NO PICTURES, PLEASE

The National Labor Relations Board has found that management at the State Journal-Register may have illegally videotaped employees during an informational picket outside the paper last fall, according to the United Media Guild that represents newsroom employees. Shannon Duffy, UMG business representative, said that picketers noticed Clarissa Williams, president and publisher of the SJ-R, and someone from the human resources department recording picketers on the sidewalk from inside the newspaper building. “I don’t know who it was, but somebody came up to me and said ‘Hey, Clarissa is in there with a camcorder,’” Duffy recalls. “Things like this are thinly veiled attempts to intimidate employees.” Williams could not be reached for comment. Duffy said that an NLRB investigator last week told him that the board has determined that a union complaint about the video recording has merit. “The board found these behaviors to be coercive and an attempt at employee intimidation,” the union says in a posting on its website. The board will give the newspaper an offer to settle the complaint, which usually includes an admission that management broke the law as well as a posting in the workplace of employee rights under federal law, according to the union. Union members complain that they haven’t received raises since GateHouse Media acquired the State-Journal Register in 2007. While SJ-R employees fi ght for raises, New Media Investment Group, a holding company for GateHouse, has continued snapping up papers from sea to shining sea. In June, it acquired the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio for $47 million in a deal that included several ancillary publications. GateHouse now publishes more than 125 daily newspapers.