The move come less
than a fortnight after the 101-year-old paper had debuted a colorful new
redesign aimed at bolstering sagging circulation—and advertising. Union
cries foul.
Less than two weeks after it debuted a colorful redesign aimed at boosting circulation and attracting more advertising, El Diario La Prensa
has laid off 20 employees, eight of them Newspaper Guild members. The
move has sparked charges that the newspaper has violated its contract
with the union.
According to a New York Newspaper Guild representative, El Diario is required
to give union employees and the Guild itself two weeks notice before
involuntary layoffs can begin. The layoffs, which were made Friday
afternoon, came without any prior notification, the representative said.
"I'm the chairperson up there and I had no notice at all," said Oscar
Hernandez, an account executive in the advertising department who heads
the Guild unit at the 101-year-old paper. He added that employees were
told by executives from ImpreMedia, the paper's owner, that they needed
to be terminated because of cash flow problems.
An El Diario spokeswoman declined to comment. But earlier
Monday the paper, which is the largest Spanish language daily in New
York and the oldest in the country, told Capital New York
that the official date for the layoffs was June 27—two weeks from last
Friday—meaning it had acted in compliance with the contract.
Mr. Hernandez said the Guild still needed to be told, and that the
two week notification was just one of the rules with which the paper
needed to be in compliance.
"There's a whole laundry list of things they have to do before they
can do an involuntary layoff like this," he said, including seeing if
there were any volunteers. "We believe this is retaliation against the
people who are involved with union activity."
In May, the Guild worked out a settlement with ImpreMedia
after filing an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor
Relations Board over anti-union remarks by Content Director Juan Varela.
El Diario was required to post an official notice saying it would honor the Guild contract.
The layoffs also come amidst charges by veterans that management is
weakening the paper's relationship with its readership by looking to
expand beyond its traditional Puerto Rican and Dominican audience and
target more upscale readers. The new strategy, which informed the
redesign, is the brainchild of executives installed after Argentine
newspaper La Nacion bought a majority stake in ImpreMedia in 2012.
"Back in November, the company said they wanted to get a different
audience, that we were a 'ghetto newspaper," Mr. Hernandez said. "They
were looking for a more educated reader, even though [our current
readers] have been the bread and butter of El Diario for 101 years."
Fewer of those readers are buying the paper, however. Although online
readership has doubled in the past year to more than 1 million unique
visitors, the print edition—which generates 90% of revenue—has suffered.
In an interview earlier this month, Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez, executive vice president at impreMedia and general manager of El Diario,
said that he could not say whether the paper was profitable because of
how costs were allocated across the parent company. But the paper's
average weekday circulation fell 13% to 31,000 copies in the six months
ending in March, compared to the prior-year period, according to the
Alliance for Audited Media.
To subscribe to Crain's Click HERE
