[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. If you read The New York Times every day, you may have to skip reading it on Thursday. That's because about 1,000 unionized Times staffers are threatening a walkout on Thursday if they don't reach agreement on a new contract by then. We've talked on the show recently about the threatened railroad strike, the ongoing adjunct professor strike at the New School, Amazon, of course, and others. Well, now it's The New York Times on the verge of a walkout.

To be clear, they are threatening a one-day walkout, not an ongoing strike, but it's still a big deal, still a big statement if it happens. We'll talk now about why they're at this point with New York Magazine features writer, Shawn McCreesh, who's written two articles recently on the labor situation at The Times. Shawn, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Shawn McCreesh: Hey, thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: To start out, you reported on a letter delivered to management on Friday signed by more than 1,000 Times employees that demands a better offer on health care funds, return to the office policies, and their pension plan, but you report that what they really want is permanent increases in the base pay, a bigger share of The Times profits. You cite that the staff is mad because they feel the paper is sitting on a pot of gold. Let me ask you this first, as far as you can tell, how profitable is The New York Times these days? I thought newspapers are going out of business all over the country.

Shawn McCreesh: Yes. To start, we should go back a couple years and explain the economic dynamics here because the backstory is really important, and that's that there were two major events in the last couple of years that changed everything, which is Donald Trump and the pandemic. We're coming out of a time where for the last many years, newspapers and journalism was suddenly hot again and very chic, and people were subscribing and there was these commercials about The New York Times and truth being played at the Oscars, and democracy dies in darkness at the Washington Post, and all this sort of thing.

Then when the pandemic hit, everybody was similarly freaked out and sitting at home and on their phones all day long, and so subscriptions continue to boom. Now we're coming out of that era and both those things are ending and subscriptions are falling flat at other news organizations, but The Times, to its credit, used the momentum from that era to transform the business into something beyond a newspaper. They used all the money, they made other acquisitions, and they diversified the income stream, and they've transformed it into a really robust business. It's the greatest success story in the legacy media these days.

That is really why the employees are steamed now because they just spent a couple hundred million dollars to provide The Athletic, another news website. They feel that while it's great that the company is being transformed into what its leaders would like us to see it is more of a tech company almost, the journalists are trying to remind them that, "Hey, this whole thing is built on us and our newsroom, and you need to give us a cut."

Brian Lehrer: Yes. It's interesting, before we get off The Times profitability, interesting that you make the point in your article that there are economic headwinds for major media companies in general right now, citing layoffs at CBS and CNN that just happened, and the Washington Post killed it Sunday magazine, and yet The New York Times thrives and thrives, it seems like. What does The New York Times reporter make? I'm sure there's a scale and there are bigger journalistic stars who make more than other staffers. How would you begin to describe what people make as New York Times journalists that has many dissatisfied?

Shawn McCreesh: Yes, the average-- sorry, actually, average isn't the right word, the median salary for a reporter that's represented by the news guild-

Brian Lehrer: Just so people know what median means, this comes up all the time, but median means half-- in this case, half the people make above this number and half the people make below this number. Go ahead.

Shawn McCreesh: Right. That's $133,000. Again, there are star reporters and others who make a lot more, a few who make less, but you're looking at about $133,000. That's more than most journalists make. One thing here is that as upset as The Times employees are and they say I guess rightfully so that it's very difficult to live on that salary and raise a family and have an apartment in New York City, there are many other media workers who make a lot less. There's some grumbling about that, I would say, from other corners of the media, but yes.

Brian Lehrer: Nevertheless, it's like the baseball players. I've used this analogy before. Fans will say, "Ticket prices are so high because the Jacob deGrom is making $43 million a year," or whatever it is, I should say Justin Verlander since he just came to the Mets, but really, that's because the companies, the owners, make so much money that that's just their fair share that they're negotiating. The owners are still going away with a ton of money, and they'll charge whatever people will pay for tickets no matter what they pay in salaries. In this case, yes, a Times staffer, it may sound like a lot of money compared to other journalists, but the relevant comparison is what the company is making, right?

Shawn McCreesh: Yes, that's right. The Times, it's not a public utility, it's a business, there are shareholders, value needs to be created for the shareholders, but that's at the root of this too. What you say is true. The CEO, she makes $5.8 million. That's up from $4 million the year before. The publisher, his compensation grew nearly 50% last year to $3.6 million. Previously, the executives made more, in their defense. The old CEOs actually made more, but yes, the executives make a lot of money there.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Some of the staff anger as you report is around CEO pay, reported that the staffer's site publisher AG Sulzberger himself is getting a raise last year from $2.4 million to $3.6 million, up 50%. The CEO, Meredith Kopit Levien, went from $4 million to $5.8 million, the staffers assert these are their numbers, I can't confirm them, but this is what the staffers are saying they make.

Shawn McCreesh: Actually, they're from an SEC proxy statement, so it's publicly-

Brian Lehrer: Aha, so that's a good source.

Shawn McCreesh: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: It's a public source. What kind of increase do the staffers say is fair, given that?

Shawn McCreesh: This is tricky. There's such a Byzantine job classification, and the numbers that each side is throwing out, they vary wildly depending on the employee, but essentially, they want something-- I can't remember the exact number right now, I think it's something in like a 6% range of a standard increase in pay. Another thing that's happening here is because they've gone for so long without a contract, they're saying that whatever number they finally get needs to amortize out to include the previous year to where they got nothing. Then once you factor in inflation, it's pretty complicated.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls on this. Any New York Times staffers want to call in and weigh in? You can do so anonymously. You don't have to say, "Hi, this is Maureen in Washington or Maggie at Mar-a-Lago or Janelle in Charlottesville," or anything like that. You can be John Doe in Westchester if you want.

On the management side, you don't have to call in as Mr. Salzburg or from Manhattan, you can be anonymous too, or anyone with a comment or a question who's just The New York Times reader, or maybe you don't even read The New York Times. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer for Shawn McCreesh, covering The Times labor dispute for New York Magazine. Shawn, if they walk out on Thursday, what, if anything, will people see on The Times website, and will a print edition be printed?

Shawn McCreesh: Yes, this is a really interesting question. Right now, they're actually negotiating as we speak, and the employees were just informed that they're all being docked a day's pay. The company is treating today as a strike, and so they're even more irate today than they were yesterday, but many of them tell me today, they do not expect a compromise to be reached. The word is that they will be walking out on Thursday.

For the average reader who's not following the story, you maybe won't notice. The Times is a huge organization, not everybody's in the guild, a lot of the foreign correspondents are not in the guild, a lot of the bureau chiefs are not in the guild. A lot of reporting will still occur today and tomorrow, so things could be teed up for Tuesday. There are always evergreen stories laying around. Basically, there will be enough to keep up the facade, and it's not like the app on your phone is going to go blank all of a sudden, but it is a full 24 hours without reporting which is pretty unprecedented. I think the last time something like this has happened is 1978. There have been other brief walkouts for an afternoon or an hour that were more about solidarity displays at other points of tense negotiation.

The walkout, to me, and the idea of a work stoppage, what it brings to mind for me is the fact that in the last many years, the local news infrastructure in this country has been rotted out so terribly that The New York Times is one of the only, if not the only, in some parts of the country legit news organization we have to cover big stories that break. Their national team, that is all those reporters are in the guild. If there's a school shooting on Thursday, or a wildfire, or an earthquake, or a hurricane, The New York Times, they're not going to have any boots on the ground for that and nobody's going to cross the picket line. That's where it might get interesting.

Brian Lehrer: Why just a one-day walkout then? Why not a full-fledged strike with no end date until they settle a contract?

Shawn McCreesh: These people, nobody wants to strike. I think that it's a show of force. I think they really want to show their management and their publisher how pissed off they are. If this doesn't do it, if this doesn't move the needle at all or at least enough for them, then the next step is to start talking about a strike authorization vote but again, nobody wants it to get to that.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at wnyc.org as we talk about the potential walkout of perhaps more than 1,000 New York Times staffers on Thursday if they don't come up with a contract agreement. 212-433-WNYC. It's Shawn McCreesh, our guest, who's writing about this for New York Magazine. Brenda, in Brick, you're on WNYC. Hi, Brenda.

Brenda: Hi. I am calling because I wanted to know how much the subscriptions went up after The New York Times started carrying Wordle and how many people, friends of mine, who are subscribing to it now because they want Wordlebots because that's more money for The Times.

Brian Lehrer: Wordle, the word game that people, in case some of the listeners don't know. Do you know the answer to the question and is Wordle only available to Times subscribers?

Shawn McCreesh: That is a good question. I'm actually not sure. The only thing I can really say about this is that as The Times incorporates things like Wordle and The Athletic and the recipes app, and they've got games and everything else like this, there's also this activist investor that's bought up 7% of the stock or the shares and there are business world people trying to push the publisher and the CEO to bundle up some of these other properties and wring more out of subscribers and try to convert people who are just paying to read the paper, trying to get them to pay for these other properties too.

I don't have exact numbers but all these different little properties that are factored in are part of the business success story of the paper right now.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Although I've wondered about this dynamic in the staffers' dissatisfaction about all the money The Times has spent acquiring things in recent years, including Wordle and the sports journalism site, The Athletic, as you mentioned, which I've read they paid $500,000,000 for, but if we assume that those are investments in future profits, not luxury items to please the owners, then where do they come into contract negotiations?

Shawn McCreesh: What's interesting to me about this is that the CEO and the publisher are very capable. The reason The Times is a huge success right now is because of these business moves that they've made, and that's allowing the employees to ask for a bigger salary bump. On the other hand, I think what the employees, they tell me, the newsroom, the way they see it is that you can buy all these other things and that's great but at the end of the day, what makes this business work are the journalists and this is a very specialized workforce.

These are reporters at the top of their game. They have sources, they have relationships with the most important people in Washington and on Wall Street that tell them things that make it the best paper in America. Some of these people put their lives on the line to do this job, and all of that falls apart if you don't pay the newsroom. You can buy as many cooking apps and word games as you want but if the reporters aren't out there doing their jobs, then it doesn't work.

Brian Lehrer: Ella, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Ella.

Ella: Hi. Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: You are, I see, a New York Times employee.

Ella: That's correct, and a guild member.

Brian Lehrer: What would you like to say?

Ella: I came in a little late on this call this morning so I didn't hear everything you guys were talking about earlier but I just want to say from my perspective as a rank and file guild member, a member of The New York York Times unit, that I'm really excited and feel really heartened by all of our members coming together to do this because the way that the company been acting is really disheartening, has been really demoralizing. That it's been months and months and months we've been so clear for so long about what it'll take, about what we need, about why these things are important, and it's not just that we want our wages to keep up with inflation, which we certainly do.

People haven't gotten raises since March 2020 but also, it's about keeping the standard of living in New York City, of having well-paid journalism jobs so people can do this work, about having new people who come in the door who may not have family money who can work at The New York Times and make our journalism better. We have people in our unit who make very low amounts, who make under $60,000 a year, I think there's even some under $50,000 a year. They are not many, but some. We're also fighting for minimum scales, floor salaries in our unit, and that's huge too.

Brian Lehrer: Decent minimum salary. I'm going to have to go because the line is so bad. I don't know if management's jamming your line or something like that but the crackling is so bad. I'm going to have to leave it there but you got a lot of stuff on the table, Ella. Thank you. I think we have another from the staff. Andrea, on the Upper East Side, you're on WNYC. Hi, Andrea.

Andrea: Hi, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, how are you?

Andrea: Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. What do you do?

Andrea: Great. I'm a news designer at The New York Times. I design pages for the Sunday national section. Actually, I really love my job. It's something that I take a lot of pride in.

Brian Lehrer: Neat.

Andrea: Yes, I love it. I've been doing that for two years. I've been at The New York Times for six but I wanted to call and just point out that our unit is huge. We have security guards, we have news assistants, we have [unintelligible 00:18:20] salespeople. We talk a lot about the newsroom but this is bigger than the newsroom. This is all the people who support the newsroom.

It may be that some of our star reporters do make really big salaries but I also know a lot of people who took pay cuts to work at The New York Times because they really believe in the mission. Part of this, as Ella was saying, is really raising our salary floors. It also becomes a diversity issue because we want people to be able to afford to live in New York, who come from all sorts of different backgrounds. We want people to be able to afford to retire. I talked to one coworker who said, "I'm going to be the first person in my family who gets to retire because of the pension of The New York Times." I think that really hit me.

Brian Lehrer: What do you think is the most important economic demand? Is it the salary floor, the minimum pay for people as they start out? If so, do you have any numbers on that or whichever one you would list as the most important economic demand?

Andrea: I definitely think that the salary floor is probably, for me and for a lot of people, the single most important thing. I think I make enough money. I don't think our security guards make enough money. I think our proposal raises the salary floor-- I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure to $65,000 a year, which I don't think is unreasonable when you're asking people to live and work in New York.

Brian Lehrer: Security guards are in the same union at The New York Times building as some of the journalists?

Andrea: That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: That's a good thing I think. Andrea, I thank you.

Andrea: I think so too. We love them. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much. What's the back-to-office issue that you referred to in your article, Shawn?

Shawn McCreesh: They're also negotiating over return to office policies and I don't have the exact specifics on where they are with that right now, but they don't want to just go right back to the policies that were pre-pandemic. That's a sticking point too, but The Times has this big giant newsroom, so obviously you can see why the management would want employees to come back too. That's part of it. I think these things are ancillary compared to the salary, but that's all sticking points too.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Last question. I guess. Does a one day walkout-- if this happens on Thursday, give real leverage or just make people like us write and talk about it?

Shawn McCreesh: We're about to find out, I guess.

Brian Lehrer: I guess so, and we will be finding out in among other places, New York Magazine, where feature writer Shawn McCreesh has been covering The New York Times labor dispute. Thanks for coming on with us, Shawn. Appreciate it.

Shawn McCreesh: Thanks, Brian.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.