maybe they should join the BloggersUnion...
Posted on 08/13/2007 3:15:57 PM PDT by SmithL
Los Angeles (AP) -- The yearlong fight between newsroom employees at the Santa Barbara News-Press and its wealthy owner now centers on the firing of eight employees, some of whom urged subscribers to cancel their subscriptions as part of the dispute.
Testimony was scheduled to start Tuesday in what is expected to be a monthlong hearing on federal charges that the newspaper illegally fired employees for attempting to form a union.
The National Labor Relations Board has charged the paper with improperly firing eight reporters, six of whom hung a sign over a highway overpass in February urging passers-by to cancel their subscriptions.
The six were protesting the earlier firing of two reporters for union activities, according to the NLRB.
The eight reporters are asking to be reinstated with back pay.
Newspaper officials have defended their actions.
The 41,000 circulation daily that covers the wealthy coastal community of Santa Barbara has been embroiled in newsroom controversy since last July, when several top editors quit, saying that millionaire owner Wendy McCaw meddled with news coverage.
The paper countered that the former employees had let their personal opinions influence news decisions.
Newsroom employees voted overwhelmingly last September to form a union, but the workers and the paper have been clashing since then over the legitimacy of the vote.
The hearing that begins Tuesday centers on 15 unfair labor practice charges the NLRB has levied against Ampersand Publishing LLC, the paper's corporate parent. McCaw herself is expected to testify at some point.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
There are no good-guys here, and no one to cheer for.
ping
Just how stupid are “journalists”? Never mind, I think I already know.
It will never happen in Calif, sadly.
It will be no surprise to learn that the workers are liars.
maybe they should join the BloggersUnion...
Turmoil inside buggy whip companies was also entertaining I understand.
The News DEPRESS is A liberal rag... bareable only because no other paper is available...
We need it for our Parrott’s cage.
More than 40 newsroom staffers have resigned or been fired over the past year, according to savethenewspress.com, a union Web site that keeps tabs on developments at the newspaper.
The News-Press, founded in 1855, was bought by Ampersand Publishing LLC in 2000 from The New York Times Co.
at least you get the box scores... 8^)
Each of the McCaws has hired business attorneys, divorce experts, accountants and courtroom tacticians. Local lawyers and accountants will likely make millions in fees before the divorce is final.
An attorney from Bogle & Gates told a judge that within the first year the McCaw divorce had become the second or third largest case, of any kind, that the firm has ever handled. One larger case he cited: the fallout from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
Splitting the fortune, one local attorney says, has become a "veritable industry" of its own.
On one level, the case involves the trappings of everyday billionaire life: keeping the Hunts Point house, flying in the choicest of the couple's jets, taking Mediterranean vacations aboard Calixe, the family yacht.
On another, it resurrects one of the richest chapters in Northwest entrepreneurial history: How was the McCaw Cellular fortune built? Where did the money come from? And, after 21 years of marriage, who gets to keep what?
Craig McCaw and Wendy Petrak met in the early 1970s while undergraduates at Stanford University.
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