The Newspaper Guild of New York (The Newspaper Guild, Local 3) represents journalists, sales staff, and technical workers in the print and online media industry in the New York metropolitan area. Among its members are reporters, photographers, editors, typographers, commercial artists, technicians, accountants, mail-room and circulation staff, independent translators, and staff members of non-profit organizations. The Guild has been active in campaigns to defeat racial and sex discrimination, to promote worker safety, and to provide job security in an industry that experienced rapid automation and other technical and structural changes.
The Newspaper Guild of New York (NGNY) was chartered in 1933 by a group of journalists led by Heywood Broun, columnist at the New York World Telegram. In December of the same year, representatives of disparate groups of journalists from across the country met in Washington, D.C. and formed the American Newspaper Guild (ANG). The driving forces behind creation of the Guild were Broun and Jonathan Eddy of the New York Times, both from the NYNG. There was considerable opposition within the fledgling Guild to operating as a trade union rather than as a professional association. In that internal struggle, the NYNG strongly supported the trade-union model. The bitter Newark Ledger strike of 1934-1935 proved to be a testing ground for conflicting visions of the Guild's role. While the strike settlement yielded little in the way of concrete gains for the strikers, the Guild emerged from it with an enhanced sense of national solidarity and confirmation of its ability to lead and bargain for its members.
At its founding, the American Newspaper Guild was open only to journalists, broadly defined. However, in 1937 it expanded its jurisdiction to include commercial departments, and added the goals of improved journalistic and ethical standards, and equal employment and advancement opportunities in the newspaper industry to its mission statement. The Guild affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in 1936, but soon abandoned the AFL for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
The ensuing years saw increased international expansion as the Canadian region was established in the 1950s. In 1970, the ANG changed its name to The Newspaper Guild (TNG). Against the backdrop of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, the Guild and its locals heightened their opposition to race and gender discrimination in news industry hiring and promotion practices during the 1960s and 1970s.
The charismatic, energetic Broun, whose politics were forged in the Socialist Party, served as president of the New York Guild for its first six years. Early organizing campaigns enjoyed considerable success. In 1935, the New York Post became the first New York newspaper to unionize, followed by the Daily News in 1936, and the New York Times in 1941. The first magazine to unionize was Time in 1937.
The NGNY has carried out lengthy strikes against several major New York newspapers, including the 16-week Brooklyn Eagle strike of 1937, the 11-week World-Telegram and Sun strike of 1950, and the five-month Daily News strike of 1990-1991.
In 1995, the The Newspaper Guild merged with Communication Workers of America (CWA), and in 1997 it became a sector of the CWA. As of 2011, TNG-CWA represents 34,000 members. The Newspaper Guild of New York represents employees of major dailies, weeklies, many publications of the City's ethnic communities, magazines and other publications of non-profit organizations such as Consumers Union, and news and data services.
In spring 2015, the Guild voted to change its name from the Newspaper Guild of New York to the NewsGuild of New York to better represent digital-based news organizations.
