New York Daily News and Forbes staffers walk out amid US media job cuts

Staff at the New York Daily News and Forbes walked out on Thursday, adding to growing unease in the US newspaper industry in a week when the Los Angeles Times fired more than 100 journalists.

LA Times fires 115 journalists in ‘HR Zoom webinar’ following union protests
Mike Gartland, a city hall reporter and Daily News union steward, targeted owner Alden Global Capital with a reference to one of the paper’s most famous headlines, Ford to City: Drop Dead, a 1975 response to President Gerald Ford’s refusal to offer New York a financial bailout.

Gartland posted: “Alden to News: Drop Dead. Defend the Daily News!”

Once home to legendary reporters including Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, the paper is a shadow of its former self.

The Daily News “once boasted the ‘largest circulation in America’ and was 4,000 employees strong,” the union said. But “by the year 2000, circulation dropped by nearly half and the publication underwent several rounds of devastating job cuts. Since the spring of 2022, 27 people have left and the [News] Guild staff now totals 54 people.”

Citing changes to overtime policy and “chronic cuts” as fuel for the first Daily News walkout since 1991 – the year the paper was bought by the British press baron Robert Maxwell – staffers planned a 24-hour operation. Protesters rallied outside the Broadway building where the paper uses a co-working space, having closed its Manhattan newsroom in 2020.

Alden, a “vulture” fund known for slashing newspaper budgets in search of profits, bought the company that owned the Daily News the following year.