Cleveland Plain Dealer editor George Rodrigue has announced that the paper will lay off nearly half of its unionized workforce in early 2019 as it transitions to a “centralized production hub.”
According to clevescene.com, the announcement came only days after the Plain Dealer News Guild presented a counter proposal to the outsourcing plan that Advance Publications reportedly began to explore in October. Bargaining has been ongoing this month.
Rodrigue sent a letter to local news editors and published it on Cleveland.com Dec. 27 before employees themselves learned that their jobs would soon be gone. He has characterized the decision as an effort to preserve quality local coverage while creating efficiencies.
The PD’s union was the nation’s first news guild (Local 1) and at its height represented more than 700 reporters and editors in the region. The few who remain work under a contract that expires in February, at which point all signs point to the union's final dismantling. In social media posts, the Guild has explicitly characterized the recent decision as "union busting."
The logistics of the move to a centralized production hub remain unclear, but the 29 editors and designers who assemble the paper before it’s printed — selecting stories for the print edition, writing headlines, creating graphics — will ostensibly be “outsourced” to a hub which performs similar functions for a number of papers.
Rodrigue said this centralization concept has been industry tested and proven to be effective, but local journalists have strenuously disputed the notion that an overburdened national staff, working from generic templates, can produce the same level of quality that local editors and designers can. They also question the meaning of “local editorial control,” which Rodrigue insisted the PD would retain.
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