Bend Bulletin newspaper union fights Carpenter Media Group layoffs

The union that represents reporters at Central Oregon’s 122-year-old newspaper is negotiating its first contract with the corporation that bought the outlet last fall. Carpenter Media Group has already laid off nonunion workers at the Bulletin, like the paper’s copy editor, but the Central Oregon NewsGuild says that a contract — and the worker protections it would include — must be in place before any union layoffs could be made. The company has acquired more than 30 newspapers in Oregon alone, including those in the Pamplin Media Group, and approximately 250 others in the U.S. and Canada.

The NewsGuild unit has taken the unusual step of urging subscribers to cancel their subscriptions if the corporate management does not agree to their demands. The Carpenter Media Group declined OPB’s request to be interviewed and sent a statement that said it is “dedicated to preserving and strengthening community journalism in the communities we serve.” The company has made deep cuts in other local media outlets it has acquired. Central Oregon NewsGuild leader Morgan Owen is a crime and public safety reporter for the Bend Bulletin. She joins us to share the latest in the story that’s unfolding at her paper.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. About a year ago, a Mississippi-based company called Carpenter Media Group bought the Bend Bulletin. It was part of a huge newspaper buying spree in the Northwest. The company laid off some non-union workers at the Bulletin and then the Central Oregon NewsGuild, the union, said that a contract and the worker protections it would include must be in place before any union layoffs could be made. The NewsGuild unit has now gone further. Its members recently took the unusual step of urging subscribers to cancel their subscriptions if corporate management does not agree to their terms.

Morgan Owen is a crime and public safety reporter for the Bend Bulletin and the past president of the Central Oregon NewsGuild. She joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Morgan Owen: Thank you, Dave. It’s great to be here.

Miller: What did the company, Carpenter Media Group, say when they acquired the Bend Bulletin about a year ago?

Owen: When Carpenter purchased the Bulletin about a year ago, they said in no uncertain terms that pretty much everyone would be keeping their jobs. That promise lasted for all of a month before there were mass layoffs across all of the former EO [Eastern Oregon Media Group] papers. It happened just a couple weeks before Christmas.

At the time, I was the president of the union. And our regional arm didn’t have a rep for us because they were transitioning and growing the company, so they were in the process of hiring. That same day that they announced the mass layoffs for all of the former EO papers, they sent me an email as well, notifying me that they wanted to lay off certain people. I had to call those people and tell them the situation. It was a really tough conversation. I did that, along with some of our other members who were more involved in the leadership at the time.

And the thing that I want to say is that the thing to understand about union negotiations, especially before a first contract is reached – which is where we are at the Bulletin right now – is that a company cannot just lay off unionized employees without bargaining over it first. And in spirit, the email that I got from the company that day was saying that’s what they wanted to do.

They were threatening to implement these layoffs with having one very short session with the union to negotiate over this. We called their bluff. We said, “That’s not happening. That’s not enough time to negotiate what could be layoffs.” And after discussing it with them, it became more and more clear that our position had to be that we must have a contract before we engage in the subject of layoffs. And since December, we’ve been successful so far in helping everyone that is a union employee keep their jobs.

Miller: How did you decide that you’d ask the public for its help recently?

Owen: We are getting to the stage in our contract negotiations where we are trading wage proposals with the company. They were really hesitant to give us a wage proposal until our last session because they were saying that they could not give us wages until we had told them whether or not we would negotiate on layoffs, until they effectively implemented those layoffs. And we said that just wasn’t going to happen. We held our position that we must have a contract before we talk about layoffs.

So they gave us a wage proposal … Well, they countered our wage proposal. We had already proposed wages and we proposed $26 per hour with annual seniority-based wages. And considering the high cost of living in Bend, $26 was a very modest starting proposal. We were hoping that Carpenter would see that as the show of good faith that we intended it to be.

Instead, and this is really the big thing that has changed for us, is that they countered our proposal with a base pay of $20 per hour with merit-based raises that an employee would only become eligible for if they successfully filed 10 to 12 stories per week. And to give some context, our current workload right now is three to five stories per week. That’s really important because that’s about the capacity that our reporters have to give our readers quality journalism. And we’ve seen Carpenter push this 10 to 12 stories per week quota at other papers that are unionized, that they’re negotiating a contract with. We really were not surprised that that came across the table, but that was the big thing that changed.

Miller: We asked the paper’s owners if they wanted to join us for this show. They said that they had to respectfully decline participation in a live interview at this time, but they did give us this statement:

“Carpenter Media Group is dedicated to preserving and strengthening community journalism in the communities we serve. We believe in the vital role that local news plays in informing, connecting and uplifting communities. Our focus remains on equipping our local teams with the tools, resources and editorial independence needed to deliver meaningful, fact-based reporting that reflects the voices and values of their readers and the communities in which they live. We are committed to ensuring the long-term sustainability of community-based journalism in Oregon and across our organization.”

Do you feel like you’re getting the tools and resources to deliver meaningful, fact-based reporting right now?

Owen: No, I can tell you absolutely not. When they did layoffs, we lost our copy editor, which was a huge blow to us. We have seen that our only editor who is left has a lot on her plate. We hardly get support in terms of being journalists anymore, other than just having our stories edited, which is tough to say because the editors are not our enemy in this.

What I can say in response to that statement is that we’ve just seen that their so-called commitment to local journalism is just not true. The things that they’re saying in that statement are just not reflecting what we’re seeing on the inside. On the inside, what we’re seeing is a commitment to clicks and a commitment to pushing content regardless of quality. That’s really reflected in the wage proposal that they gave us.

That 10 to 12 stories per week – again, that is very unachievable for a journalist if you want to have quality content that you are creating. And that’s per reporter, not as a newsroom, per reporter. And there’s absolutely nothing in our wage proposal that we proposed, or in our contract as a whole for that matter, that would preclude the company from voluntarily giving merit-based raises to incentivize extra content creation on top of the seniority-based ones that we proposed.

So, what their proposal shows us is that it’s about rewarding employees who perform well. It’s about farming content, using employees who are so burned out that they leave before Carpenter ever has to consider paying them another dime. And for those who stay, the goalposts will simply be moved and none of us will ever get raises.

Miller: We have under a minute left, but just to be clear, if you cannot get a contract that you think is fair, you are prepared to ask readers to exert enough pressure to stop subscribing to try to take the paper down?

Owen: Yes, absolutely. We have a petition that people can sign, that should be linked somewhere. But also, if you go onto the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild’s website, we have a whole section talking about Carpenter Media Group, who they are, and what we are asking for in a petition for both the Bend Bulletin and for the Everett Herald in Washington – who is in a similar situation, negotiating with a contract with Carpenter as well.

Miller: Morgan, thanks very much.

That’s Morgan Owen, a crime and public safety reporter at the Bend Bulletin, past president of the Central Oregon NewsGuild.

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