UNEQUAL: A STUDY OF PAY AT THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

June 2023

Compiled by Jennifer Smith Richards, Joe Mahr, Sarah Freishtat, Madeline Buckley, Michael Phillips and Stacey Wescott

The workers of the Chicago Tribune Guild are committed to bringing accurate, comprehensive and meaningful news to the communities we serve. We’re driven by this mission and urge the Tribune’s hedge fund owner, Alden Global Capital, to invest in this effort — not diminish our newsgathering ability and devalue our journalists.

We are working to create a more equitable environment for the Guild members of the Chicago Tribune, and we’re calling on Alden Global Capital to do the same. Our analysis of pay by gender, by race/ethnicity and over time found alarming trends since Alden purchased this newsroom. We knew it would be bad, but it’s worse than we thought.

We are losing ground in working toward equal pay among the Guild-represented employees of this newsroom. We are losing ground in the number of employees, and in newsroom resources as a result of Alden’s financial disinvestment in our newspaper. We have lost ground in our wages, period, as management denied most of our members raises even as the cost of living climbed higher.

In short: we are losing ground in ensuring the Tribune is a place where journalists can afford to stay, experience professional growth, and tell the stories that our communities deserve. And it has gotten markedly worse under Alden.

Key findings: Losing ground – all around

Alden has forced workers out. Since 2019, the number of Guild-represented workers in the Tribune newsroom has gone from 134 journalists to only 76 — cutting the number of journalists covering our communities by nearly half.
There is an unconscionable pay gap between journalists of color and white journalists at the Chicago Tribune. The median wage for a full-time journalist of color is $10,000 less than a white full-time journalist. Comparing median pay for our full-time workers, for every dollar that a white journalist is paid, Alden values our journalists of color at 86 cents. From the data we can crunch, this gap can’t be attributed to differences in worker’s ages/ experience.
Since Alden took over, it has reduced the median annual pay for full-time, salaried journalists — our largest group of workers. White journalists are making nearly $15,000 less today and journalists of color have had pay reduced by nearly $13,000.
Alden continues to place a lower value on women. The median pay for women was $20,571 less than their male peers at the Chicago Tribune. For salaried women, the pay gap has grown since Alden took over the Tribune: Where a median salary for women used to be $19,700 lower than men, it’s now about $23,800 lower. Just like the race/ethnicity gap, this gap can’t be explained by differences in ages/ experience.
Workers don’t earn enough from Alden to make ends meet in Chicago. In a market where average annual household spending in recent years was nearly $67,000, an astounding 42% of workers make less than that. Even worse: Alden pays about 8% of Guild workers less than $50,000 a year.
Most workers who were here in 2018 haven’t had a raise since. In fact, only a dozen workers total have had a raise at all in the last five years, regardless of when they were hired, even as inflation skyrocketed.
Alden has cut its investment in the newsroom by half. Full time payroll has dropped by 54% when inflation is factored in.

Methodology

Members of the Chicago Tribune Guild received multiple years’ worth of raw pay data from Media News Group/Alden, including data that represented pay of the paper’s previous owner. The most recent data included is from March 2023. Each set of data included information about service time with the employer, employee demographics including age, race/ethnicity and gender and job title, and some data included information about raise amounts, dates of pay increases and reasons for changes in pay.

The analysis relies on the employer’s gender categories, which are binary, as well as workers’ reported race or ethnicity. Because identifying even median salaries of small numbers of people could reveal individuals’ salaries, the Guild standardized some characteristics such as age, race and gender and grouped employees by those variables. Also, because results for small groups of people could be misleading, the Guild suppressed results from any grouping that had fewer than five people.

Analysis was conducted in R. For the purposes of auditing and fact-checking, only deidentified data was used.

Total inequality in race/ethnicity

We’ve long known our newsroom does not represent the diversity of our community. In a city where well over half of residents are people of color, more than 70% of Tribune Guild employees are white. Alden’s takeover did not lead to significant improvement in correcting the imbalance. There are only eight Black journalists in the Guild.

The employer does not pay Guild journalists of color as much as their white counterparts, and that has worsened under Alden: Our salaried, full-time workers who identify as Black, Latino, Asian or multiracial make less on the dollar than white peers now than they did in 2019.

We initially grouped non-white employees together to allow a statistical look at this issue and found that our full-time Guild journalists of color now make 86 cents on the dollar to white workers. But it’s valuable to view our workers by unique race and ethnicity categories, too, to highlight the devaluing way the employer views pay for some groups.

That analysis showed that for every dollar it pays white full-time workers, Alden pays our Asian journalists at only 80 cents, Hispanic or Latino journalists at 83 cents and Black journalists at 90 cents.

This pay gap doesn’t appear to be explained by experience. The limited number of employees of color makes it hard to make broad comparisons by years of experience, but in one way we can look – by age – the gap remains. For full-time, salaried employees over 40, in 2019, the median pay of persons of color was 89 cents for every dollar of the median pay of white employees in the same age range. By 2023, Alden chose to pay that group of journalists of color 74 cents for every dollar it paid the white workers.

When it comes to median pay, no racial or ethnic group is significantly better off now than in 2019. Most groups lost ground, and wage inequalities prevail.

Female inequality in pay

Pay gaps between women and men in the Chicago Tribune newsroom have also widened since Alden took over the company. In 2019, salaried and hourly female workers’ median pay was 79 cents for every dollar of male median pay. In 2023, the median pay of salaried women was just 75 cents per dollar of male median pay, and hourly workers’ pay had dropped to 72 cents on the dollar

This gap, like the gap between journalists of color and white journalists, also cannot fully be explained by level of experience. When comparing subgroups with enough workers to evaluate, it’s clear that even men and women with comparable experience aren’t paid equally. For example, again using age as a proxy for experience, our female workers who are between 45 and 49 years old make about $3,000 less than men at the same stage of their careers.

Gutted payroll, and paychecks

Alden has driven out workers over the past four years – both actively through buy-outs, and by creating working conditions that send employees fleeing to other publications or careers. The number of employees has dropped 43% in four years. And because Alden has refused to replace most of the staff (and when new hires are made, they typically are paid less than the workers who left) the full-time payroll has been slashed by 46%.

The majority of workers who stayed through buyouts and disinvestment since 2018 have not had a raise. Just 10 Guild workers were given raises in 2021 and 2022 combined, and together, those workers are making a paltry $15,000 more than they did before.

If that’s not bad enough, consider that inflation was 19% in that four-year period.

The result: Money directly from the pockets of our journalists. Using official Consumer Price Index inflation rates, we calculated the compounding effect of inflation on the salaries of the 45 workers who have gone without a single raise since 2018. Because of inflation and Alden’s refusal to pay appropriate wages, those workers took what amounted to a significant pay cut.

Collectively, those workers lost more than half a million dollars in buying power.

Another way to look at this is through median pay. For full-time, salaried employees – our largest group of workers – a worker in the middle range, with half of the group making more and half making less, now makes $17,763 a year less than the typical 2019 employee. Factor in inflation, and the purchasing power of the typical salaried employee dropped $35,216 from the typical one in 2019. That’s money that workers could have used toward a down payment on a home, to purchase a car, or to send a child to college.

It’s money that makes a real-life impact and its absence brought real-life financial consequences to many of our workers.

For full-time hourly employees, the picture is still disappointing. The median salary is $4,006 more than in 2019. But factor in inflation, and the purchasing power dropped for this group too: by $6,919.

Summary & Recommendations

In just four years, Alden has siphoned nearly half of workers’ wage resources away from the newsroom, a practice that is compounded when inflation is considered.

During that time, Alden has continued to undervalue Guild women and journalists of color, contributing to unacceptable inequities in wages. Under Alden, a marked disinvestment in a newsroom that serves Chicago’s communities is causing harm to both the working journalists and the readers we serve. The city of Chicago deserves better than what Alden has offered so far.

Guild members recommend the following action items, mirroring the principles members have expressed at the bargaining table:

Act swiftly to repair harm caused by pay disparities among journalists of color and women. Alden management should work with the Guild leadership to identify the greatest pay inequities and invest in correcting them.
Raise wages immediately for workers who experienced pay loss because their wages have not increased since 2018. Those workers deserve to be treated fairly, not punished, by Alden for having continued to work for the Tribune.
Commit to a respectable pay scale and annual raises going forward. Minimum wages and year-over-year increases that aim to keep pace with inflation will make a difference in the lives of Tribune journalists, and create a pay structure that is fair and equitable across the newsroom.
Enact policies that prioritize diversity in hiring. We need more Black, Latino and Asian journalists — as well as those from other underrepresented backgrounds — to join our workforce. These voices matter to Guild journalists and to the communities we cover.