News Media Guild

In Guild negotiations with Chronicle management Wednesday, we reached two important agreements. First, we agreed to extend the current contract past the June 30 expiration date with the understanding that both sides still want to reach an agreement as quickly as possible. We also agreed to immediately lift the 2009 cap on sick-leave usage (the cap would have limited Guild members to use no more than 10 days of their sick bank per year starting July 1).

For a weekly that rarely sold more than 4,500 copies — and is considerably below that circulation now — the Point Reyes Light in Marin County, Calif., over the years has earned more than its fair share of industry attention.

Since Memorial Day, Wells Fargo and Co. has dumped nearly half its holdings of A.H. Belo stock, the bank holding company disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday.

CNN announced today that it has ceased using Associated Press content, in order to rely more on its own newsgathering. "We will no longer use AP materials or services," CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton wrote in a memo to staffers.

William Harvey, secretary-treasurer of Oakland-based CWA Local 9415, was a special guest Saturday at a meeting of the Media Workers Guild’s Executive Committee in San Francisco. The EC approved the general outline of a proposed merger that would unite Local 9415 with the Media Workers as well as the Hawaii Newspaper Guild. Other CWA locals have discussed joining the proposed new mega-local, tentatively being called the Pacific Communications and Media Guild.

Members of the Executive Committee of the Media Workers Guild endorsed a merger outline Saturday that could create a powerhouse communications local in the West, uniting the San Francisco-based Guild, the Hawaii Newspaper Guild and Oakland-based CWA Local 9415. The tentative outline suggests the merged local be called the Pacific Communications and Media Guild.

On Thursday, word seemed to quietly leak out, in Italian no less, that Google would soon unveil a one-click payment system for content called "Newspass."

What is Rupert Murdoch up to? That question comes up anytime the chief executive of News Corp. makes an acquisition, no matter how small. So last week, as the company proposed its biggest deal yet, the possibilities, for Murdoch-watchers, were particularly intriguing.

Nothing beats a sunny afternoon in the Sierra Nevada — among other vacation spots beckoning members of the Guild’s East Bay Unit.

The San Diego Union-Tribune laid off more than 30 staffers on Thursday in what Editor Jeff Light called in an editor’s note an effort to build "a lean, creative, multi-platform team that can lead the industry."

’We’ll learn by trying new ways of doing what we’ve done with news, by putting ourselves visibly in the social media mix, and by using the emerging tools of daily communication in all aspects of our work.’

The past month has seen further reductions among Sun-Times Media properties in and around Chicago, including three in the Chicago Sun-Times newsroom earlier this week.

Newspaper advertising and subscription revenue in North America will continue to drop through 2012, according to a new forecast by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

For all the things they must consider, from the standpoint of the blank slate itself, designers work with three very basic device dimensions: screen size, display optics and navigation — basically space, how it looks and how one moves within it.

Guild-represented court interpreters in the Central Valley (Region 3), who started bargaining a new contract in August of 2008, ratified a new contract good through Sept. 2011. On Wednesday, Los Angeles-area members (Region 1) will begin voting on a proposed new deal. If the LA terms pass muster, new contracts will be in place for all four interpreter regions statewide, covering 800 members.

After seven months of negotiations, Guild members overwhelmingly ratified a new contract last week at the Sacramento Bee. The agreement preserves severance terms that could mean tens of thousands of dollars for veteran employees who are laid off or accept a buyout. Members let the bargaining team know what mattered most to them — and the team listened and responded.

In 1791, James Madison penned a short essay that foretold a long, and ongoing, financial involvement by government in journalism. Madison said, in part: Whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people, and Representatives going from, and returning among every part of them, is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits, and is favorable to liberty, where these may be too extensive.

In a doubleheader announcement meant to move the needle on Rupert Murdoch’s ambitious paid content plans, News Corp has acquired the Skiff e-reading platform from the Hearst startup and is joining forces with Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz through a stake in their start-up Journalism Online.

The New York Times today sheds light on a new report to be published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which illustrates that newspapers abroad are having a better time of it than American papers.

Newspaper publisher Tribune Co. won’t receive approval for a $42.9 million 2010 bonus program without overcoming an objection from the U.S. Trustee at a June 16 hearing. The agent for the $1.6 billion so-called bridge loan also objects.