Hedge Fund-Owned Newspaper Group Outsources Design Abroad

Investigative journalist Thomas Peele remembers the day he found out that he and fellow journalists from the East Bay Times and the San Jose Mercury News had won the Pulitzer Prize for their “relentless” coverage of the deadly Ghost Ship warehouse hearth in Oakland, California.
Peele became a shocked person, and of the route, he was elated that he and his team would be revered for their dogged paintings, which protected a tragedy that shook their area.
It changed in April 2017. One week later, MediaNews Group, proprietor of the two papers and ratings of others across the country, announced plans to transport the Bay Area’s copy desk paintings to Southern California, triggering 20 layoffs from a shrunken roster of fewer than 100 personnel inside the East Bay newsroom.

In a flash, almost 1 / 4 of the award-triumphing editorial body of workers turned into gone.

“It becomes a kick in the tooth,” said Peele, an officer for the NewsGuild, the union representing employees on the papers.

The chain’s owners and bosses, he said, “didn’t even send a pizza.” But they did send layoff notices, at the side of “word that our papers might be edited 400 miles away through humans we had no relationship with, and who had little information about our region of the nation. And we had been instructed a few tales wouldn’t be replica edited at all.”

“Pulitzer?” he requested. “What Pulitzer?’

It became part of a developing trend of moving tasks such as proofreading, replica modifying, and page layout to “hubs” that would save cash. Meanwhile, the papers had been worthwhile, not to mention Pulitzer-triumphing—but the hedge fund that owned their figure agency desired to skim extra off the pinnacle.

Two years later, MediaNews Group, best known through its trade name Digital First Media, has determined that shutting down pressrooms, disposing of jobs, and concentrating layout and printing into local hubs has not reduced costs.

Now, it’s outsourcing California information layout to the Philippines, paying pennies at the greenback for work after hiring professionals who lived within the communities they served.

An employee inside the manufacturing branch of the layout hub, who asked no longer to be named because of fears he’d be laid off, stated Digital First as soon as he assured me, employees, that the hubs had been key to supporting the paper’s sandpaper survival depends, simply earlier than the Philippines settlement went into effect in May, the employer reduces its Southern California design and duplicates modifying pool by using a half-dozen people — all at the heels of sixty-five layoffs across the business enterprise’s Southern California newspapers a yr earlier.

“They said it turned into to store money,” he said. “So as soon as we heard the whole lot become being outsourced, we were burdened because we had been imagined to be that.”

Computers Covering City Hall?

At the Denver Post, the agency is pushing the envelope even similarly. In bargaining talks with union leaders this summer, Digital First drove for using artificial intelligence to cover excessive faculty sports. They also desire to permit computer systems to “collect and publish” municipal authorities’ information, together with “neighborhood news stories from suburban groups, school districts, and different governmental districts,” in step with an organization’s inspiration acquired with the aid of The Intercept. Denver Post Union authentic Tony Mulligan stated that the agency has already selected a dealer and budgeted cash for the transition of prep sports activities.