How to Pay Your Plain Dealer Bill: Easy Guide for Subscribers

CLEVELAND – On March 9, at the hometown newspaper The Plain Dealer, health reporter Ginger Christ jumped in her car and headed to City Hall. At a press briefing, health officials confirmed the first case of the novel coronavirus in Cuyahoga County. While they addressed the situation, her phone rang. It was labor relation consultant Bill Calaiacovo, with totally unrelated news: a courtesy call to her, the paper’s Guild chair, that they would be announcing layoffs for 18 editorial staffers, over half the Guild, and four non-union managers. PD editor Tim Warsinskey, on his ninth day on the job, gave the Guild only a 30-minute warning before he went public.

Frantically, Christ phoned in her story to the newsroom, and alerted Guild members about the layoffs. “I was walking through City Hall so unfocused I couldn’t remember where to find my car,” she recalled in an April 22 interview.

As the pandemic intensified, Christ’s life grew frenzied. She was working 60-hour weeks to cover the steps health officials and community members were taking to slow the spread. For a health reporter, it was the story of a lifetime. But as Guild chair, she was meeting with lawyers, bargaining with management, and attempting to allay her colleagues’ anxiety. No one knew who would be let go.

On a Friday morning, April 3, management instructed Plain Dealer employees to wait by their phones. If Warsinskey called you, you were gone. If Mary Lou Brink, another editor, called, you stayed. Christ and 13 others got a call from Brink, and that afternoon, Warsinskey met with them. “He said just keep doing what you’re doing, and I thought, ‘OK, I’ll just keep covering coronavirus because the whole staff was covering coronavirus,’” Christ said.

She filed three coronavirus stories on Monday, April 6, when Warsinskey called another staff meeting. He gave remaining reporters a false choice: Cover the outlying counties (which the PD had abandoned covering decades ago) and give up beats they had developed over years, or volunteer to be laid off. Advance Publications, the out-of-state conglomerate that owns the PD and dozens of other media outlets across the country, framed the move as expanding coverage. Reporters, and much of the public, disagreed. Unionized reporters’ beats—and the knowledge and contacts that made them good at their jobs—were being pilfered by cleveland.com, the newspaper’s Advance-owned, non-union companion.

Christ and nine others, including her vice chair Rachel Dissell, departed, leaving just four PD journalists. Just like that, the plan to expand coverage to the outer counties was dead—despite Warsinskey’s insistence that the layoffs would not weaken local journalism. “We will continue to be the leading source for news and information here in Northeast Ohio,” he wrote. “And we are not going anywhere.”

A month later, on May 12, the Guild announced that it would decertify, after coming to an agreement with management whereby the four remaining Guild members would be rehired at cleveland.com in non-union positions. Under the agreement, Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild promised that it would not try to unionize cleveland.com for one year—though other unions, even the International, are not subject to the bar.

National media saw the downfall of the PD as part of an emerging barren landscape for journalism during the coronavirus outbreak. Indeed, at least 36,000 journalists and support staff have lost jobs since the crisis began, exacting a huge toll on local and national news coverage. Those lucky enough to have a union were at least able to deliver better outcomes for their members. Some unions averted layoffs through furloughs and pay cuts, and for those laid off, unions made sure they got expanded severance or continuation of health coverage. The PD Guild was able to secure these types of benefits, contingent on journalists signing non-disparagement agreements.

But what has happened in Cleveland is not due to the pandemic. It reflects the final acts of Advance’s long-term, systematic plan to bust the Guild, recounted by dozens of former Plain Dealer reporters, Guild leaders, and labor experts. (Some Guild members spoke with the Prospect for this article before they signed the non-disparagement agreements and some refused to speak at all, citing the agreements.) At a time when media unions are seen as a lifeline in an uncertain industry, Advance has created a union-busting model for media conglomerates to follow, honed through nearly a century of hostility to labor. This is the story of how Advance destroyed the nation’s oldest newspaper union, and how it deeply wounded a daily newspaper Clevelanders have been picking up since 1842.

For decades, the Plain Dealer Guild was the biggest unit in Local 1 of the American Newspaper Guild, which included the PD, the Akron Beacon Journal, The Canton Repository, and the Massillon Independent. At the high point in the 1990s, Local 1 had more than 700 members, with the PD unit boasting at least 340. Unions had long enjoyed a strong foothold at the PD. The Pressmen represented the men and women laying out each day’s pages, and the Teamsters represented those who delivered the paper seven days a week. In 1944, editorial reporters joined Local 1. The three unions lined up their contracts to expire at the same time, so they could sit at the bargaining table together. This “unity council” lasted for more than a half-century.

But the story of The Plain Dealer and the Guild’s demise begins back on March 7, 1967, when media mogul Samuel I. Newhouse bought the 125-year-old publication for a record-breaking $54.2 million, entrusting day-to-day operations to his brother Norman. At the time, the Newhouse family empire, Advance Publications (named after its first purchase, the Staten Island Advance), controlled 22 newspapers in 16 cities. Today, Advance grosses $2 billion in revenue per year and remains a private family-run enterprise, with principal ownership resting with Newhouse family members. In addition to newspapers, it owns Condé Nast, makers of top magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, along with large stakes in Discovery, Inc., and social media site Reddit.

Unlike other newspaper families such as the Sulzbergers or the Grahams, making money was the Newhouses’ main objective, contends biographer Carol Felsenthal in her book Citizen Newhouse. A former PD editor told Felsenthal that Norman Newhouse’s visits to Cleveland “reminded me of a guy who collects rent in the old days.” The Newhouse family also brought in anti-union leadership, such as Leo Ring, known to Guild members as “The Enforcer.” Ring “negotiated the elimination of more than half of the 600 positions in The Plain Dealer’s composing room, arranged for the installation of plenty of modern, labor-saving equipment, and regularly faced down the paper’s Guild unit,” wrote Richard Meeker, another Newhouse biographer.

Still another Newhouse chronicler, Thomas Maier, detailed the origins of Advance’s union-busting strategies, a playbook it would return to in Cleveland. “At the Long Island Press in the 1930s, Newhouse set up a special spy network to find, harass, and sometimes fire those who thought of unionizing his newsroom,” Maier wrote. “For this, the spies received bonuses and better hours and assignments.”

In the 1940s, “Newhouse supervised the creation of something called the Allied Bi-County News Service—ABC for short,” Meeker wrote. Every reporter at the Long Island Press started at ABC as copy boys, off the regular Guild payroll. This enabled Newhouse to “maintain a night shift at the Press without paying Guild wages or overtime.” Newhouse also paid an outside picture service for photos, rather than Guild photographers.

Reporters were paid so poorly that some took public relations jobs while still working for the paper, and printed positive stories about their employers in the Press. Meeker wrote that “Newhouse was so blinded by his hatred of the paper’s unions that he would stop at nothing to keep his employees’ wages and benefits down.” The two-newsroom model and relentless violations of journalism conventions so depressed standards of quality that readership suffered and subscriptions plummeted, and the Press shuttered in 1977.

After the Portland Oregonian won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting, staff struck in 1959 for better wages and benefits. Newhouse brought in “nearly five dozen strikebreakers from Oklahoma, some with rifles and shotguns, and trained his nonunion supervisors to run the newspaper in the event of a walkout,” according to Maier’s book. Strikers were joined by staff of the city’s afternoon daily, the Oregon Journal, and for four years they published their own daily paper, the Portland Reporter.

Newhouse bought the Journal in 1961, but the strike continued until 1965, when both newspapers were forced to become open shops. In 1982, Advance shut down the Oregon Journal, leaving Portland a one-newspaper town. This was a Newhouse business strategy: create newspaper monopolies, and enjoy the positive side effect of kneecapping the unions.

When Samuel I. Newhouse began his career in 1911, few newspapers were chain-owned. By 1977, nearly two-thirds of all U.S. daily newspapers were. Cities with two or more competing newspapers fell from over 500 to 35. “Newhouse did not cause this remarkable consolidation alone, but he certainly profited from it. And, in the end, he helped legitimize it,” wrote Meeker in his biography. Consolidation led to fewer newspaper jobs and more owner power. As Meeker concludes, “during the course of his career, Newhouse put more newspaper people out of work than any other publisher in history.”

The Good Times Go Bad

Initially buoyed by the lack of competition, The Plain Dealer expanded throughout the 1990s. Dozens of journalists were hired to cover and edit news from Lorain, Lake, Geauga, Portage, Summit, and Medina Counties, joining a staff of over 400. “It was so much fun, you could write for days because it was such a thick fat paper, they had so much room and they were begging people to write giant stories,” recalled former PD reporter Joan Mazzolini.

But the absence of a second newspaper in town, while good for subscriptions, weakened worker power, and the Guild knew it. In 1996, the Guild, alone at the bargaining table without the Pressmen or the Teamsters, signed its first ten-year contract—an unprecedented length for the industry. It was mostly a long-term extension of existing terms. It offered stability, but in exchange, the contract included a no-strike clause, something increasingly common in Guild contracts at the time.

“We felt, quite candidly, that we were in a better position to extend what we had rather than take the risk of it and start from scratch,” explained Scott Stephens, who helped negotiate the 1996 contract for the Guild. “It’s a classic case for the Guild that we were a so-called professional union. We were at the bargaining table as, in a sense, as amateurs … The Teamsters are the muscle [who could] shut the place down in the event of a labor dispute and to give you that kind of upper hand.”

During that stretch, health care costs and pension costs doubled for the union. The more people laid off, the more expensive health care became for those who remained. But locked into a ten-year deal, nothing could be changed to relieve that strain.

In the late 1990s, Newhouse also introduced new rates that charged Cuyahoga County residents 25 cents at a newsstand and double that for those in the outer counties. The decision lost the PD swaths of subscribers. “As far as I’m concerned they’ve been sliding ever since,” said Local 1 president and Canton Repository reporter Edd Pritchard. Advance virtually priced themselves out, Pritchard added. Today, the weekday newsstand price is $2.

Former Guild members cite these decisions as examples of where Newhouse management went wrong. At the same time, the industry started down a path of turmoil as the internet matured. Historically, daily newspapers were a money machine for local advertising and classifieds, but the shift of readership online and the rise of Craigslist (and later, Google and Facebook) slashed revenues. Local media ran stories on how Advance was “slow to recognize the vast disruption of the internet and failed to adequately monetize its digital offerings.” Advance underlined its commitment to print by building a new PD editorial office building and printing plant in the early 2000s. This kind of lumbering transition was fairly typical in media, particularly for legacy chains accustomed to monopoly profits. But rather than seek new revenue models or digital subscribers, Advance reacted to this new reality through brutal downsizing.

In 2006, the paper offered incredibly generous buyouts to people who had been at the paper at least 20 years, with two and a half years of full pay and health care. Between the Guild and management, over 60 people took the buyouts. Up to that point, Plain Dealer jobs were for life. The wages were enough that you could buy a house, raise a family, and make a good life in Cleveland. Even during the Great Depression, the PD never had layoffs, one former staffer told me. “It was the first cold slap in the face that the fat days of newspapers were over,” said Harlan Spector, PD Guild unit chair at the time. “It was just unheard of to try to cut the staff like that.”

At their non-union publications, Advance Publications adhered to what they described as “The Pledge,” vowing never to lay off an employee. Spector recalled people saying the Newhouses never did layoffs and doubted that they would really go through with it. “And it turns out that they went further than anybody else and they destroyed the union,” he said.

As the Great Recession hit in 2008, another 50 Guild members were laid off, and remaining staff accepted a 12 percent pay cut. Guild members’ pensions had been frozen for five years, and members were hit with annual double-digit increases of their health care costs. Scott Stephens volunteered to be laid off. “[The PD] had a number on a piece of paper and they wanted to get there one way or another,” he said. As other former reporters told the Prospect, Stephens said he felt that if he left, someone who needed the job more would be able to stay.

Meanwhile, Advance Publications was cutting jobs and journalism across the country. In 2012, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a non-union Advance paper around since 1837, moved from a daily paper to three days a week. Two hundred employees lost their jobs, including half the newsroom staff. (Eventually the Times-Picayune would resume daily printing, but in 2019 Advance sold it to the Baton Rouge–based Advocate, consolidating the two newsrooms. The Times-Picayune’s entire staff was laid off, and only a handful were rehired.) Consolidation, layoffs, and decline marched on in Cleveland, and Advance prioritized busting the union.

Kelly Green Jackets With Horseshoes

When Newhouse acquired the PD, the union was strong. But a strike in 1972 to raise wage scales revealed some of the new owner’s tactics. PD editors called City Hall, and shortly thereafter the Cleveland mounted police charged the picket line. At the time, Cleveland was very much a union town—250,000 members strong—and a private company, even one as influential as the local newspaper, enlisting local government on the side of management in a labor dispute was shocking, and triggered a backlash. The city council soon adopted a city ordinance banning mounted cops from strike scenes. The Guild remembered the mounted-police assault as a “day of infamy,” and later donned kelly green jackets whose crests included a pair of horseshoes.

In 1974, another strike made Guild members of the Cleveland Press and the PD allies, despite the two papers’ rivalry. It quickly became clear that management planned to import strikebreakers. In response, on the strike’s sixth day, the Press printed a double masthead with the PD, and instructed their drivers to deliver papers to both Press and PD stops. The Teamsters refused, and Press reporters struck, joining The Plain Dealer in what would become a seven-week strike.

The Guild gave reporters a voice—such as when The Plain Dealer retracted a hard-hitting investigative story in 1981. The story, by Walt Bogdanich and the late Mairy Jayn Woge, proved that Teamsters leader Jackie Presser, who was also affiliated with the Cleveland mafia, was taking kickbacks and acting as an FBI informant. Presser was campaigning to be the Teamsters’ next president, but “there’s no way the mafia, which still controlled the Teamsters, would allow that to happen if the Teamsters knew that Presser was an informant,” Bogdanich, now an investigative reporter at The New York Times, said in an interview with the Prospect.

The two-part series ran in August 1981, and Teamsters delivered the papers without comment. But after publication, Presser contacted the Cleveland mafia, who contacted Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno in New York, who contacted Roy Cohn, who contacted the Newhouses, who instructed Plain Dealer editors to retract the story. When the retraction ran a year later, the Guild organized a picket line. “The slogan for The Plain Dealer at the time was ‘When the news breaks, we put it together,’ and so [the union] had signs printed that said, ‘When the news breaks, we apologize,’” Bogdanich said.

The threat of the strike gave PD reporters leverage. But there hasn’t been a walkout since 1991. Bill Meyer, a PD copy editor laid off in 2019, told me he picketed the former PD building downtown and the paper’s printing press in protest of the April 2020 layoffs. He invited others to join, but they told him they feared violating the non-disparagement agreements attached to severance and future health care benefits. So Meyer picketed alone.

AS THE 1970s came to a close, The Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press were in a heated circulation war. Despite the Press’s more than 300,000 subscribers, it was looking for a buyer. Before Newhouse could snap it up and consolidate the Cleveland market, in swooped multimillionaire local industrialist Joseph Cole, who bought the Press in 1980 for $1 million. “Give a publisher—or anyone else for that matter—a monopoly and you run a very real risk of seeing a square deal converted into a rigged deal … Simply said, I don’t like monopolies,” Cole said in a speech at the time. But just two years later, Newhouse abruptly paid Cole $22.5 million for the Press’s circulation list and a subsidiary bulk-mailing company—allegedly in exchange for Cole agreeing to shut down the Press.

John Funk, who worked at the Press from 1978 to 1982, said that Press reporters got “less than a day’s notice the paper was closing.” Police told reporters leaving the newsroom that Cole “don’t want you to take nothing like your typewriter or whatever,” Funk said. After 103 years, the Press ceased publishing. If you wanted to work for a daily, there was now just one gig in town: the PD.

In 1984, federal investigators began to investigate the Cole-Newhouse transaction. An article ran in the Akron Beacon Journal headlined “Plain Dealer Offered Cole $14.5 Million to Fold Press,” revealing a contract with Newhouse which included that promise. But though a federal grand jury in Cleveland was impaneled, for reasons that remain unclear, the Justice Department probe ended in 1987 with no charges being filed.

With the Press’s demise, the PD’s circulation jumped: The paper raised advertising rates 47 percent in less than two years and added more than 80,000 subscribers. Circulation peaked in 1983 at 497,386 daily and 501,042 on Sundays.

Despite the boost, the heavy-handed, penny-pinching Newhouse ways had sapped public trust in Cleveland newspapers. A 1980 Cleveland Magazine story that surveyed readers found them “brutally critical … ranging from a belief that the papers deliberately cover up and distort the news, to a feeling that their writers and editors are simply incompetent.” In the mid-1970s, More, a journalism review, published a list of the ten worst papers in the U.S. The Plain Dealer, along with three other Newhouse papers, made the list.

Perhaps the community’s low regard for its daily stemmed from the PD’s unwillingness to offend anyone in pursuit of its stories. “The PD’s failure to even examine Power in the community, let alone challenge it or present a countervailing influence, tips the scale of justice and equality time and time again against the ordinary person and deforms its responsibility in its most important task—to inform citizens in a free society,” wrote Roldo Bartimole, a local media critic, in 1993. Yet after the 1982 loss of the Press, Clevelanders had no choice for their news.

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