This reporting is featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
The New York Times is on the cusp of finally inking a historic contract with its guild employees that would end messy and protracted negotiations, Confider has learned.
The deal could be sealed as soon as this week and would provide employees with raises they’d long fought for.
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Guild members credit a number of actions—in which they’ve turned up the heat on Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien—as the reason the company is finally coming to terms on a deal.
At an all-hands event last week, Levien was challenged by journalist Stephen Hiltner about the “pretty bitter” contract dispute. “What I will say is, as I think people know, we are now in a phase which I hope means we’re getting close to the end here, of doing off-the-record meetings, so it wouldn’t be appropriate of me to talk about what’s happening in those meetings,” Levien responded, according to a readout of the meeting obtained by Confider.
Guild members have left cake at Sulzberger’s office door to mark the two-year anniversary of the contract negotiations and, on April 12, they delivered a petition along with a snow globe, signed by more than 1,000 members, which read in part, “The New York Times is healthy enough to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on stock buybacks and handsomely pay its top executives. It’s long past time for you to tell your negotiators to reward hard-working Times Guild members too.”
The next off-record bargaining session is tomorrow. We wonder whose turn it is to bring the cake.
Reps for The New York Times and The NewsGuild—which also represents The Daily Beast’s union—declined to comment.
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