An agreement had been ratified, Warsinskey came around to saying, in which the Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild Local 1 agreed to “no longer represent the bargaining unit at The Plain Dealer and disclaim its interest in the bargaining unit.”
The Union will be no more, in other words. The four remaining PD reporters, the last holdouts from a staff that numbered 340 only 20 years ago, will be laid off and offered jobs (on their current beats) at cleveland.com, which will become the sole supplier of content for the print Plain Dealer. (It has already been providing the majority of print content in recent weeks.)
“The newly united newsroom under the leadership of cleveland.com editor Chris Quinn will continue to provide stories and important perspectives to the people of Northeast Ohio,” Warsinskey wrote. “The Plain Dealer remains a stanchion of Ohio journalism, and still is the best source for print journalism and advertising. Before anyone starts pounding nails in coffins, as some of my more sensationalist brethren and harsh critics are wont to do, take a breath. This is not the end of The Plain Dealer. Far from it.”
Why anyone should take a breath and believe Warsinskey, after his crock of applesauce one month ago announcing the paper’s shifting editorial focus, (a shift he said would broaden the paper’s coverage to five underserved Northeast Ohio counties), is beyond us. That announcement was of course a lie, a ploy to get as many PD reporters as possible to take voluntary buyouts by removing them from their beats and exiling them to the exurbs. But Warsinskey wrote the column as earnestly as a boy scout and continues to shill for the company that just promoted him for donning the hangman’s hood. He called cleveland.com “by far the largest [newsroom] in Ohio” Tuesday, for example, but after the purges on the print side that’s no longer the case. The newly united newsroom, with 64 total staffers, is smaller than the Columbus Dispatch, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Toledo Blade, by recent counts.
The Columbia Journalism Review reported Wednesday that the PD staffers who have been laid off during the pandemic can keep their health insurance until February, provided they sign a non-disparagement agreement, so that’s some good news at least. (The piece, written by Anna Clark, is also the most comprehensive chronology of the paper’s contraction from 2008 to the present moment, and is worth a read in full.)
The death of the Guild is by no means a surprise. The recent newsroom massacres have often been characterized as “death blows,” and each Guild press release over the past year has read like a eulogy. Advance’s whole digital-first strategy in Cleveland, though it mirrored the company’s efforts to expand online content in other markets, was designed to bust the union that the Newhouse family so reviled.
The Guild noted in its statement Tuesday that as part of the agreement, it would make no efforts to organize the cleveland.com newsroom for at least a year, but encouraged other local unions and the national NewsGuild to do so.
“The end of the unit, as unionization is picking up at other media companies across the country, is a sad moment in Cleveland history. Its imprint on the newsroom, and city, has been invaluable in the last century,” the Guild statement read. “Those who came before us bargained, picketed and went on strike over the decades for fair wages and benefits, worker safety and racial and gender equality. They also fought for free speech and objective coverage, protecting not just themselves but their readers…
“To those Guild members who came before us: We are sorry. To the city and people of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio: We will miss you. We did our best.”
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This article appears in May 6-12, 2020.
Cleveland. com is tough to read. The articles leave you thinking who, what, when, why and where? Their grammar and spelling are on par with a middle school student.
Will the new Plain Dealer now have front page articles by Troy on LeBron’s favorite candy bar? MGK’s feud with Eminem is newsworthy to the new PD staff. We can now expect it to be an above the fold article.
Under this agreement is the Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild Local 1 allowed to unionize Scene?
It was dead when editors and reporters became the PR firm for the Jimmy Dimora Political Machine.
Who cares, its a liberal rag.
Kick every other customer in the nuts and wonder why your business model is not working!
Did Sam think we were kidding when we said we hope these “Journalists” starve?
The Plain Dealer was never any good. It was always a corporate mouthpiece for guys who had the time to put their feet up on their desks at 9 am and read the paper.
The Cleveland Press, delivered in the afternoon when working men had time to read, was always the real paper in this town. Louis Seltzer wouldn’t have pled with Frank Jackson for an interview. He would have told Frank to show up at his office in an hour, and don’t be late.
The Cleveland Press died in 1982, right along with Cleveland’s unionized labor force. It died so that its lakefront real estate could be turned into the headquarters of Jones Day, the most corporate law firm in the Midwest.
Great News, hope you pukes learn something.
Now the only Print Newspaper in town will feature Joey Morona posting articles on social media beefs with the term “Big Mad” in the headline.
Scene can pretend that they’re above this type of tripe, but no, it’s precisely who they are too.
Keep penning articles about Cum Trees, Vince and Sam will run his Soros funded propaganda pieces about inmates at Ohio jails…like people give a fuck, and Brett Zelman can school us about anti-Semitism and how his peeps deflect destroying Western Society with any criticism labeled as such.
You’re all shit bags, non-Union shit bags at that…every day you make the world a shittier place.
@Moron virus: Scène is an entertainment weekly, not the newspaper of record for the city. For you to insist on the same standards is absurd.
Scene at least isn’t riddled with typos, grammatical butchery, or a mouthpiece to spread lies for the establishment.
You may not get the statewide and national news at scene, but you were never supposed to.
The Plain Dealer regularly insults a large proportion of its readership, which explains its declining circulation.
The P.D. turns off readers with its crusade to make life easier for criminals and its apathy toward all the murders in Cleveland. It angers readers by its practice of routinely blaming the Board of Elections for the inactions of people who are too lazy and apathetic to maintain their voter eligibility. The P.D. does not believe in personal responsibility and accountability. Instead, it wallows in “victimhood.”
Moreover, a majority of the P.D. Editorial Board champions the “right” of men who “identify” as women to use women’s rest rooms and to take showers in women’s locker rooms. This is utter madness.
It features a truly terrible editorial cartoonist who draws essentially the same cartoon five days a week.
Finally, the Plain Dealer has sacrificed truth on the altar of political correctness. Newspapers should report the truth without fear or favor. The P.D. has failed miserably at this.
It’s a complex issue. There was failure on all sides. There is always a drive to eliminate union jobs because the owners never want to pay fair wages or benefits. There is a failure of the owners to not see the future and adjust. To give away the stories for free at the start and now want to charge for them.
“Scène is an entertainment weekly,”
Wow thats obtuse.
Let’s have a look at some of the headlines from your ‘entertainment weekly’ …
Blacks discriminated against
Northwest Ohio stays home less than rest of the state
New EBT card for pandemic kids
Ohio Gyms sue
And who can forget the classic ‘Everybody be like fuckin dyin’
So you can shove your entertainment weekly garbage. This rag spews a lot of political garbage out of its pie hole and it all has a left slant that gives a pat on the head to criminals and other people that repeatedly make dumb life decisions.
all journalists are liars. We only go to these local news sites because we have no other choice.
What will I use for the bottom of my bird cage?
The Cleveland Pain feeler and daily Birdcage Liner has been sick for years. It’s been wasting away and dying like an old geezer with terminal cancer. And now it’s on life support. Soon we will be the biggest city without a daily paper. Or maybe we already are, and have been for quite some time.
Go look at the newspapers of other cities, both online and in print. The PD is a joke. Even Detroit, for all its misery and failure, has TWO better papers than Cleveland has.
And now theracists, haters, conservatives, white supremicists, and other assorted vermin that infested the PD’s comment boards for decades have all slithered and crawled over here, and have contaminated these comment boards.
F’k each and every one of you, and all your horses, and your little dogs, too. Hope you all get together at your local watering holes and get sick and die slowly and miserably. And soon. The sooner the better. Fewer votes for the Orange Plague.