Today's Top Stories

Check Out ROC's 2013 Diners' Guide to Ethical Restaurants

It's here: The (Guild-represented) Restaurant Opportunities Centers United's annual guide to eating out ethically, telling you which restaurants are doing a lousy job with pay and benefits and which ones are worth your support as a diner. The guide looks at 150 of America's most popular...

Solidarity Works! Fired Cablevision Workers Reinstated

All but one of the 22 CWA members at Brooklyn Cablevision who were fired in January are back on the job. Through email, Facebook, petitions and rallies, more than 100,000 people showed their support for the workers, who have been trying for the last year to negotiate a fair contract after an...

Unions Happy With Obama's Choice for Labor Secretary

From CWA to Jobs with Justice, labor organizations are applauding President Obama's choice of Tom Perez to head the U.S. Department of Labor. In a statement Monday, CWA called him an "inspired choice" whose "experience reflects a fervent devotion to working families." Official White House photo...

Petition: Stop California's Fee-for-Records Bill in Its Infancy

California's Administrative Office of the Courts has written a bill that imposes a $10 fee each time someone requests a court file -- a fee that would also apply to journalists, who regularly request dozens of such documents as part of ordinary beat reporting. Public records already are prepared...

Pew State of the News Media 2013: Challenges Intensify

Here's the good news out of Pew's 2013 report on the state of the news media: newspaper circulation is hodling steady, and even growing on Sundays. But the bad news is that, “There are more signs than ever that the reduced reporting power in the news industry is having an effect and may weaken...

Albany: Without Us, New Press Would Print Blank Pages

The Newspaper Guild of Albany is thrilled about the new press that will display our work like never before. We congratulate the Hearst Corp. for making this major investment at a time when many others are abandoning daily delivery. At the same time, the Hearst Corp. has not shown a similar...

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Media companies need more Latino journalists

Ruben Navarrette — February 24, 2011 — Pasadena Star-News

Americans count on the media to tell us -- as Walter Cronkite used to say -- "the way it is." But how can media companies do that effectively when their staffs look more like the way it used to be? In 2000, Latinos accounted for about 4.5% of print journalists. In radio and television, the numbers were smaller. Today, according to the American Society of News Editors, Latinos make up only about 3.5% of print journalists.

Churnalism or news? How PRs have taken over the media

Paul Lewis — February 24, 2011 — The Guardian

A new website promises to shine a spotlight on "churnalism" by exposing the extent to which news articles have been directly copied from press releases. The website, churnalism.com, allows readers to paste press releases into a "churn engine." It then compares the text with a constantly updated database of more than 3 million articles. The result is a "churn rating," showing the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced from publicity material.

Gannett's global workforce fell 7% in 2010; U.S. newspapers once more led way in cutting jobs

Jim Hopkins — February 24, 2011 — Gannett Blog

Gannett's worldwide employment fell again in 2010, but at a slower rate than in the two previous years, according to a new filing the company made today with government regulators. Today's SEC filing shows that under Craig Dubow, who became CEO in 2005, the company has now eliminated 20,000 jobs -- more than one in every three. U.S. Community Publishing -- the company's biggest division -- once more shed the most workers: 2,300, or about 9%.

Election Rules

— February 24, 2011

Candidate statements

— February 24, 2011

Union battle goes national

— February 23, 2011 — Bloomberg News

Unions and their allies are planning rallies, vigils and press conferences in at least 27 states this week against what they see as a national attack on government employees. Demonstrations are spreading from Wisconsin and Ohio, where bills from Republican governors to curtail collective-bargaining rights have attracted thousands of protesters. Efforts include lobbying all week against measures in Indiana and a Friday AFL-CIO rally in New Jersey.

HuffPo: 'Vast Majority' of Our Bloggers Understand Value of Free

Dylan Stableford — February 23, 2011 — TheWrap

The Huffington Post is fighting back -- sort of. After the Newspaper Guild criticized the site for exploiting journalists, urging Arianna Huffington to give her unpaid bloggers a cut of the $315 million AOL agreed to pay her for HuffPo, the site's senior vice president of media relations responded with an e-mail to the Guild's president. Its salutation? "Dear Bill," it opened, violating one of the first canons of journalism.

Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About

How screwing unions screws the entire middle class.

Kevin Drum — February 23, 2011 — Mother Jones

What's happening is a story about power. It's about the loss of a countervailing power robust enough to stand up to the influence of business interests and the rich on equal terms. With that gone, the response to every new crisis and every new change in the economic landscape has inevitably pointed in the same direction. And after three decades, the cumulative effect of all those individual responses is an economy focused almost exclusively on the demands of business and finance. It's not clear how this will get turned around, but unions, for better or worse, are history.

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