STAFF FEARS FOR JOBS AS JOURNAL GETS SMALLER
By JANET WHITMAN and KEITH J. KELLY
NEW YORK POST

December 4, 2006 -- As Dow Jones & Co. unveils a new look for the Wall Street Journal that will save $18 million a year, the media giant is grappling with the need to find other areas to cut costs.

The new design for the Journal, to be unwrapped at a media briefing today, will see the newspaper's width shrink by 3 inches starting in January, a bid by Dow Jones to trim costs and attract new readers.

Even with the millions in savings the $43 million project is expected to reap, Dow Jones is under intense pressure to come up with other belt-tightening schemes. Like most major newspapers, the company's flagship Journal has been beset by volatile advertising demand for the past few years amid competition from the Internet.

In a sign Dow Jones is aggressively looking for savings under new CEO Rich Zannino, the company said last week it would shut its three Canadian bureaus, putting four full-time reporters and two part-timers out of work.

"We're stunned," Tim Martell, an organizer with the Independent Association of Publishers' Employees, Dow Jones' largest union, told The Post. "Canada is a major trading partner with the United States and the only G7 country without a Wall Street Journal [presence]."

Dow Jones said beat reporters in the U.S. will pick up the slack.

The union is fretting that the shrinking of the Journal will lead to the loss of printing plant jobs.

"Our biggest concern is that with a narrower paper, they will be able to close print plants," said Martell. "If it is a standard-sized paper, they could contract it out to print it at other plants."

Dow Jones has been looking to deeply cut employee costs. The company opened a new round of contract negotiations with its largest union last month by asking workers to start paying out double the amount they currently contribute toward health care.

Dow Jones last week announced an initiative to eliminate wasteful, overlapping coverage by the Journal, WSJ.com and Dow Jones Newswires.

Under the plan, according to an internal Dow Jones memo, a new group at the Jersey City-based Newswires will be responsible for all breaking corporate news, company-wide - stories which often would have been duplicated by the Journal and WSJ.com.

The move will free up the staff at WSJ.com to do "tasks more geared to the online world," such as blogs, videos and podcasts, and allow Journal reporters to focus on more analytical stories, the memo said.

janet.whitman@nypost.com

oh come on, she's not part of the story unless, say, she used to lead the effort to unionize the JC office. anyway, reporters who cover the media frequently have to cover their own publications, e.g. NYT reporters during the whole blair/raines shakedown.

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It seems that JANET WHITMAN should not be reporting about a story she is part of, (Journalism 101), that being said her lack of journalistic ethics ought to work out well at the Post.

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That is the NYP for you though. They've never been too good at accuracy. Harass is a strong word to use. It implies a lot that isn't there.

Unionization is per physical location. Why the JC location isn't a part of the union like the rest of the company is strange. There was a previous article written by her the other week about the company's offer to the union. It was pretty insulting.

first, there are so many things wrong with that NYP headline. nothing in the story shows that anyone's getting harassed. and technically the reporters at the JC office aren't WSJ reporters. something I'd like to know is why harborside isn't unionized to begin with.[quote]

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An interesting fact .. Janet Whitman used to work for Dow Jones at the Jersey City location she is reporting about. She left for the NY Post about 6 months ago.

It's a tough life for a financial journalist trying to pick up an honest day's work on the waterfront.

UNION HARASSMENT IRKS WSJ STAFFERS

By JANET WHITMAN and KEITH J. KELLY - NEW YORK POST

November 21, 2006 -- The union representing reporters at Dow Jones & Co.'s Wall Street Journal might want to get a bit more organized.

Several journalists at the financial publisher's newswire operation in Jersey City have started complaining about being harassed by phone calls from Wall Street Journal union reps looking to recruit them.

Some reporters at the waterfront office complex said they've received more than one or two calls a day from different Journal reporters. Even union sympathizers said the calls are curbing their enthusiasm to sign up.

Dow Jones management sent out a memo to employees yesterday telling reporters that they should "feel free to hang up," adding, "if you feel harassed, please let your manager know."

The stepped-up effort to unionize the waterfront office complex at Harborside Financial Center comes as Dow Jones and the union are trying to hammer out a new contract.

Adding the 230 eligible Harborside employees - the largest non-union location at Dow Jones - could give the Independent Association of Publishers' Employees a lot more clout in contract negotiations.

After making half-hearted attempts to recruit the Jersey City location in the past, the union is now closer than ever to winning its support.

Talk at Dow Jones is that the union is only a dozen or two dozen employees away from getting the 50 percent majority it needs.

Union president Steve Yount admitted that the union has been urging IAPE members to call employees at the Harborside office, but he insisted that they are not harassing them.

"I think if the union-eligible people at Harborside are inside IAPE, we'll have much more strength at the bargaining table," he said. "If the company wasn't worried about the possibility of Harborside joining the union, I don't think they would be bringing this up."

Dow Jones' current contract with the union, which represents about 2,000 employees from The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and other Dow Jones publications, expires at the end of January.