In three days, journalists from the Orange County Register – and 10 other publications across Southern California – will collectively leave the workplace in protest of stagnant wages while reporting on and living in one of the country’s most expensive regions.
It may be the latest fight for the future of the local news landscape, as journalists – some of whom have had to drive for Uber at night or take a second mortgage on their home – put pressure on the Southern California News Group after almost two years of unsuccessful bargaining between the company and their newly formed labor union.
It’s also rekindling a troubling observation.
Local newsroom pay disparities have often sent valuable community journalists – experts on conveying crucial information in understandable terms – down the path of shaping narratives for people in power, said Jodi Balma, a political science professor at Fullerton College.
“When I served on a hiring committee for a Public Information Officer (the formal title for a government spokesperson), we had so many journalists applying because they were looking for an exit ramp, not being valued at their newsrooms,” Balma said. “To me, that is scary.”
Journalists, after all, have an “incredible resume of skills that would be really useful to weaponize,” Balma said.
“If the highest bidder for your labor is the nefarious special interest trying to destroy our democracy, we all need the media to keep the journalists on their payroll.”
The goal of the SCNG walk out is to combat economic conditions that have fueled staffing issues and, consequently, coverage gaps in the densely populated metropolitan areas between Los Angeles, the Inland Empire and San Diego, said Charlie Vargas, a leader at the SCNG Guild.
“When we have people working to cover more than one community, or we have just one reporter covering a large community like Anaheim, for example – it’s a lot for one person to do. And that affects the quality of the stories that we have coming out,” said Vargas, who covers casinos and entertainment for the company.
When hard financial straits impact reporters’ day-to-day lives, “it affects the quality of the reporting,” Vargas said.
He estimates that 70% of SCNG Guild’s 120 members have pledged to walk out, but added, “more members have signed on in the last couple of days since we announced our walkout publicly.”
A request for comment from SCNG spokespeople went unreturned on Friday.
“It’s an odd dynamic, if you think about it – we’re in the information age, with so much at the tips of our fingers because of the internet, and yet so much of the news cycle, or what you see on internet, is still dominated by the national, broader topics,” said Mindy Romero, founder and director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at University of Southern California.
She added:
“We have seen, by any measure, an erosion of the strength of local news. Newsrooms have gone away or have been decimated. We have been left with a lot of dedicated reporters, but many fewer than we’ve had before, and the reporters that are still on the local beat have to do more with less.”
Bottom line – “The public is hearing less about issues that are happening around them in their local communities that are so important and so often more relevant,” she said.
The one-day walk out is scheduled for Dec. 14, for which the SCNG Guild is raising funds to help workers who will be impacted, to make up for lost wages and help pay for groceries and utilities.
Some employees haven’t seen a raise in 15 years, Vargas said.
“There are several members in our guild who unfortunately can’t have this as their sole job, so they’re working another job, or they’re looking for income in other ways,” he said, recounting one bargaining session where workers from the Guild verged on tears, saying they had families to take care of.
“They’re just trying to make it,” he said.
Corporate ownership has restructured newsrooms and chipped away at local media across SoCal for years, claiming casualties like The OC Weekly and slashing the size of newsrooms like the Register, which fell under SCNG when it was acquired in 2016 by SCNG’s parent company, Digital First, which in turn is owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
Earlier this Summer, Alden also bought the San Diego Union-Tribune from former private owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who – in a publicized bid to save local journalism – brought the paper back under private ownership, along with the Los Angeles Times, in 2018.
Soon-Shiong’s sale of the Union-Tribune came just after the announcement that the Los Angeles Times would lay off a spate of digital and audio staff, and vexed SCNG Guild members for another reason entirely.
Since SCNG workers voted to form their union in 2021, Vargas said they’ve put up with “multiple delays by the company since then to address our pay. We have moved excellently on other portions of the contract but pay has been delayed.”
So when SCNG bought the Union-Tribune for what Vargas said was an undisclosed amount – “It shocked a lot of people,” Vargas said.
“We were told they didn’t have the money for pay increases. Where did the (money) come from? That could have been a raise for a lot of people,” he said.
“It could have been new positions.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story valued the sale of the Union-Tribune at $65 million. The amount of the sale is undisclosed but is estimated to be in the millions of dollars. We regret the error.