Author: Dan Kennedy

Guild e-mail paints dark picture

The Boston Newspaper Guild’s insurance consultant, Bonnie Hanisch, has sent an e-mail to Guild members at the Boston Globe showing that they could bring home slightly more money if they approve a package of concessions totaling $10 million when they vote on July 20. (Media Nation obtained a copy earlier today.)

The cost, though, is high: a brutal reduction in health-insurance and retirement benefits. In fact, the consultant’s math is based on an assumption that the average Guild member would choose to reduce her or his 401(k) contribution from 10 percent of salary to 4 percent if the package is rejected, as a similar package was on June 8. Hold the 401(k) contributions steady, and employees would actually make less money with a “yes” vote than with a “no” vote.

So why would anyone vote yes? If the concessions are approved, salaries will be cut by 9 percent (including eight unpaid days off). If they are rejected, the 23 percent pay cut implemented after the “no” vote remains in place.

The e-mail has led to some speculation that the Guild is quietly pushing for another “no” vote, the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly reports. Poynter Institute business analyst Rick Edmonds describes the situation facing Guild members as “a choice between a punch in the gut now or being slapped upside the head later,” with a “yes” vote merely deferring some of the pain.

Yesterday I had a chance to talk with a few Globe staff members about the vote and whether they think the concessions will be approved this time around. The rough consensus: yes, but there is deep anger at the New York Times Co. over its highhandedness and lack of straightforwardness in communicating with Globe employees.

Look for the vote to be close once again.

The full text of Hanisch’s e-mail follows:

The Executive Committee, along with the Governing Board, has asked that I reiterate some of the questions that came up this weekend, along with an example of how you could mitigate the 23% if the contract is not ratified.

First, our medical plan renews on May 1st of each year. Our premiums increased from Harvard Pilgrim by approximately $500,000. At that time, there was an estimated $300,000 in the Taft Hartley Health Fund, and we were expecting an additional $200,000 of new health fund quids that had been negotiated in the last bargaining negotiations. Hence, there was no rate change/contribution changes to the employees.

On April 7th, we began the $10 million concession meetings with the company. Ultimately, part of the concessions was approximately $1.3 million in health care quids that had been negotiated over the past 20 years.

What this means to you — whether the contract is ratified or not, your health insurance contribution rates will increase next May 1, 2010. Based on our estimates, if the contract is ratified, we need $2.5 million of employee contributions. If the contract is not ratified, we need $1 million of employee contributions. (Health care increases are based on the medical claims of this group and those that are participating. These estimates are based on the same health care costs, and an estimated 5% increase.)

If the contract is not ratified, here is an example of how to reduce your costs:

If Ratified
Average Salary: $58,000
Family Health Insurance: -$ 5,492
401K Deductions (Average person in BNG is 10%): -$5,800
Taxes (FICA, FUTA, SUTA, Fed; est. 30%): -$14,012
8 Furlough/Unpaid Days: -$2,231
TOTAL: $30,463*

If Not Ratified
Average Salary: $44,660 (23% reduction)
Family Health Insurance: -$1,170
401K Deductions (change to 4%): -$1,786
Taxes: -$12,511
Zero Furlough/Unpaid Days: $0
TOTAL: $29,193

Difference of $1,270 or $24.42 per week.

If the contract is not ratified, you keep the $1.3 million of quids; you keep the pension plan; you keep the retiree health insurance; you keep the 401(k) match, etc.

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to contact me at xxx.

Thank you.

Bonnie M. Hanisch, CEBS
President
Boston Insurance Group

*As alert Media Nation commenter Tony points out, Hanisch’s math is a bit off — the number should be $30,465.

A banner day for the Banner?

The Bay State Banner may survive. According to the Boston Globe’s Meghan Irons, Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree (photo) says he has lined up a dozen investors to save the weekly newspaper, which serves Greater Boston’s African-American community. Ogletree says the Banner, founded 44 years ago by Melvin Miller, who’s still the publisher, could resume publication next week.

Meanwhile, the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly takes a closer look at the Banner and finds it to be “uneven.” But though Reilly pays lip service to the notion that the Banner is a community paper rather than the African-American equivalent of the Globe or the Boston Herald, I think he gets a little too hung up on the Banner’s shortcomings in comparison to major media outlets.

The real point of comparison ought to be with neighborhood papers like the Jamaica Plain Gazette, the South End News and the Dorchester Reporter, as well as ethnic papers like El Planeta, the Boston Irish Reporter and the Boston Haitian Reporter.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’m intimately familiar with what those papers publish every week; far from it. But I do know that neighborhood papers are where you go for church and school announcements, news about local businesses and the like, which you rarely see in either of the city’s dailies. Whenever I’ve picked up a Banner, that’s what has stood out.

Of course, a weekly newspaper isn’t the only way of covering a neighborhood or an ethnic community. New England Ethnic News, for instance, offers an online compendium of the city’s ethnic newspapers, including the Banner.

In addition, a couple of years ago, there was a serious proposal to launch a Web-based news service for Roxbury, with content to be provided by citizen journalists who’d be recruited for the task. Perhaps the smartest idea was to tie the Web site to a local-access cable program.

It never got off the ground, which was a shame. But if the Banner revival falls short — or even if it doesn’t — we’re likely to see some online experiments in reaching out to Boston’s neighborhoods.

Photo of Ogletree (cc) by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Commenting on comments with Keller

WBZ-TV (Channel 4) political analyst Jon Keller will be interviewing Doug Bailey and me about Bailey’s column in today’s Boston Globe, in which he argues that newspaper comments are worthless. (They are if you’re going to do them the way the Globe and the Boston Herald do them. But we’ll talk.)

The segment should pop up on the 11 p.m. news.

And by the way, has anyone yet figured out the identity of the anonymous blogger whom Bailey attacked?

Thursday update: Here’s the link to Keller’s story.

Dissecting the death of WBCN

Danny Schechter, the “News Dissector” whose progressive approach to the news was such a key part of WBCN’s early years, has weighed in on CBS’s decision to pull the plug. He writes:

The station’s legacy and importance — the reason it built a national reputation and worldwide respect — was deliberately buried in the need to meet quarterly revenue projections and serve its corporate masters. Their goal was to compete with commercial drek by becoming commercial drek. And they did.

And where did it take them? To the radio graveyard. Shame.

Interestingly enough, Schechter says he had recently been approached about doing commentaries for WBCN’s Web site — something that may yet come to pass, given that CBS is reportedly thinking about keeping the station semi-alive online.

An anonymous straw man

Doug Bailey want you to know there’s a local blog out there that’s not as reliable as maybe it should be. (Imagine that.) But he doesn’t want you to know what the blog is. Bailey, a former Boston Globe staffer-turned-media consultant, writes on the Globe’s op-ed page:

I recently contacted a blog that has apparently gained a reputation as an “authoritative source” on local news to point out an outrageously inaccurate — and easily verifiable — item posted on the site, attributed to one of its many “insiders.” The editor of the site conceded to me his “inside” information had actually come from an anonymous posting he saw on a newspaper website. If this wasn’t outrageous enough, this site has developed a following among traditional media reporters who apparently believe this blogger is wired and who regularly republish his missives unaware that his “exclusive” sources come from anonymous comments on their own websites. The identities of the “insiders” are unknown even to the original blogger.

Without the name of the blog and its author, and a chance for him to respond, the value of Bailey’s anecdote is approximately zero. Let’s have it, Doug. And let’s see the Globe give his target an opportunity to defend himself.

If only David Brudnoy had lived to see it

One side benefit related to the demise of WBCN Radio (104.1 FM) is that CBS will move Bruins games from WBZ (AM 1030) to the new WBZ-FM (98.5 FM).

The late, legendary WBZ talk-show host David Brudnoy spent years lamenting the frequent Bruins interruptions. Ironically, the beneficiary of the move will be Dan Rea, who, unlike Brudnoy, is a hockey fan.