The newsroom at the Anchorage Daily News, the most widely read newspaper and news website in Alaska, plans to unionize.
At the top of the would-be union’s list of goals is better pay.
Sixteen out of 20 eligible newsroom employees – that’s 80% of reporters, photographers and editors not in management – recently signed cards supporting the formation of a union, according to a news release from the proposed union, dubbed the Anchorage News Guild.
The signed cards are part of a petition to the National Labor Relations Board for a union election and a request for Daily News management to voluntarily recognize the union, the statement says. The Anchorage News Guild says it plans to join the Pacific Northwest branch of the NewsGuild-CWA, which describes itself as a national union of more than 25,000 members, founded by newspaper journalists in 1933.
It would be the only union-organized newsroom in Alaska and likely the first of its kind in the state.
There’s been continuous turnover among newsroom employees for the last few years, said business reporter Alex DeMarban, who has been with the ADN or its prior iteration, the Alaska Dispatch, for about 15 years.
“A key thing for everyone is a desire for fair wages and regular wages that can keep up with the cost of inflation,” DeMarban said. “And so we just want to be able to pay the bills that keep going up, and also to help make the paper more sustainable, so that we can basically get paid enough to continue working there and continue producing, you know, the high-quality product that Alaskans want.”
The union’s members would also seek better transparency in regards to pay and a sustainable workplace environment, the news release says.
Anchorage Daily News management, including its publisher and top editor, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Anchorage Daily News went bankrupt in 2017 under the Dispatch masthead, and the Fairbanks-based Binkley family bought it out of bankruptcy court.
Then, in 2020, the ADN won its third Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the most prestigious award in American journalism.
The paper cut its printing schedule to two days a week this August to allow it to focus on its digital products, publisher Ryan Binkley said at the time. It was not a sign that the newspaper was struggling, he said.
In its statement Tuesday, the Anchorage News Guild said members of the unionization effort, part of a national trend for local newsrooms, still love working at the newspaper and remain honored to produce award-winning journalism.
“We do recognize that the company’s leaders, they’ve gotten us to this point. We appreciate that. We respect them a lot,” DeMarban said. “But at the same time, we believe there has to be a way to find some wage increases with some regularity and some better benefits.”
Casey Grove is host of Alaska News Nightly, a general assignment reporter and an editor at Alaska Public Media. Reach him atcgrove@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Caseyhere.
