'WSJ' Staffers Picket Dow Jones Meeting

By: Seth Sutel, AP Business Writer (AP) Reporters and editors from The Wall Street Journal, escalating an increasingly hostile standoff with management, picketed across the street from Dow Jones & Co.'s annual meeting Wednesday to demand better wage and health care benefits.

Several reporters from the newspaper, including two who won Pulitzer prizes last month, also planned to speak out against Dow Jones executives at the annual meeting itself and press for the union's demands.

About 50 journalists carried placards criticizing the company's contract proposal and chanted, "Zero percent, what will pay the rent" and "Peter Peter benefits eater" in reference to chairman and CEO Peter Kann.

The protests follow several months of tense negotiations between the company and its main union, the Independent Association of Publishers' Employees. The union has engaged in other protests this year, including picketing in front of the company's headquarters and showing up late as part of a work-to-rule job action.

Such protests are rare at Dow Jones, which has been known for a paternalistic culture that demanded loyalty from employees and rewarded them with generous benefits. E.S. Browning, a longtime stock market reporter with the paper who serves on the union's bargaining committee, says that culture has been eroding.

"There's been a series of cutbacks over the years, and people are concerned that they're not just cutting fat," Browning said. "There are hard feelings on both sides."

Union-represented employees at Dow Jones have been working without a contract for about a year. The union replaced its president and bargaining committee after its rank and file members rejected an earlier agreement reached with management last fall.

The offer currently on the table calls for a reduction in health care benefits and no wage proposal increase for 2003. The wage proposal for this year and other details were not immediately available.

In addition to Browning, the union also recruited another veteran reporter, Charles Gasparino, to its bargaining committee. However, Gasparino quit the paper last week to take a job at Newsweek, marking the latest defection of high-level talent from the paper.

The New York Times lured away Lawrence Ingrassia, an assistant managing editor at the Journal, to be its business and financial editor in January, and several top reporters have also left in recent months.

The union has also sponsored a shareholder proposal, to be voted on at the annual meeting, that would separate the jobs of chief executive and chairman.

Other companies have come under pressure to make similar moves, and Walt Disney Co. did so earlier this year following a shareholder protest.

Dow Jones spokeswoman Brigitte Trafford declined to comment on how the talks with the union were going, other than to say that the company continued to "negotiate in good faith ... We remain confident that a mutually agreeable settlement will be reached."

Last week, Dow Jones reported a 73% drop in first quarter profits, skewed by a large non-cash gain in the comparable quarter a year ago. The results before one-time items beat expectations. Revenue rose 12% amid an improving advertising climate, but the company said advertising remained far below normal levels and that the company would keep a careful eye on costs.

Employees say the company's outlook is better than executives' cautious forecast.

The union has also taken its case to the Bancroft family, Dow Jones' controlling shareholder, with an open letter to them in an advertisement on the op-ed page in Tuesday editions of The New York Times. The letter called the company's wage and health care proposals "a direct attack on the paper's ability to attract and retain quality reporting talent."

It wasn't the first time the union has used Dow Jones' annual meeting to press its case. In 1999 two other reporters fresh from winning Pulitzer prizes spoke out at the meeting against a company proposal to cut its contributions to employee's retirement funds.