April 3, 2007

Sun-Times media group seeks accomodation

By Michael Ulreich

President, Chicago Newspaper Guild

The good news that came out of a meeting between the leaders of the Guild’s four Chicago area newspaper groups and top management of the Sun-Times Media Group March 22 is that the new leaders of the newspaper company want to reach contract agreements with the units in what may be record time.

The bad news is the company says it’s broke.

Conrad Black was on trial in a Chicago courtroom, across town from the conference room at the Sun-Times offices where the future chief negotiators for those contract agreements once controlled by Black were meeting. They sat on expensive blue upholstered chairs that had been ordered by Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel, once a highly paid consultant to the Sun-Times.

It was at that meeting March 22 that new Sun-Times Media Group CEO Cyrus Freidheim declared he aspired to reach contract agreements with his Guild employees one month before their respective contracts expire.

That would certainly be a worthy goal.

Chicago Newspaper Guild Executive Director Gerald Minkkinen said Freidheim’s commitment to early contract resolution was “one of the most positive ways to indicate a new world” in the company’s relationship with the Guild. More typical had been negotiations that dragged on months, even years, after contracts expired.

The Guild’s Waukegan News-Sun unit is currently at the bargaining table with the company. The Joliet News Herald unit’s contract expires in June, the Sun-Times unit’s in September, and the Pioneer Press Editorial unit's at the end of the year.

Freidheim noted that the newspaper business is in transition, threatened by the easy access to news sources and blogs via the Internet.

Further complicating matters for the Sun-Times Group, Freidheim said, is the actions of its past top executives now on trial, who allegedly “pirated”  millions of dollars from the company and deprived the newspaper's operations of new investments and resources. Those former executives are accused of treating the Sun-Times and its properties less as treasured newspaper institutions and more as tawdry financial commodities to be manipulated for their own gain.

Black was the controlling shareholder of Hollinger International, the owner of the Sun-Times Group, and Radler was the publisher of the Sun-Times. Hollinger has sued the pair for $542 million in damages and the Security and Exchange Commission charged them with fraud and taking $85 million.

The fact that former publisher David Radler was able to write a check for $28.7 million to pay a recent SEC fine hints at the money he squirreled away from his profitable association with Black, Freidheim said. Radler then started a new career as a federal snitch, electing to plead guilty to a 29-month sentence in a Canadian prison to save his own skin and a couple extra years in an American prison by agreeing to be a chief witness against his one-time associate Black.

Both Black and Radler faced 25-to-30 years in prison.

“We have to play with the hand we’re dealt with,” Freidheim said.

The Sun-Times recently announced a $34 million loss in the fourth quarter alone.

“You look at our finances,” publisher John Cruickshank said. “You know that our company is losing a lot of money. So where do you get $2 million from? It may have looked like a magic bullet (to cut the TV Guide) and we went in over our heads and we were wrong.”

Freidheim pledged that he wouldn’t continue years of carnage suffered by the editorial side of the operation.

“We’re not going to save ourselves by cutting the newsrooms,” Freidheim said. “We’re not going to touch the newsroom. But we’re hoping to get the cooperation we need from the Guild.”

Yet Freidheim’s comments March 22 seemed to focus primarily on the Internet side of the business. He wants to have a “24-7’’ Internet newsroom. It will be the Internet site, he said, which will break news while the newspaper takes the time to explain it later.

“The newspaper benefits dramatically because we want to own the reader,” he said. “To be a successful newspaper company you have to have both.”

Of  the Guild’s potential contribution, Freidheim said: “We have to have a whole lot of freedom on the Internet and without that freedom we won’t be successful.’’

But the Sun-Times Media Group’s new management has already taken some misguided steps of its own. The decision to save $2 million by cutting out the TV Guide and shipping readers to its woeful Internet site for this information proved a big blunder.

“I guess I’ll take most of the heat for that,” Freidheim said. “We did it and we found out we were wrong.”
  The Guild’s Sun-Times unit co-chair Bob Mazzoni told Freidheim editorial employees should not have to bear the brunt of management mistakes at contract time.

“Management makes mistakes and sometimes they pay for those mistakes with their jobs. Sometimes they don’t,” Freidheim replied.

The two sides agreed to meet at a later date to discuss how the various papers in the chain would share stories and photos. The Guild wants its members to be paid for work that is used in another format. Minkkinen said that there is a proposal at the Waukegan negotiations which would compensate editorial employees when their work was used in another newspaper and which would prevent management from using the system to reduce positions.

“One of our objectives is to really take advantage of our localness, and the strength of our core reporters,” Cruickshank said. “Whatever we do to share will be done to improve our papers.”

“We’re going to take some actions and we’ll make some mistakes but we’re not going to just sit here and let the world have at us,” Freidheim said.

Neither are we.

“We’ve seen some good signs,” Minkkinen said March 22. “All of our leadership has seen a different attitude on the part of the new managers. Those are all good signs.”

The fact is that at one time the Guild was processing more than 20 grievances between its four units, a massive waste of personnel and money to rectify issues that at times seemed rather trivial. Since Black and Radler have been gone it has been easier to resolve outstanding issues. The Radler era sentiment was: “We don’t give a damn what you think, consider yourselves lucky to have a job.” It appears to have been replaced by the thought: “We need you, we need each other.”

A touching sentiment, to be sure.

But when you ask employees to sacrifice for the good of the company, something must be offered as a way of making those sacrifices worthwhile, like a commitment by the company to its employees as well as its readers.

“What it really comes down to often is money,” Joliet unit chair Bob Okon said.

Mazzoni said it was hard to have faith in management that appears capable of committing sins – albeit different ones – that can result in the same damage and dispiriting morale.

Freidheim said he won’t be intimidated by the challenge of being the second newspaper in Chicago. “In time of upheaval, No. 1 becomes No. 2,” he said.  “This company is fighting for its survival but we are not just going to survive we’re going to thrive.”

The meeting was also attended by Guild President Mike Ulreich, Pioneer Press unit chair Lynne Stiefel, Sun-Times unit co-chair Misha Davenport and Waukegan unit chair Andre Jackson.

“We’re going to be Chicago’s neighborhood newspaper,” Freidheim said. “That’s what we are. We’re not going to be a substitute for the New York Times. This is going to be a local newspaper.”