was a 2017 Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt. She is online at www.annaclark.net and on Twitter @annaleighclark.