David Hardy, a 20-year veteran, also was canned. He was lead plaintiff in a racial discrimination suit that won $3 million from the News when it was owned by the Tribune Co. several years ago. He says he's now planning another suit against new owner Mortimer B. Zuckerman.
"The whole thing is outrageous, especially in terms of black males," said columnist Juan Gonzalez, a former Philadelphia Daily News reporter who has been a prominent advocate of the New York Daily News' news-gathering staff. (The two papers have no connection.)
The National Association of Black Journalists said the firings were particularly outrageous at a time when most big news organizations are trying to make news staffs as ethnically diverse as the communities they cover.
The New York Daily News, however, is no longer like most big news organizations. Its last three years have been on a high wire. Once America's biggest newspaper, it has endured a five-month strike, a sale to British press baron Robert Maxwell and a slump into bankruptcy and uncertainty as Maxwell mysteriously plunged from his yacht amid allegations he plundered his publishing empire.
Daily News circulation stands at 800,000, but its look is postwar black and white.
Zuckerman says he's coming to the rescue. The real-estate and publishing magnate, who also owns the news magazine U.S. News & World Report, said the firings would help the paper recover from its $10-million-a-year tailspin. He said he intended to launch new columns and new features, and restore the paper's voice: "tough, sassy, full of outrage at injustice and street- smart."
The news boss reached agreements with the Daily News craft unions before completing the purchase of the paper last week. The Newspaper Guild held out.
And lost.
The union members were asked to reapply for their jobs, with many receiving form letters rejecting their applications.
Besides minorities, the Zuckerman ax seemed to fall heavily on active unionists, people over age 50 and photographers.
Resisters will rely on the Newspaper Guild of New York, which already has hired flamboyant boycott specialist Ray Rogers. Other guild locals, including Philadelphia's 1,600-member Local 10, are poised to lend support.
Daily News reporter Kitty Caparella, president of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia, lamented the decline of newspaper quality that inevitably follows mass firings.
"It's a really unfortunate sign of the times for everyone," she said, ''when bean counters become more important than quality newspapering and the people dedicated to putting out newspapers."
