DFM workers

DFM management came to a bargaining session empty-handed, telling a national coalition of NewsGuild representatives that the company’s hedge fund ownership intends to keep employee pay frozen companywide to help maintain its profits. Alden Global Capital, principal owner of Digital First Media, has earned worldwide notoriety for its ruthless staff cuts and double-digit profit margins. The ongoing damage to newsrooms across the country has triggered protests from New York to Denver to the Bay Area.

Members of the Bay Area News Group newsroom staff, winners of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the deadly Ghost Ship Fire, publicly denounced their corporate owner’s business practices Thursday.

Twenty-one Guild members are being bought out and layoffs are next. How many more people will be let go is not known.

Let’s visit the DFM bosses. Invest in employees. Raise our pay. Now.

Thirteen Guild-CWA bargaining units representing newsroom, advertising, circulation, and production departments at Digital First Media opened joint negotiations for a wage increase Thursday in Denver. Union negotiators proposed a $1 per hour raise for all employees effective July 1. Management offered no proposal, stating that budgeting is under way for the next fiscal year that begins July 1, and that managers won’t be prepared to begin serious negotiations until June.

Leaders of 12 Guild bargaining units reached an unprecedented tentative agreement with Digital First Media today, including the first across-the-board pay increase many DFM workers have seen in years.

One thousand NewsGuild workers at 13 newspapers nationwide stand united today as we begin a new, more public phase of the Guild’s #NewsMatters campaign for fair contracts with Digital First Media.

Nearly 1,000 news workers at Digital First Media have launched a nationwide revolt against job cuts and profiteering they say are threatening local journalism at the nation’s second-largest newspaper company.