Business

NJ’s death ‘Star’

FEAR PHASE: The Star-Ledger draws $9M line in sand. (
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Faced with mounting losses, the Star-Ledger in Newark — New Jersey’s largest daily paper — is threatening to shut down at the end of the year unless it wins major concessions from its production unions.

Publisher Richard Vezza gave the unions until Sept. 27 to come up with $9 million in savings or else the paper will be shuttered.

In a letter to staff, Vezza said the paper felt “pushed into a corner.” He said the unions, whose contracts expire next month, have agreed to only a handful of meetings since the paper asked last December to start negotiations.

“It is apparent that the unions have little or no interest in meaningful negotiations,” Vezza said.

He said the paper lost $19.8 million last year — on top of $12 million in 2011 — and expects a similar shortfall this year.

Vezza said the company determined that it could save $9 million by outsourcing printing and production to outside vendors and went to four unions representing pressmen, mailers, engravers and machinists to try to obtain the same amount in concessions.

“If the unions provide savings to approximate the savings that could be obtained through outsourcing, this would allow us to continue to print and package in-house, preserving both union and non-union jobs here at the Star-Ledger — otherwise we would like to outsource to obtain the savings,” he said in the letter.

The paper, which has 771 employees, 605 full-time, is part of Advance Publications, controlled by the billionaire brothers Donald and SI Newhouse, Jr., who also own Condé Nast. Its circulation is 342,788 daily and 432,040 on Sunday.

Last year, the company cut the frequency of its Times Picayune in New Orleans from daily to three times a week and began covering the city with its digital news service, NOLA.com.

Vezza said that is not in the cards for the Star-Ledger. “There are no plans for that,” he said. “This is strictly a labor issue.”

The company’s NJ.com draws on material from the Star-Ledger, the Jersey Journal, the Trenton Times and other dailies and weeklies Advance owns in the state.

Ed Shown, pressman’s local boss and head of the combined Star-Ledger Council of Unions, said, “There is no way we can give them $9 million. It would take away half of our wage package.”

He called the threat part of management’s negotiating strategy.

“Nobody wants to see the paper close,” he said. “We are both on the same page on that.”