The Desert Sun NewsGuild Fights for the Paper’s Survival; Worrisome COVID Variants–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Oct. 17, 2022

Indy Digest: Oct. 17, 2022

The latest round of cuts by Gannett, the parent company of The Desert Sun, didn’t surprise Christopher Damien.

But they infuriated him—and his colleagues as well.

“We’re angry,” said Damien, a Desert Sun reporter who serves as the unit chair of the Desert Sun NewsGuild, the newspaper’s newsroom union. “I really can’t sum it up any better way than that. Look. I’ve been at The Desert Sun for nearly five years. I’ve seen several rounds of these. We have reporters at The Desert Sun who’ve worked here for 30-plus years. How many times have they seen stuff like this happen?

“At a certain point, it’s both exhausting and enraging to just see corporate leadership just driving this thing right into the ground. And we’re pissed—and we’re doing something about it (by unionizing).”

The latest round of cuts, announced by CEO Mike Reed on Oct. 12, is brutal: Five mandated days of unpaid leave in December. Severance for “voluntary resignations.” A suspension of 401(k) matches, and more. All of this came just two months after Gannett laid off 400 employees—about 3 percent of the company’s workforce—and said another 400 open positions would not be filled, after the company announced a second-quarter loss of $54 million on revenues of $749 million.

Damien and his fellow NewsGuild members, however, are protected from these cuts. The union was born in December 2020, when newsroom employees filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board, following in the footsteps of newsroom employees at other newspapers, including The Arizona Republic in Phoenix. The union is still in the process of negotiating a contract with Gannett, and the NLRB shields union members from cuts during negotiations.

“Right after we unionized, Gannett, much like they just did the other day, suspended the 401(k) (match) for everybody in the company,” Damien said. “Arizona was able to fight that off because of union protections called ‘status quo.’ … Gannett actually suspended our 401(k), even though we had those same protections that Arizona had. We filed an unfair labor practice with the National Labor Relations Board, and we won. So Gannett had to give us our 401(k) (matches) back and actually had to retroactively pay what they’d stolen from us. And then they had to post in our newsroom that they’ll never do it again.

“That’s the kind of stuff we’re going to keep doing. … We’re happy that we’ve been able to protect ourselves with dignity through these laws that protect labor. But that’s not what we’re fighting for. We’re not fighting for a temporary protection from these measures that Gannett clearly will just keep doing. We’re fighting for a contract. We’re fighting for a contract that will be in effect for years, and that’s going to not only protect us, but protects future generations of reporters that come and work here.”

The editors and non-newsroom employees at The Desert Sun, however, are not union members.

“We were protected from this round of sacrifices, but our editors aren’t,” Damien said. “They’re going to be hit by all this stuff, and we think that’s unacceptable.”

Damien said Gannett has told union members they’ll have a contract by the end of the year.

“We want to see a serious proposal,” Damien said. “They keep trying to push some really technical stuff that’s not worth getting into for these purposes, but let’s just say they keep putting on the table contract proposals and responses to our contract proposals that we, frankly, find offensive, because of how poorly they’re thought out and how badly they protect labor.”

Even if the Desert Sun NewsGuild has a contract in place by the end of the year, that won’t change the fact that Gannett is in big trouble. The quarterly losses are bad—but the $1 billion-plus in debt that Gannett took on as the result of a 2019 merger with Gatehouse could be crippling, according to numerous industry analysts. According to the Poynter Institute, Gannett reported it had paid down $55 million of that debt since June 30—largely by selling off real estate and other assets, and will be selling $65 million to $75 million in real estate and other assets to pay down more. (Gannett sold The Desert Sun building on Gene Autry Trail in 2021.)

While Gannett is selling off assets, laying off employees, and making life more difficult for its remaining employees, the company is paying its top executives handsomely. CEO Mike Reed earned a whopping $7.74 million in 2021, including a $900,000 salary, a $767,052 bonus, and a little more than $6 million in stock. CFO Doug Horne received more than $1.7 million in salary, bonuses and stock.

“These are the same guys that are getting us on a call—a last minute, less-than 15-minute meeting—a couple days ago and saying, ‘We need to make vast sacrifices for the well-being of this company,’” Damien said.

Damien said the primary goal of the union is to fight for the survival of The Desert Sun.

“We have this paper’s best interest in mind. This nearly a 100-year-old newspaper,” Damien said. “There’s a lot on the line here, and we know that. We understand that responsibility, and we’re rising to the occasion. This kind of (cuts), it’s just more, and more, and more, and more of pulling the rug out from under us. It’s unacceptable.”

Given how bleak Gannett’s situation looks, I asked Damien what kind of future he saw for The Desert Sun’s owner.

“These guys (Reed and Horne) made this problem; these guys need to fix it,” he said. “You’re asking me what I think they should do to fix it. I don’t know. I’m not a corporate CEO; I’m a local news reporter. All I know is that they need to stop threatening local reporters, local news, and the integrity of our local democracies by driving us further into debt.”

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• The SARS-CoV-2 levels in Palm Springs’ wastewater are more or less flat, as of the most recent testing. The average was 214,720 viral copies per liter on Oct. 3 and 4; it was 210,433 Oct. 10 and 11.

• Oh, hey, there are new subvariants that seems to be spreading rapidly. CNBC reports: “As winter inches closer, Dr. (Anthony) Fauci is sounding the alarm about a pair of ‘pretty troublesome’ COVID variants. The two descendants of omicron’s BA.5 subvariant, called BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, both have dangerous ‘qualities or characteristics that could evade some of the interventions we have,’ Fauci told CBS News on Friday. The two sublineages are responsible for more than 10% of all current U.S. cases, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data—just one week after they weren’t even significant enough to list.” Oh boy.

• Sort of related: Gov. Gavin Newsom is formally ending the COVID-19 state of emergency in California … but not for four-plus months. Our partners at CalMatters say: “California’s COVID-19 state of emergency will end Feb. 28, 2023, nearly three years from its initiation, officials from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced today. The announcement came as new variants spur concerns that there will be another deadly winter surge across the country and as test positivity rates plateau in California following a nearly three-month decline. More than 95,000 Californians have died as a result of COVID-19, according to state data. The state of emergency gave Newsom broad, often controversial, powers to issue masking mandates and temporary stay-at-home orders in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. It also enabled the governor to enter into billions of dollars of no-bid emergency response contracts with testing facilities, personal protective equipment suppliers and temporary workforce agencies. Some of those contracts were with untested vendors who failed to deliver services.”

• Two grocery store chains have announced a merger that could have a huge effect on the Coachella Valley. CNN says: “In a mega-deal that could have a huge impact on grocery shopping in America, Kroger and Albertsons announced Friday plans to merge. If approved by regulators, the nearly $25 billion deal would be one of the biggest in US retail history. The proposed merger, which the companies expect to complete in 2024, would combine the fifth and tenth largest retailers in the country. The companies own dozens of chains, including Safeway, Vons, Harris Teeter and Fred Meyer and reach a combined 85 million households. Kroger and Albertsons, which both employ mostly union workforces, want to merge to be more competitive against non-union giants such as Walmart, Amazon and Costco. The grocers are also facing increased pressure from Aldi, the fast-growing German discount supermarket chain.” This would mean all local Ralph’s, Vons and Albertsons would have the same owners. Eek.

• Well, this certainly seems concerning. Also from CNN comes this headline: “A global epidemic of cancer among people younger than 50 could be emerging.” A little more: “A new review of cancer registry records from 44 countries found that the incidence of early-onset cancers is rising rapidly for colorectal and 13 other types of cancers, many of which affect the digestive system, and this increase is happening across many middle- and high-income nations. The review’s authors say the upswing in younger adults in happening in part because of more sensitive testing for some cancer types, such as thyroid cancer. But testing doesn’t completely account for the trend, says co-author Shuji Ogino, a professor of pathology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Ogino says the spike is due to an unhealthy stew of risk factors that are probably working together, some which are known and others that need to be investigated.”

• Well, this also seems concerning. The Los Angeles Times reports: “Alaskan officials recently canceled the Bering Sea snow crab season for the first time ever after scientists discovered an unprecedented decline in crab numbers. Climate change is the No. 1 suspect in the drop-off. ‘We’re still trying to figure it out, but certainly there’s very clear signs of the role of climate change in the collapse,’ said Michael Litzow, shellfish assessment program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs an annual survey of Bering Sea snow crab numbers. (Snow crabs are also found in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska.) The decision to cancel, announced by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game on Oct. 10, came as a devastating blow for local fisheries in a state where the seafood industry is an economic cornerstone. Commercial landings last year of Alaska snow crab alone came to 44 million pounds and $219 million, according to NOAA data.”

• And finally … a camera-hogging emu who became famous because of his owner’s hilarious TikTok videos is fighting for his life after being stricken with the avian flu. The Washington Post reports: “Emmanuel the emu—who went viral on TikTok for hilariously pecking his owner’s phone as she filmed educational videos about farming—is fighting for his life amid a deadly outbreak of avian influenza that has killed most of the birds on the farm where he lives, his owner said. Emmanuel is experiencing nerve damage in his right leg and can’t eat or drink on his own after contracting the disease on Wednesday, content creator and hobby farmer Taylor Blake shared late Saturday on social media. Blake, whose family owns Knuckle Bump Farms in South Florida, said the farm lost more than 50 birds in three days—all but Emmanuel and Rico the swan. Emmanuel—the roughly 5-foot-8, 120-pound emu, whom The Washington Post interviewed in July—faces ‘a long road ahead’ to recovery, Blake said. But he is a ‘fighter’ she added. The United States is in the midst of a months-long avian influenza outbreak that experts have said is the most severe since 2015, when a ‘highly pathogenic’ strain of the disease affected more than 49 million birds.” Get better, please, Emmanuel!

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