The pay equity study was conducted by a committee made up of members of the NewsGuild-CWA units representing workers in 11 Tribune Publishing Co. newsrooms and TNG-CWA staff. The study was performed in support of the joint contract bargaining effort by eight recently-unionized newsrooms.
The units represented are the Baltimore Sun Guild, Chicago Suburbs, Daily Meal Guild, Daily News Guild, Design Production Studio Guild, Hartford Courant Guild, The Morning Call Guild, Orlando Sentinel Guild, Tidewater Media Guild, Tribune Content Guild. The Chicago Tribune is the only newsroom not represented.
How we created this report
The individual units obtained data for 384 members through information requests to the company. Because this study is focused specifically on full-time editorial employees, most of the pay data represented in this study does not include part-time or non-editorial employees.
Most of the data is current as of March 1, 2021, before Alden Global Capital acquired the company, and it doesn’t represent the most recent round of buyouts in June 2021. A single officer in each unit was responsible for handling raw pay data. Survey responses were compiled by a handful of members of the pay equity committee, and individual units were given access to survey responses by their members to merge the two data sets. Care was taken to strictly limit access to pay data and no names attached to salaries were shared beyond units. Units provided anonymized data files to the joint team, which created a master spreadsheet and analyzed the data.
For full-time employees, pay data was annualized assuming a 2,080-hour work year. Because job titles varied greatly between units, employees were grouped into five broad categories (editorial assistant, non-editorial, production/web, reporter and visual journalist) by representatives of individual units based on their knowledge of their co-workers’ job responsibilities.
About 73% of members represented by the joint units filled out the survey. We believe the results of the survey to fairly and accurately reflect the situation of the newsrooms at large — a majority of Guild-represented employees in every newsroom filled out the survey.
This is reflected in the demographics of survey respondents as well. About 45% of respondents were women, compared to 42% of the newsrooms. About 81% were white, compared to 78% of the newsrooms. About 50% were categorized as reporters, compared to 46% of the newsrooms.
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