Occupy the New York Times! In January Times Watch [1] noted that Times staffers who were members of the Newspaper Guild of New York were protesting the New York Times Co. for freezing pensions for some employees even as it granted a $15 million golden parachute to former chief executive Janet Robinson after she departed at the end of 2011. An open letter [2] to Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has so far been signed by 592 Times staffers. (Photo courtesy of New York Post.)
Just don’t expect this particular battle between the “1 Percent and the 99 Percent” to appear in a sanctimonious liberal news report in the Times.
The situation may be escalating. Executive Editor Jill Abramson and others had to walk a polite silent gauntlet on their way to the paper’s “Page One” editorial meeting on Wednesday afternoon, Adam Clark Estes wrote at The Atlantic [3]:
The hallways were impassible outside the daily Page One meeting of the senior-most editors at The New York Times on Wednesday afternoon, due to an unfortunate series of events that has almost 600 journalists up in arms. An internal memo obtained by Poynter described the event as a "quiet, 10-minute display of unity…to show our common dismay over contract negotiations" for the members of the Newspaper Guild. The full memo reads as follows:
Please join us at 3:50 p.m. on Wednesday for a quiet, 10-minute display of unity, around the entrances to the Page One meeting room on the third floor. The point is to show our common dismay over contract negotiations <http://saveourtimes.com/index.php> in which management seems determined to seriously compromise our financial welfare, our access to health care and our security in retirement. We hope that senior editors who witness and understand our mutual resolve will convey the gravity of the situation to management.
An “N.G.” (presumably a Times staffer) published eight photos [4] from the polite protest.