Worker disputes threaten N.J. papers

Advance Publications, which owns The Star-Ledger and its smaller sister paper, the Trenton Times, set three conditions that management must achieve to prevent a shutdown.

The Star-Ledger must establish new agreements with the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union and Teamsters Local 1100. The former represents 90 drivers at The Star-Ledger and the latter is the mailers’ union.

In addition, management must convince 25 non-union employees from the Trenton Times and 200 non-union employees from The Star-Ledger to accept buyouts. The buyout packages include a one-year guarantee of salary and medical benefits in exchange for the immediate termination of employment.

Though the mailers’ union is set to hold a vote on a new agreement today, negotiations with the drivers’ union have been unsuccessful. Star-Ledger publisher George Arwady sent a memo to employees last Tuesday stating that “the Drivers have left us with no choice” but to send “formal notices to all employees this week … advising you that the Company will be sold, or, failing that, that it will close operations on January 5, 2009,” according to The New York Observer.

Officials from both unions did not respond to requests for comment.

The troubles of the two New Jersey papers come as declining advertising revenue has strained operations at many of the nation’s print publications.

“Newspapers are generally under tremendous financial pressure,” journalism professor Paul Starr said in an e-mail, explaining that the “shift of advertising to online media and the loss of subscription revenue from declining readership — plus the current economic downturn — are a triple whammy.”

Wilson School professor Stanley Katz called the situation “incredible” but “not very surprising.”

“It’s what’s happening all over the country. Papers are shutting down or being radically restructured,” Katz said, citing attempts by the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The New York Times to cut back, restructure sections and offer buyouts. The costs of newsprint and ink have also increased over the past few years, Katz added.

Last Tuesday, the McClatchy Company — the publisher of several leading newspapers such as the Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee — announced a major staff reduction that will result in the elimination of about 1,150 jobs across its 30 daily newspapers.

The Star-Ledger and the Trenton Times, however, had not yet resorted to buyouts, though both papers have been losing money for years and are projected to lose $30 million to $40 million this year, according to The New York Times.

Starr noted that the loss of these newspapers could be drastic for New Jersey residents. “This is a state without a commercial broadcast television station,” he said. “[New Jerseyans] don’t get much news about their own state and local government. And they are going to get even less news with cutbacks in the state’s newspapers.”

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

For the time being, though, the fate of the two papers is undetermined. Advance Publications has already retained JPMorgan Chase to help sell off the papers in the event that union concessions cannot be achieved.

But Donald Newhouse, the company’s president, said in a Star-Ledger article that “[w]e strongly believe that if we can achieve the three objectives we set for ourselves ... then we will be able to produce a viable newspaper.”

The Trenton Times, with a weekday circulation of 52,681, employs 110 people, while The Star-Ledger, the nation’s 15th-largest newspaper with a weekday circulation of 350,000, has a staff of 1,412.

A dying breed

Though some print publications will likely survive the current crisis, both Starr and Katz said they believe that their central role in bringing citizens news is fading.

“It’s not entirely clear that packing [information] in the way we have traditionally done for newspapers is viable anymore,” Katz said, noting that electronic media allow viewers to choose the form and point of view they want to read.

Starr explained that “online news media have not yet been able to generate the kind of revenue that print newspapers have generated in the past,” adding that there are some doubts that internet newspapers “will ultimately be able to create a comparable financial foundation for reporting.”

Katz said he believes that the gradual demise of local and regional print media will be a tremendous loss.

“I don’t think there’s anything sacrosanct about the form, but what is essential to communities and to the local foundations of democracy is that citizens are well-informed about the communities and regions in which they live,” Katz said.

“Plenty of reporters and commentators are following the presidential election campaign, but the probability that any reporter will investigate poor service and corruption in some dull municipal agency is diminishing,” Starr said in an address at the “Future of News” workshop at the Center for Information Technology Policy in May.