ProJo union confirms layoffs, expects more, plans to fight

PROVIDENCE – The union representing Providence Journal newsroom employees says it will fight plans by new owners Gatehouse Media to outsource editing jobs.

In a newsletter to members Wednesday after Gatehouse’s acquisition of the Journal from A.H. Belo Corp. became official, the Providence Newspaper Guild accused new ownership of “cramming [the paper’s] local identity into some one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter editorial operation and edited by people halfway across the country who have never set foot in Rhode Island.”

To prevent the outsourcing and new layoffs, the Guild said it would be “doing actions in the building to demonstrate the seriousness of our concerns and we will be taking our story out into the state at large, so readers and advertisers know what is at stake here.”
The Guild scheduled a meeting for members at noon Thursday to begin coordinating its resistance.

On Tuesday, 22 Guild members were let go in the transmission from Belo to Gatehouse – 14 in advertising and eight in editorial – according to the newsletter, plus an unidentified number of non-union workers.

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And on Wednesday Interim Publisher Bernie Szachara confirmed in a Journal story on the transition that by mid-February “some, but not all, current Journal copy-editing and page-design positions eventually will be transferred to a center GateHouse currently operates in Austin, Texas, for many of its newspapers.”

The Guild newsletter estimated those plans to outsource the copy desk plus “ad makeup work by the pre-pub department in January” could result in up to 30 additional layoffs.

Before the recent round of layoffs, the Journal employed 155 Guild members. At the end of 2013, the newspaper employed 385 total workers according to the PBN 2014 Book of Lists.

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