Philadelphia Newspaper Strike Deadline Thursday Night; Union Plans Competitive Online Newspaper

Tomorrow at midnight is the strike deadline for The Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia, which represents the staffs of the Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer. As Business Week reports, “The issues dividing the two sides include the owners’ proposal to take over the pension plan and do away with seniority status for employees.” This is a challenge to new publisher Brian Tierney, who recently, as Editor and Publisher notes, “announced plans to cut as many as 150 editorial jobs. Those would come a year after more than 100 job were lost at both papers through a 2005 buyout.” And Tierney likely didn’t make more friends at the unions with his Q&A in today’s Wall Street Journal, in which he says “One of the things I’ve seen in the newspaper business is that we have a tendency to marinate in our own juices. The gene pool is pretty limited,”and “I haven’t met an advertiser out there who thinks … that the secret to being [a] better [newspaper] is to necessarily have a lot more people doing it.” The Guild authorized a strike on October 26, and other smaller unions will meet tomorrow to decide whether to join it. Negotiations are continuing.

If there is a strike, the Guild intends to publish its own newspaper online. According to Stu Bykofsky, a Daily News columnist and Guild spokesman, the goal of the strike publication would be “to provide news and information for the community so they won’t be deprived.” There are big plans for the site, including an advertising sales component, and the Inquirer‘s chief steward said it would be a straight news site, not one that would focus on advocating for the strike. Oldtimers will remember the 1994 San Francisco newspaper strike and the plethora of unvarnished online news sources that appeared then, in the early days of the commercial web. But the world of publishing has changed irrevocably in the past dozen years. With fewer readers in almost every major city reading the local daily, if there is a strike Philadelphia readers will get some subset of their news needs satisfied by the bottomless pit of the web. The mayor won’t need to read the funnies over the radio, as New York’s LaGuardia once did during a work stoppage. It’s ironic that the need to differentiate a new news site from what websites the Daily News and Inquirer maintain officially during a strike might lead to the sort of desperation-induced innovation that so many large-city newspaper sites need to put into effect anyway. Strikes are hell on everyone involved and no one would never recommend it as a means toward innovation, but this bears close watching. It could lead to better online newspapers.

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