What Does It Mean to Defend the Daily News?

I’m Theresa Braine, a breaking-news reporter on the New York Daily News national desk for nearly 7 years, and a Bargaining Committee member. 

My team’s job has largely been on the digital side, with some of our stories getting into the print edition, and we were always on the lookout for fresh, tabloid-worthy happenings across the U.S. Nowadays we are told to look closer to home, focusing largely on the tristate area, because “this is a local paper,” as if New Yorkers aren’t interested in reading anything outside their tiny bubble. What’s “trending” is more and more being used to define their newsworthiness. 

When I started, there were 18 people on my team. Today there are nine, and dwindling. 

A few weeks ago, the 1978 version of “Superman: The Movie” popped up on my TV. There, suddenly, was the Daily Planet, and a bustling newsroom. I felt a pang. 

The days on 33rd Street were long gone before my tenure started in late 2018, but there was at least some of that flavor left in the newsroom I walked into. Editors and print designers would yell front-page headline ideas to each other across the room; televisions were always on; we were each flanked by people tapping out stories on their respective keyboards. Energy infused the air as we put the next day’s paper together and spewed out stories for posting on the web. 

Even 10 years ago we used to send reporters — freelancers, even — off to assignments around the country.

Flash forward a decade, and I wasn’t even reimbursed for the Uber to haul my office equipment home in 2020. A corner of my living room now basically belongs to my employer, who pays nothing toward that either.

Nowadays, my office life is two-dimensional, relegated to communications on Slack. Because mine is a desk job, I am chained to my apartment all day. It’s not unlike a continuation of lockdown. 

It’s discouraging to work at a place with ghost owners who won’t even deign to meet the people whose passion is lining their pockets. It is so apparent that the principals of Alden Global Capital don’t feel publicly accountable. Likewise, the Daily News executive editor they hired refuses to show up at the bargaining table, leaving us with zero editorial representation on the other side. It’s just us, an HR person who seems more interested in spreading management misinformation than in attending to our actual HR needs, and the company’s union-busting lawyer and his associates. 

That is where Alden puts its money. If they had invested all that into beefing up the paper, imagine what our enterprise would look like today. Indeed, the company has done the opposite, actually cutting some of our salaries in 2020, as Alden started populating Tribune’s board. My pay decreased by about $1,400, and I calculated recently that in the five years since it was imposed — presumably because of the pandemic, though that emergency is long over — it has cost me about $7,000. And I was at the low end of the salary cuts. There are people who’ve been at the paper much longer than I who have not had raises in years. As for me, I’m earning less than when I started, and am essentially working for free one week a year. 

Meanwhile, my rent has risen, inflation has set in, and food costs more. 

In contrast, Tribune’s outgoing CEO — who Alden dumped immediately upon taking over in 2021 — left with a $2.5 million package. Some of that was my money.

Alden is now the second-largest owner of newspapers in the U.S., in terms of average daily print circulation, right behind Gannett (which it also tried to buy, in 2019). The hedge fund and the conglomerate have each winnowed their reporting ranks and homogenized coverage by sacrificing local reporters. 

There is one difference between the two, however. As one of our colleagues (I believe) once pointed out, Gannett conducts itself like a media company. Alden does not. Rather than earning a return on investment, the hedge fund gets its revenue by extracting resources. Last year it sold the Daily News printing plant in Jersey City for more than $90 million — but still has nothing to offer for cost-of-living raises. 

Although Alden and its subsidiaries are private, the Nieman Lab at Harvard University in 2018 obtained some financial information. Digital First Media, the newspaper-publishing arm, reported a 17% operating margin for fiscal 2017, and $160 million in profit. It obtained that by chipping away at the very souls of the dozens of newspapers it owns. 

We at the Daily News are being bled dry by attrition. In addition to no newsroom, we have no politics editor, no bona fide city editor and no Albany bureau or reporter. New York City’s Hometown Paper uses wire copy to cover our own state government! After that slogan became the Daily News Union’s rallying cry, our executive editor suddenly tweaked it to read, “New York’s Election Newspaper” — with no visible plans on how to make that happen. 

Against this backdrop, negotiating with Alden’s minions can feel like sitting at Hannibal Lecter’s dinner table discussing whether there will be salad. 

In April 2024, Alden shut down eight weekly newspapers in Minnesota, including one that was 160 years old and another that was 140, the Center for Transformative Media reported at the time. 

A report released last month showed that the number of local journalists per 100,000 residents had declined by 75% since 2002. Back then there were about 40 journalists per 100,000 residents. Today there are 8.2. 

“The crisis is more severe and widespread than previously thought,” said the report, a joint venture of Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News. 

In Queens, New York, population more than 2.2 million, the number is 4.3 local reporter equivalents per 100,000 people. New York State as a whole ranks 21 on the list, with 9.8 per 100,000.

New York City has 27.3, some of the highest. In Suffolk County there are 12.9. 

People need trustworthy news sources — staffed by people who are taught how to find and vet information for veracity, who are dedicated to informing people and introducing them to things they may not have realized they needed to know, who relish crafting a narrative from a pile of facts, and who want to draw attention to stories and people that may not be on the wider public’s radar. 

We do this much less effectively without proper resources and a contract that guarantees fair wages and sensible benefits.

SUPPORT OUR FIGHT FOR A FAIR CONTRACT

Theresa shared her statement about our fight for a fair contract at the Daily News at a Guild press conference on August 14, 2025.