Hundreds of members of the Los Angeles Times staff walked off the job and gathered at Grand Park on Friday.
This comes a day after management let the newsroom union know that another significant round of layoffs would be coming. KNX News’ Pete Demetriou spoke to Mary Kate Metivier, who has spent five years at the newspaper and is concerned about the impact that major staffing cuts would have on the paper’s reputation.
If management laid off 100 staffers, “We lose necessary resources for our community, we lose essential journalism, we lose watchdog journalism,” she said.
Matt Pearce, president of Media Guild of the West and a reporter for the L.A. Times, said the newspaper won’t tell them on the record how many people they may lay off. He also said they’re protesting the fact that the L.A. Times can’t give them information that they need to make “an intelligent decision” about their futures.
They hope the paper’s publisher will be willing to sit down with union members and talk rationally about what cuts would have to be made and what can be done to try to preserve the journalistic integrity of the newspaper.
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With today’s walkout, it’s unclear what The L.A. Times will look like for the Saturday edition.
“It could be a thin newspaper. I don't know what's going to be in it, I don't know who's going to be writing the stuff that's going to be in it because it isn't us,” Pearce said.
He said they don’t know what’s happening at the paper because management froze staffers out of Slack and emails Friday after participating in the strike.
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