THE Village Voice staff and the Phoenix-based outfit that bought the weekly two years ago are sitting down tomorrow to hash out their first collective-bargaining agreement since the takeover.
Owner New Times inherited the three-year pact when it acquired Village Voice Media, and though the current agreement doesn’t expire until June 30, sources say that the battle lines have already been drawn, and, not surprisingly, health care is a major focal point.
“They’ve cut the staff literally in half since they took over,” said Tom Robbins, a writer and the shop steward for the editorial workers who are part of United Auto Workers Local 2110. “The way we look at it, they’ve already taken a huge bite – do they need to take more?”
He said management is trying to force workers onto a contributory health plan from Choice Plus, which would seek employee contributions for the first time.
Robbins said the plan could end up costing each worker anywhere from $3,600 to $5,500 more per year.
The unionized workers are grumbling that a strike is possible.
While the union has put forth a wage proposal, he said the company has not made any motion at all yet in that direction.
And Robbins doesn’t feel too comfortable.
“There is no way they are going to give us a pay increase to match that,” he said.
Michael Lacey, the combative New Times CEO, did not return an e-mail seeking comment by presstime.
The Local includes both editorial and business side workers.
Tony Ortega, editor-in-chief of the Voice, said, “I’ve been told these things always go to midnight on June 30.”
But Ortega, who took over only in March 2007 after a revolving door of editors under the new regime, said he remains hopeful a deal can be reached.
“We value their work and hope to make an amicable settlement,” he said.
“Like a lot of other newspapers, we have shrunk down because of the economic factors affecting the industry,” he said.
Fade
Looks like it won’t be such a smooth transition in the photo department at Condé Nast Portfolio, after all.
When news first broke that Photo Director Lisa Berman was leaving her Condé Nast days behind and returning to Time Inc.’s Entertainment Weekly, Portfolio Editor-in-Chief Joanne Lipman had been assuring everyone that it was going to be a smooth transition, as Berman would stick around while the magazine searched for a replacement.
But it ain’t happening.
Berman is out of there on Friday and starts her new gig at EW on July 7.
“It was time for a change,” said Berman, who had been one of the originals on the financial magazine that launched last spring just as the economy began to sour. Nobody has been hired to replace Berman.
“We’re interviewing candidates,” said a spokeswoman.
The art and design side of the publication has been particularly problematic for Lipman, previously a longtime editor at The Wall Street Journal.
In the early days, Lipman began the publication with artsy non-people covers and drove Design Director Robert Priest crazy with changes.
Meanwhile, Lipman is also continuing to churn through more of the start-up staffers on the editorial side.
Among the latest to go: Senior Editor Bob Roe, and his wife, Nancy Hass, a contract writer whose contract was not renewed.
Pay up
Veteran mob reporter Jerry Capeci isn’t giving it away anymore.
Starting this week, his ganglandnews.com is going behind a paid wall.
“Why has the Web site gone paid? Because we want to get paid for our work,” said Capeci, who’s broken stories from the goings-on inside the Gotti clan to the Mafia cops, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, who are now serving life sentences.
He’s charging $5 a month for a subscription, $25 for six months.
Capeci first started writing about the mob while covering the courts at The New York Post in the 1970s and 1980s.
Gang Land actually started as a column in the Daily News but ended in the mid-1990s when he left the paper. It then ran online.
The column also ran in the New York Sun from 2002 to 2007, but since then has existed solely online, where it has continued to break mob stories, most recently allegations that the late mob boss John Gotti had also routinely beat up his son, John “Junior” Gotti.
Confusion
As Jack Kliger, who earlier this month was kicked upstairs at Hachette Filipacchi Media, made the trip to the parent company’s Lagardere Media worldwide powwow in Barcelona, questions continue to swirl about what his replacement will do once he formally takes over in September.
There are also questions about the fate of COO Philippe Guelton, a Frenchman who was long considered Kliger’s heir apparent before he was passed over for Alain Lemarchand, the CEO-designate.
“Kliger was able to accommodate the French, that’s why he kept his job for nine years,” said one former executive.
But friends say he had long chafed under orders from Paris to cut costs while still developing Internet strategies at the same time.
“There is no business strategy when your only strategy is to cut costs,” said the former executive.
Insiders say that the company does have some new Web plans in the works.
Still, more than a few executives inside and outside the company said that Hachette – which publishes special interest titles ranging from Elle and Woman’s Day to Road & Track and Car and Driver – might be on the prowl for deals.
Rodale, home to Men’s Health and other special-interest magazines, would seem a likely merger partner, said one well-connected media executive, although there are no talks underway at this point.