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In the news biz, it's called burying the lead — putting the most newsworthy bit deep down in the story. Publisher John Armstrong did just that in a memo sent last week to employees of ANG Newspapers — the Oakland Tribune and its sister papers — as well as folks at The Contra Costa Times, its sister papers, and the former Hills newspapers, now all owned by Denver-based MediaNews Group. After expounding about the official merger of all these papers under the banner Bay Area News Group-East Bay, or BANG-East Bay, and what it all meant, Armstrong dropped the bomb. Oh, by the way, the new company would not be recognizing the union that had represented reporters, photographers, and copy editors at the ANG publications.
So that's it for the union? Well, not so fast. Carl Hall, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and rep for the Northern California Media Workers Guild, insists that Armstrong's having said so doesn't necessarily make it so.
The union had predicted the company's move since July 25, when plans for BANG-East Bay were first unveiled. In the last three weeks, the union twice filed charges against MediaNews with the National Labor Relations Board for refusal to bargain in good faith, and for transferring jobs and employees out of its jurisdiction to the nonunion CoCo Times.
Hall says the company may have deliberately depleted its ANG unit over several months while expanding operations at the nonunion papers in order to take away their union status prior to the merger. Labor law holds that if the majority of workers in a merged business are not union members, and didn't vote for union representation, then the union can't impose itself on the new entity.
The legal question, Hall says, is whether it's a true merger with ANG fully integrated into the bigger company, or whether the unionized portion persists as a distinctive unit. The guild is banking on the latter, since only about twenty of its 125 employees were transferred to the CoCo Times Walnut Creek office.
The union's other flank of attack is to start organizing its CoCo Times counterparts. "We make no secret about this," Hall says. "Our interest is any news worker that wants to be represented, we want to help them achieve that goal. Even if we prevail in our legal strategy and wind up with an ANG unit after this consolidation, to be effective and successful we're going to have to organize the larger entity."
Hall also says the union will appeal to the community for support while working to keep the papers successful. "We're going to try to avoid demonization," he notes. "We don't want to engage in any tactics to harm the empire."
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The Tribune is a really crappy newspaper. Regularly scooped in its own backyard by SFGate, content to ignore a string of murder stories to publish some meaningless fluff piece headed with something like "seniors embrace macrame." What the EBE does in terms of investigative journalism in the East Bay absolutely puts the Tribune to shame. For years, the Tribune published "rah rah" pieces about the Beys and the corrupt, irresponsible local leadership that helped buffer them from investigation and prosecution. Major dailies are increasingly going on life support. The Tribune, while not exactly a major daily, is soon to follow. Good riddance. Use that paper pulp for something more useful in life, like wanted posters for Oakland city officials.
Why doesn't (or did I miss it??) the EBE do some investigative journalism and find out who controls, owns and runs the MediaNews Empire out of Denver? I'm concerned that MediaNews papers push agendas that benefit the non-transparent owners of the privately held MediaNews Group organization. Let's shed some light.
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