Last May, the corporate owner of the Times-Picayune made an announcement that shook New Orleans: The newspaper was cutting back to a three-day-a-week press run.
New Orleans would become the largest city in the country without a daily newspaper. The community, sad and angry, protested and strategized, but the decision had been made.
Some 900 miles north, Guild members at the Cleveland Plain Dealer felt the aftershocks. They watched and worried as Advance Publications — the owner of their newspaper, too — gutted The Times-Picayune staff. Earlier, the company had done the same thing in Ann Arbor and at smaller Michigan newspapers.
It felt like “the handwriting was on the wall,” said Harlan Spector, chair of the unit of Local 1, the Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild.
A staff meeting didn’t put fear and speculation to rest. Spector said the paper’s editor revealed no details, but “made it clear that change was coming, that now might be a good time to pursue other opportunities.”
The Guild had something else in mind.
Could the union beat the company to the punch? Tell readers what might be coming and enlist them in a pre-emptive strike to save their daily newspaper?
With the help of a grant from the CWA Defense Fund, that’s exactly what they’re doing. And the community is roaring.
“This is the talk of Cleveland,” Spector said. “It’s brought some people to realize that the paper is pretty important to the community. Maybe it’s always been there, and you take it for granted, but if we didn’t have a daily paper and had just a handful of reporters covering an area of over 1 million people, it’s not going to be pretty, and it’s not going to be journalism as we know it.”
The bad news is that some of those fears have come true: Less than a month into the campaign, Advance announced it would cut one-third of the union’s 168 newsroom jobs, no matter what decisions are made about the Plain Dealer itself.
If the company hoped its grim announcement would kill the campaign, it underestimated the Guild.
With negotiations already underway for a new contract, the bargaining team in early December nailed down a six-year agreement that provides better benefits for the members who will be let go, limits future layoffs and starts to reverse wage cuts that began in 2009. Members ratified the contract Dec. 11.
The Guild broke the news to the community on its “Save the Plain Dealer” Facebook page:
“While the forced departure of one-third of our journalists will cause deep, lasting harm to the work of news-gathering, we believe your outpouring of support for the Save The Plain Dealer campaign has helped dissuade the company from making even deeper cuts, and causing even greater community harm, as has happened at the other Advance newspapers.
“The Save The Plain Dealer campaign and The Newspaper Guild will continue to fight to preserve responsible, high-quality journalism in Cleveland, and to maintain the seven-day-a-week Plain Dealer. Be assured, this campaign is far from over.”
The campaign officially began the Sunday after Election Day with an ad in the Plain Dealer itself.
Then came billboards and bus signs, public forums, Internet and TV ads, and bountiful media coverage, from multiple stories on local TV stations to a segment on NPR and a story in USA Today.
A Facebook page and a petition on Change.org gave the public a place to share their feelings about their endangered newspaper, some so poignant they’ve left Guild members teary.
In a powerful essay-long comment on Facebook , reader Lisa Roberson described her life-long “love affair” with the paper, noting that a story about a rape survivor helped heal her own wounds and that she thanks “God every day for my health” because of a series about a young mother’s death.
“I truly believe the Plain Dealer has more stories to tell, more people to save and more lives to change,” she wrote. “Simply put — losing the Plain Dealer is not an option.”
The comments have been invaluable to Guild morale, said science writer John Mangels, who, with features writer Andrea Simakis, first proposed the campaign.
“What I’ve said to members of the steering committee when we’ve all been kind of tired is, ‘Take a few minutes, sit down and read through some of those comments, they will lift your spirits and recharge your batteries,’” Mangels said.
Community leaders, even those who may have a love-hate relationship with the newspaper’s coverage, are also speaking out.
“Having a newspaper like The Plain Dealer, with the reporting staff they have, is of vital importance to the public,” local U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach told a radio interviewer.
The Cuyahoga County executive said losing daily publication would send the wrong message about the community’s economic viability, and Congressman Dennis Kucinich urged owners to sell the paper rather than cut its print run. Meanwhile, the City Council is considering a resolution of support for the campaign.
The company has had no official response to the campaign other than a front-page letter to readers.
“It is the role of our leadership team in Cleveland to design the best model to safeguard the future of our enterprise and to preserve the quality of our journalism at The Plain Dealer,” the letter from publisher Terry Egger stated. “Ours is not an ‘either/or’ decision between print and digital. We must do both. We do not have a specific plan, timeline or structure for Cleveland. But we will — very soon.”
Egger, Advance CEO Steve Newhouse and other top managers have refused media requests for interviews and opportunities to appear at public forums.
“All they’ve done is send a form letter response to people saying that a ‘local team’ is coming up with a plan,” Mangels said. “We’re concerned that whoever this local team is, it hasn’t been in with touch the campaign and it hasn’t been in touch with the thousands of people who have responded to the campaign.”
Some Clevelanders have questioned the union’s goal, asking “is it all about protecting jobs?” Spector said.
“Of course we want to protect jobs, but it’s bigger than that,” he said. “This is about a newspaper’s role in the community. A newspaper is more than a business. It’s part of the civic life and part of the civic dialogue, and we know that when daily newspapers die, the civic involvement of the community suffers.”
Spector points to a county reform effort that occurred after the Plain Dealer reported on a corruption scandal among top leaders. The entire form of government was overhauled in favor of a more accountable system.
“A community leader told me that the reform wouldn’t have succeeded without the Plain Dealer hammering away at it every day,” he said. “Whether we’re in print or online, staff cuts mean there are fewer people doing what we’re supposed to be doing, which is watchdogging the community.”
Mangels said it’s clear from readers’ comments that, whatever the business model, they want experienced, capable journalists reporting the news.
“We’ve heard from thousands of people here who say they’re willing to pay more for their subscription or begin paying for online content as long as the quality is good,” he said.
“I think we all realize there’s a business decision to be made, but we think there’s a business case to made for saving the paper.”
The Guild’s John Mangels, right, presents a special T-shirt to Sam McNulty, whose Market Garden Brewery hosted a “Save The Plain Dealer” gathering for Plain Dealer workers and the public on Dec. 6. The shirt features the motto of the beer McNulty brewed in honor of the campaign, “7-Day Lager: Best when enjoyed daily, because once a day keeps ignorance at bay.”