The New York Daily News Union is still fighting this newspaper-murdering hedge fund

Corporate raiders to local news: drop dead.

It’s a familiar story in 21st-century media, and one that’s playing out in real time at one of this city’s most essential resources, The New York Daily News. At a rally in City Hall Park on Monday, Daily News journalists sought to remind New Yorkers of their battle for a fair union contract — which has dragged on for more than three years — as well as the paper’s essential role in the lifeblood of the city both historically and today.

(The staff at the Daily News unionized in early 2021 in response to news that the paper’s parent company was being acquired by Alden Global Capital, a shadowy hedge fund with a reputation for destroying beloved local papers across the United States.)

“We’re breaking news, we’re holding City Hall to account, we’re doing the work of a newspaper, and we’re making money,” reporter and union shop steward Evan Simko-Bednarski told The Groove. “All we’re asking is for some of the money to come back into the paper so we can keep doing our jobs. That shouldn’t be a radical ask.”

The rally drew the likes of Comptroller Brad Lander as well as Council Member Carmen De La Rosa, the latter of whom is sponsoring a City Council resolution in support of the Daily News Union’s fight for a fair contract.

This extra civic heft may prove necessary: all these years into the process, talks are still stymied over basics like “a livable wage” and “salary increases that actually keep up with inflation.” (Alden reportedly stalled out the early years of bargaining with outlandish demands about cutting vacation time and being able to call reporters home from vacation at a moment’s notice.)

“For the most part, none of us have received pay raises in more than a decade,” Michael Sheridan, a video and photo editor and member of the union bargaining committee, told The Groove. “We got pay cuts during the pandemic that have never been restored. And everybody’s cost of living has dramatically increased.”

Instead, Alden has suggested $55,000 as a reasonable starting salary for New York City-based workers in the year 2025, and annual raises of 2.5%, well below recent rates of inflation, even if pay cuts had actually been reversed. (For context, a recent report from the anti-poverty organization Robin Hood estimated the poverty line annual income for a single person in New York City as around $44,000.)

“Find me that apartment where somebody can afford to live in on that,” said Simko-Bednarski. “You’re forcing people to make impossible choices to do a job that should be seen as a public good.”

A public good that also still happens to turn a profit.

“Some of our members are paid so little, they qualify for low-income housing,” NewsGuild of NY president Susan DeCarava told The Groove. “Make no mistake, the Daily News makes money and that value comes directly from the work of our members. Alden Global Capital’s number one priority is accumulating profits at the expense of journalism.”

We should say here that Alden has no public-facing contact information and therefore was unreachable for comment for this story. A representative for Daily News management sent the following statement:

“For the last several months, the Daily News has made good faith efforts to speed up negotiations and move these talks toward a conclusion, but the guild has failed its members by rebuffing us. Good faith demands actually sitting down and bargaining. For reasons that are inexplicable, the guild shows more interest in posting fliers and staging protests.”

The company made similar claims in an op-ed, which the union has responded to here:

Even understaffed, under-resourced and without a physical newsroom (previous ownership closed up shop on their office space in 2020), the Daily News routinely breaks crucial local news stories and provides the old-school in-depth local coverage the city has relied on for over a century, somewhere to turn that isn’t the racist bile of The Post, or a New York Times that barely deigns to cover its own backyard.

The union is asking concerned New Yorkers to sign an Action Network petition, the better to put the pressure on Alden Global Capital and its publicity-shy owner Heath Freeman. And just as importantly, they want New Yorkers to be aware of efforts like these to kneecap a civic institution so important it damn near single-handedly ran Gerald Ford out of office on the strength of a single headline.

“I’m somebody who grew up reading the Daily News at my grandfather’s kitchen table, and that’s a humbling thing,” Simko-Bednarski said. “Private equity is centered around this idea of buying something, optimizing it and selling it for a profit. So they clearly still think that there’s value here, and if there’s value, it comes from New Yorkers. So New Yorkers should be clear-eyed about what’s going on at the paper.”