New York Daily News and Forbes staffers walk out amid US media job cuts
Staff at the New York Daily News and Forbes walked out on Thursday, adding to growing unease in the US newspaper industry in a week when the Los Angeles Times fired more than 100 journalists.
Mike Gartland, a city hall reporter and Daily News union steward, targeted owner Alden Global Capital with a reference to one of the paper’s most famous headlines, Ford to City: Drop Dead, a 1975 response to President Gerald Ford’s refusal to offer New York a financial bailout.
Gartland posted: “Alden to News: Drop Dead. Defend the Daily News!”
Once home to legendary reporters including Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, the paper is a shadow of its former self.
The Daily News “once boasted the ‘largest circulation in America’ and was 4,000 employees strong,” the union said. But “by the year 2000, circulation dropped by nearly half and the publication underwent several rounds of devastating job cuts. Since the spring of 2022, 27 people have left and the [News] Guild staff now totals 54 people.”
Citing changes to overtime policy and “chronic cuts” as fuel for the first Daily News walkout since 1991 – the year the paper was bought by the British press baron Robert Maxwell – staffers planned a 24-hour operation. Protesters rallied outside the Broadway building where the paper uses a coworking space, having closed its Manhattan newsroom in 2020.
Alden, a “vulture” fund known for slashing newspaper budgets in search of profits, bought the company that owned the Daily News the following year.
“Alden wants to act as if we are not being chiseled,” Gartland said. “We’re not going to engage in that intellectual dishonesty. In reality, we’re being crushed for cash. As a result, staff is diminished, which means our ability to cover the city is diminished. We believe this is bad for New York.”
Ellen Moynihan, a metropolitan desk reporter, said: “Everyone I work with cares so much about this paper and this city, but Alden only cares about extracting money instead of investing in us. Reporting and producing a newspaper is not a job that fits neatly into an eight-hour box, and if we are not allowed to report the news as it happens, stories go untold.”
Alden did not immediately comment.
At Forbes, a financial news outlet based across the Hudson River in Jersey City but owned by an investment company from Hong Kong, employees went on strike for the first time to protest lack of progress in bargaining talks, two years since forming a union.
Andrea Murphy, a reporter and the Forbes union chair, told Bloomberg that managers were “dragging their feet and slow-walking this whole process. We’re hoping [the strike] shows them that we are serious.”
The walkout was planned to last three days. Forbes said it was “working diligently” with the union but “disap
pointed by the decision to stage a walkout”, though it respected the right to do so.
As an election year gathers pace, with Donald Trump poised to win the Republican presidential nomination again, national and local US newspapers are experiencing increasing staff unrest and major cutbacks.
Last week, Sports Illustrated employees received an email saying many of them would be laid off in the coming days. On Tuesday, staffers at the Los Angeles Times were told the company