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After three years sparring with their billionaire owners for a basic union contract, workers at the New York Daily News are finally on the precipice of inking a deal—and clawing back some of what they've lost since hedge-fund vampires took over the newspaper in 2021.
The NewsGuild of New York told Hell Gate the union reached a two-year contract agreement with notorious newspaper-killer Alden Global Capital for journalists at the Daily News late last week. The deal includes new salary floors of at least $63,000, 6 percent wage increases, health care for part-timers, and new "just cause" protection from unfair job termination. The union is expecting to ratify the contract in the coming days.
Battle-weary reporters and editors were told the news in a mass Zoom call Thursday evening, and said there was a palpable sense of relief, if not quite elation, across the screens. Alden Global Capital has systematically decimated the Daily News over the past several years, including slashing jobs and booting staff out of the Lower Manhattan office that inspired Clark Kent and Lois Lane's "Daily Planet," permanently closing the office and forcing reporters to work without a newsroom.
"It feels like the most positive thing that has happened in the four years since we were taken over by Alden Global Capital," said Michael Sheridan, a video editor who first started at the Daily News in 1993, following in the footsteps of his father who worked there for two decades.