The Guild and fellow unions at the Albany Times Union met with management Monday to discuss a proposal to raise workers' health care costs by more than 30 percent, while the company's costs would rise less than 13 percent. Guild President Tim O’Brien told the company that it is difficult to ask members to pay a third more for health care when they have not had a raise in more than five years. Publisher George Hearst insisted those were separate issues. O'Brien tells members: “We will continue to do the research needed to get the fairest deal we can. We believe the proposal as it is is unacceptable, but we are glad to work with the other unions to try to find a solution.”

Of the dozens of assertions in a wide-ranging “manifesto” about the altered state of journalism from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, this one stands out: Journalists are not merely purveyors of facts. That awakening call comes in a lengthy report titled “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present.” The authors can foresee a world where 90 percent of news reports are written by computer algorithms that convert data into narrative structures and where many newsworthy events are first described by connected citizens rather than journalists. The result: "The journalist has not been replaced but displaced, moved higher up the editorial chain from the production of initial observations to a role that emphasizes verification and interpretation. … Working between the crowd and the algorithm in the information ecosystem is where a journalist is able to have most effect, by serving as an investigator, a translator, a storyteller," the report states.