Local newspapers – produced by reporters who live in and know about their communities – are vital to America’s democratic health.
But local papers, including dailies and rural weeklies, are being swallowed by a handful of global financial predators. The giants profiteer by drastically underfunding and shriveling the staffs of the papers they seize, eliminating local news beats and filling their pages with cut-and-paste, out-of-date syndicated articles with no local relevance.
A particularly voracious example of predatory ownership is the sprawling Gannett chain – now controlled by SoftBank, a Japanese, multibillion-dollar investment syndicate that has taken over some 218 daily papers, including my city’s Austin-American Statesman. These banking barons have literally been squeezing the “local” out of their news products, and they’re now trying to squeeze out more money for themselves by shortchanging the few dedicated local journalists still trying to produce a real newspaper for the Texas capitol city.
To be clear, the Statesman is profitable for Gannett and SoftBank. Yet, while rich investors and top executives keep hauling in enormous paydays (Gannett honchos draw $7 million a year plus bonuses and benefits), local journalists have been denied a rise for five years. Some have had to take second jobs and/or re-mortgage their homes to keep doing honest journalism they believe in. Gannett has responded to this dedication with a slap in their faces, proposing to eliminate its corporate share of employees’ pension funds.
So… STRIKE! The Austin News Guild, led by Nicole Villalpando, is reluctantly planning to go public with action to bring this injustice into the open. Curiously, Gannett’s designated editor of the Statesman has not allowed even one article to be printed about this big news of labor suppression in our progressive community – much less informing Austinites about SoftBank’s ownership of our “local news.”
This is not merely an Austin story, for hundreds of Gannett staffers across the country are up against the same greed, pondering strikes to gain just a little bit more economic fairness. This takes guts and community support, for these workers are not only confronting multibillion-dollar owners, but also pusillanimous editorial bosses who refuse to stand up for their colleagues and honest journalism.
To help these journalists (and ourselves) get a better deal from these newspaper monopolists – consider chipping in to help sustain the union’s upstart strike: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ubcyf6-austin-americanstatesman-newsguild-strike-fund.
