Timesland expresses solidarity with Lee unions affected by print reductions

We at the Timesland News Guild want to express solidarity with the newsrooms across the country affected by Lee Enterprises’ poorly managed print reductions.

Iowa-based Lee Enterprises recently cut multiple newspapers in the United States to three printed editions a week.

Lee prints The Roanoke Times daily, as always, but elsewhere in Virginia, now delivers printed newspapers only three days weekly to subscribers of The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Martinsville Bulletin, Danville Register & Bee, Bristol Herald Courier, News Virginian in Waynesboro and Culpeper Star-Exponent.

The Roanoke Times is one of about a dozen Lee-owned papers in Virginia, and one of only three unionized Lee newsrooms in the state.

As of this week, The Roanoke Times has taken over print edition production responsibilities for the Martinsville Bulletin and Danville Register & Bee.

We feel a responsibility to speak up for the Lee-owned newsrooms in Virginia that don’t have our platform, and to show support for all the Lee-owned newsrooms that have been affected across the country, particularly our unionized colleagues at The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Casper-Star Tribune in Wyoming, Southern Illinoisan in Illinois and Daily News in Washington and Oregon.

You are not alone. We stand with you.

For years, Lee has clearly signaled the shift away from print and toward digital. Lee claims this most recent step will allow reporters to spend less time working to make print deadlines and more time on hard hitting, quality, in-depth local news stories.

We love that idea, but Lee is not actually investing to make it happen.

Instead of stepping up support for local papers, Lee has continued to cut jobs this year, stretching skeleton crew newsrooms even thinner. The company imposed pay cuts on nonunion journalists via 3.8% salary reductions or unpaid furloughs.

Instead of shining the spotlight on locally-produced content online, Lee is allowing fewer local stories to show up on the home pages of our websites.

Lee has disinvested in the teams that produce local news, and is using their continued struggles to justify further cuts, rather than providing the support needed to thrive. 

To our readers frustrated with unusable mobile websites, poor customer service and unreliable deliveries: We hear you. We’re frustrated, too. We want to bring you news worth paying for — and we know our colleagues in other newsrooms do, too.