"Union busting" Cleveland Plain Dealer Newspaper lays off 22 newsroom employees today, upsetting the Guild...By editor Kathy Wray Coleman of Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio's most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog, which are also top in the Midwest in Black digital news
By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor-in-chief (Editor's note of April 10, 2020. Since this article below dated April 3, 2020 when the Cleveland Plain Dealer laid off 22 newsroom employees, including four Black female journalists , which left 14 newsroom reporters at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 10 of more have been laid off, effective April 10, including News Guild Chair Ginger Christ, News Gild vice chair and investigative reporter Rachael Dissell, and columnist Phillip Morris, who is Black. The 10 laid off on April 10 are listed below, the first eight of them reporters. Now the print section only has four reporters)
- Rachel Dissell (investigative reporter)
- Ginger Christ.
- Patrick O'Donnell.
- Laura DeMarco
- John Petkovic.
- Michelle Jarboe.
- Phillip Morris.
- Lisa DeJong.
- Photographer Gus Chan
- Friday Magazine Editor and Feature Reporter Greg Burnett
Original article posted Friday, April 3, 2020 was published before the 10 aforementioned newsroom employees were laid off on April 10, 2020
CLEVELANDURBANNEWS.COM, CLEVELAND, Ohio- The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest newspaper, today laid-off 22 newsroom employees as publicly promised early last month by incoming Editor and General Manager Tim Warsinskey, the former managing editor who replaced George Rodrique at the start of the month, Rodrigue stepping down effective March 1 after roughly five years on the job.
Four of those laid off, mainly journalists and some photographers, are non-union managers and 18 are represented by the News Guild, the union that is irate over this new round of layoffs.
Among those let go were columnist Mike McIntyre, TV critic Mark Dawidziak, senior staff photographer Marvin Fong, health reporter Brie Zeltner and Black journalists Olivia Perkins, Roxanne Washington, Melody Smith and Julie Washington.
In announcing the layoffs, Warsinskey's said in a statement that the layoffs are "strictly financial."
He said that between the Plain Dealer and its online affiliate, Cleveland.com, there will be 77 combined staff employees stationed in Akron, Cleveland and Washington, D.C. following today's newsroom shakeup.
What he did not stress though, is that Plain Dealer employees, particularly its seasoned reporters, are generally better paid, more experienced, and traditionally backed by a labor union.
Guild leaders called the layoffs union busting and said that, starting today, there will be only 14 Guild journalists in the newsroom, down from 300 a decade ago, and that "union jobs and years of experience are being replaced by lower-paid, non-union workers - not to mention wire and non-local syndicated stories."
The union argues that the Plain Dealer remains one of the top 25 major newspaper's nationwide by circulation, and said that Warsinskey's announced the layoffs online earlier this month just one half hour before notifying the Guild.
Last year around this time period the newspaper let go of some 41 staff members over two rounds of layoffs, give or take a few, outsourcing jobs of layout editors and designers, and dismissing 12 newsroom employees, including reporters, editors and photographers.
Last year's controversial layoffs impacted more than a third of the newspaper's unionized staff.
Union leaders have accused the newspaper and its hierarchical decision makers of trading local news for a centralized unit removed from the community, and of ignoring the union's proposal for more subscribers to reduce the number of layoffs.
Newspaper officials have said that in spite of the layoffs "the Plain Dealer will remain a local institution."
Only time will tell.
Founded in 1872, the Plain Dealer, once among one of 25 top newspapers in the country and owned by Advance Publications, has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Ohio, and had roughly 250,000 daily readers and 790,000 readers on Sundays before it switched to a four-day delivery newspaper in 2015, including Sundays.
Two years earlier, in 2013, the newspaper reported daily readership of 543,110 and a Sunday's readership of 858,376, a drop of nearly 50 percent of daily readers from 2013 to 2015 when it began under the leadership of Rodrigue with a reduced delivery week, and more than 50 fewer employees.
It had a daily circulation of 246,571 copies in 2016, and circulation figures continue to decline while competition from social media and the Internet in general continues to flourish.
The latest circulation numbers from the Alliance for Audited Media reported average Sunday circulation for the first quarter of 171,404 and average circulation for Wednesdays and Fridays, the only weekdays the paper is home delivered, of 94,838.
It had a daily circulation of 246,571 copies in 2016, and circulation figures continue to decline while competition from social media and the Internet in general continues to flourish.
The latest circulation numbers from the Alliance for Audited Media reported average Sunday circulation for the first quarter of 171,404 and average circulation for Wednesdays and Fridays, the only weekdays the paper is home delivered, of 94,838.
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio's most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog, which are also top in the Midwest in Black digital news.Tel: (216) 659-0473 and Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, and who trained for 17 years at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview, CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.
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