MediaNews' 2-Tier Wage Proposal a Sign of the Times

It's a typical conversation I find myself in these days. Over dinner at Go! Conference in Virginia earlier this week, we were talking about the roiling turbulence of the newspaper industry. "These papers won't go away, somebody will pay for them," a well-informed  friend said. Well, yes, they won't go away, though, they will shrink, I suggested. What's lost every day  is this: the quality and quantity of journalism he gets, I get, we all get. It is being slowly reduced. It's a reduction that is almost imperceptible daily, but eye-opening over a few years.

Already, newsroom staffing has dropped at least four per cent in about 18 months. U.S. newsprint usage -- both news hole (the editorial content) and adhole (the rest) -- is dropping. Page-size reductions are costing two of the nation's flagship papers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, 5-10 percent of their news space. Deepening cuts are temporarily suspended at the Los Angeles Times, as the very fate of the Tribune Company is in play. Fewer pages, fewer staff people, lesser products.

But all this is prologue. And we can see the next act being played out in the negotiations now started between MediaNews -- now the nation's fourth biggest newspaper company -- and the Newspaper Guild, representing editorial staff at the San Jose Mercury News.

On Thursday, MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton presented the local Guild negotiating group with a shot across the bow. It's a lengthy set of changes to current compensation standards and work rules. You knew when Singleton was willing ponied up for the Mercury News , the Contra Costa Times and the Saint Paul Pioneer Press -- all papers immediately put up by sale by McClatchy when it bought Knight Ridder -- this reckoning was coming. Singleton faces the same economic pressures as the rest of the industry, and is as intent on trying to maintain margins as well. The only way to do that as ad revenues flat-line is to cut costs dramatically.

Mercury News staffers -- and the Guild -- may be surprised at the comprehensiveness of the cutbacks. Subject to cutbacks: 1) pensions to be replaced by 401-ks; 2) higher health insurance premiums; 3) more union jobs made non-union; 4) reduction or elimination of a number of work rules that protect union work and make it more difficult for MediaNews to cut costs by having more flexible work schedules, subcontracting work, sharing workers from other operations, etc. If you peruse the proposal, you may be amused to see that Dean wants to move staffers from a French-like 37.5 hour workweek to a 40-hour one. Sacre verte!

For the reading public, the biggest change may be this one: the proposal to create a two-tier wage system in the newsroom. Effectively, current staffers -- many of them already up in air about their new ownership and its commitment to high-quality journalism -- could keep their current pay levels, though future increases can be expected to be meager.

But the next hires would be closer to community newspaper standards. That's right , those coming to work at what has been one of the nation's top 10 papers would earn closer to what they'd get if they signed on at the Bakersfield Californian or the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian or the Glendale News-Press.   

You can already begin to see the impacts of these kinds of hires in newspapers across the country.

In large regional papers, you used to get the work of an experienced metro reporter, with 10-20 years knowledge of the beat and the community, a reporter whose job it has been to maybe write a story a day or three a week. Now, you are more often seeing the work of young, energetic, sometimes talented reporters, who have relatively little professional and community experience. And these reporters are expected to often crank out two stories a day. More is gonna be less.

In the end, the rising question will be how much young professionals believe journalism is a worthy career. How many of them in 2010 will choose it, compared to many other options, if all they see if a life of low professional wages and an industry in a deepening siege mentality? How over time, will their choices affect the quality of journalism we all get?

Maybe as readers you've begun to see these changes, though they of course happen slowly. Expect to see a lot more of them, a steady diminution in the quality of the news report as well as in its volume. Get ready for less and less news, ironically, as the news industry's greatest vehicle for distribution ever invented -- the Internet -- becomes a more and more dominant part of our lives.