Wrapports LLC, the parent company of the Sun-Times and the Pioneer Press suburban weeklies (and the Reader), is surely proud of Aggrego, the hyperlocal-news-gathering operation that is “building the future of community media” by tapping into a huge market: 18,000 communities that represent 13,000 local media outlets and $135 billion local ad dollars.
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But the guild is not persuaded. It’s not in the nature of labor unions to be beguiled by management’s assurances—not when labor and management are on good terms, and certainly not in this case, when the guild and Sun-Times Media have been negotiating a new contract for more than a year and have almost nothing to show for it. “We’re at the point where we’ve lost all patience,” says David Roeder, a Sun-Times business writer and guild negotiator. He says that at different times the guild has thought “we were starting to make a little headway in all our main priorities— job security, wages, benefits—but always there was something that knocked us off course.” The disruptive closing of Sun-Times Media’s suburban offices was one of those things (suburban editors now work downtown, and reporters file from the field), and the layoff of all its photographers another. Then there was what happened to Roeder: last March he was told his guild-covered job no long existed, and if he wanted to continue working it would be for the nonunion Grid, a glossy weekly that Wrapports launched to provide the Sun-Times with business news. The idea was that Grid could attract new advertising and expand into other cities. But it lasted four months as a weekly (it’s now a monthly), and Roeder lasted three months as a Grid staffer. The guild filed a complaint with the NLRB, and Roeder went back to the Sun-Times. “It was a rather swift outcome,” he observes.
“They try stuff,” Chicago Newspaper Guild executive director Craig Rosenbaum says of Wrapports and Sun-Times Media, “and if it doesn’t work they try something else.” That sounds not only admirable but necessary if Sun-Times Media, which Wrapports rescued from bankruptcy, is to be put back on its feet. But it leaves the guild wondering if management is going through the motions of negotiating while making big decisions in which the guild isn’t a consideration.
The reporter started following one of the Aggrego callers on Twitter. “Turns out he JUST graduated college,” the reporter told Kathy Routliffe, a Pioneer Press reporter and guild negotiator. “He must be one of those $9 an hour guys who will eventually take the union jobs over. Can he be a non-Guild eligible Wrapports employee and still publicly call himself a Pioneer person?” A couple of hours later, the reporter wrote Routliffe again: “Some of his tweets even mention that he’s doing a STORY. That’s more than calendar items and collecting submitted photos. I’m definitely concerned about job security.”
Aggregro-written stories—offered as products of the “Wrapports News Service”—are now commonplace on Pioneer Press websites. I contacted the “community news producer” from the Mundelein Review and asked if he’d speak to me. He passed along my request to his superior, John Puterbaugh, in an e-mail slugged “Guy from Reader wants to do Aggrego piece. I’ve said nothing.” Puterbaugh wrote and thanked me for my interest but let me know all media inquiries should be sent to Landon.
This might get us to the nub of something. Guild complaints about the Aggrego rookies poaching on Pioneer Press turf focus on their youth and inexperience; but young journalists get into the business however they can and Aggrego is one of the few open doors. To judge from what I’ve learned online about a few of its staffers, Aggrego hasn’t been hiring nincompoops: Puterbaugh, for example, edited Northern Illinois University’s Northern Star at the time of the 2008 massacre on campus and was later named one of the country’s hundred most promising student journalists.
