Because no community is too small.

Dear colleagues,

We, the journalists of the Capital Gazette, the Carroll County Times and the Baltimore Sun Media Group, are uniting to form a union.

Local journalism is unique. We are your neighbors, the eyes and ears of your communities. We report on what matters most to you every day: the crime down the block, the local football team, your child’s school. Whether the sun shines or disaster strikes, we are right there with you. As local news outlets dwindle, we know now more than ever that quality community news is a gift too precious to lose.

But that important work grows more difficult each day because of decisions made by distant corporate owners on behalf of shareholders. Decisions that have led to smaller newsrooms, stagnant wages and limited resources.

After years of our company underinvesting in our newsrooms, we are tired.

We are tired of bearing a workload that requires a newsroom four times the size. We are tired of not receiving reasonable cost of living raises, despite the fact we bear the additional responsibilities of our former co-workers. We are tired of having staffs too small to cover all the stories our readers care about.

We’ve watched talented colleagues leave jobs they love in order to afford a house, or start a family, or just live without the constant threat of layoffs. Nobody should have to choose between doing a job they love and having people they love.

So we aren't waiting for someone else to make decisions that affect the communities we cover, communities in which those decision-makers have never set foot.

Together, as the Chesapeake News Guild, we are fighting for change.

We want respect for the work we do and a living wage to go along with it. We want real investment in our newsrooms and the people who make them work. We want a seat at the table.

That is why we are asking Tribune Publishing, our parent company, to voluntarily recognize us as a unit of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. We believe in the future of journalism, and we hope Tribune will join us in building that future.

Together, we will fight to protect local journalism – because no community is too small. Please join us.

—The Chesapeake News Guild Organizing Committee

Three newsrooms. One union.

Together, the Chesapeake News Guild spans the entire Baltimore metro area, touching the lives of more than two million people.

The Capital Gazette

The Capital, with a handful of reporters and photographers, is a daily print paper covering Maryland's capital city Annapolis – the seat of three separate governments, a national historic landmark and ground zero for sea level rise. Our stories about Anne Arundel County and communities in Prince George’s County also appear in the Maryland Gazette, the Bowie Blade-News and the Crofton-West County Gazette.

The staff of The Capital continues to work every day to report the news Annapolis needs. We've never missed a day of print publication.

The Baltimore Sun Media Group

Once we were many. But today, our hyperlocal weeklies share a mission: to cover our communities in intimate detail, to know them inside and out.

Some of our many publications include: The Aegis (Harford County); The Howard County Times; The Towson Times; The Catonsville Times; and Soundoff (Ft. Meade).

Together, we give the communities we cover a voice, look out for their interests and bring neighbors together.

The Carroll County Times

For more than a century, the Carroll County Times has been the eyes, ears and voice of a community with a rich agricultural heritage and an ever transforming future. This tight-knit group of reporters and photographers remains dedicated to covering Carroll’s development and history and telling the stories that matter to the people who live and work here.

Our history

Once, we were many separate community newspapers, each with a long history and a sizable staff. Old-timers like to impress new reporters with stories of the good old days, when a paper covering one county had dozens of reporters – enough to cover every community meeting, every burglary, every school play. Some of our papers competed with one another, and nearly all competed with the Baltimore Sun.

But in the last few decades, our newsrooms were each purchased by the Sun, which was owned by the Tribune Company, later named tronc (The company recently reversed course, changing its name back to Tribune Publishing Company).

Local news around the country is facing a crisis, in part because the internet trained people to stop paying for their news. But newsrooms like ours have been stretched thinner by profit-hungry shareholders and extravagantly paid executives, who make cuts at the bottom to cushion their lives at the top.

Today, like other newsrooms around the country, our staffs are a fraction of the size they once were. All of us feel the sting of years of layoffs and attrition – and those of us that remain carry the weight of Tribune’s underinvestment in our workloads. Some of our weekly publications have just one reporter.

Alone, we are small. But together, we are the backbone of our region’s journalistic landscape. We tell the stories of millions. We publish information people rely on. We are the engine that makes our company work.

Our relationship with the Baltimore Sun

Our papers are owned by the same company as the Baltimore Sun. The Baltimore Sun has been unionized since 1949, and their unit fully supports our organizing efforts. From the Baltimore Sun’s union chair, Scott Dance:

“The Baltimore Sun, whose roots as a union shop date to 1934, once competed against these community papers. But its suburban bureaus have disappeared as it instead leans on these papers, which it purchased in 1997 and 2014, for hyperlocal coverage. The Sun's Guild employees stand in solidarity with these colleagues – it is long past time for them to earn the same rights and benefits Sun staff have defended for decades.”