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Posted July 14, 2011

Station Management Imposes New Contract on Unit

AFTRA members who work at Peoria’s WEEK/WHOI-TV are Central Illinois’ home team. We are photographers, producers, reporters, anchors, meterologists and mulitmedia journalists. Combined, we account for more than 500 years of local news experience. Together, we are working through our union, AFTRA, to bring our community the best possible news, sports and weather coverage they deserve because we are local professionals committed to doing our jobs well.

But here’s a scary forecast that you won’t see televised on WEEK/WHOI-TV: Wall Street is threatening the news professionals who Peoria – and all of Central Illinois – have come to know and trust. A company called Silver Point, a private equity firm, has controlling interest in Granite Broadcasting which owns the local broadcast operation of WEEK-TV and WHOI News. If Silver Point has its way, local news professionals may soon be off the air.

AFTRA members who work at WEEK/WHOI-TV have been in contract negotiations with station owners since November 2010. Negotiations stalled on Feb. 18, 2011. Despite months of good faith bargaining, concessions to company proposals and repeated requests by AFTRA for the company to return to the negotiating table, to date, the company has flatly refused. On July 16, Management imposed the terms of their "last, best and final" offer.

The truth is Silver Point is not interested in local news. It is only interested in making money. Silver Point has cut the local news budget, eliminated the jobs of 20 union engineers, installed robotic cameras in their place, has piped in local weather from Fort Wayne, Indiana and soon, the entire local news broadcast could be outsourced to another city.

Will you wake up one day to find your local news is no longer local?

Peoria’s local news team is fighting back because the people of Central Illinois deserve better, and so do you! You have the power to prevent this. Please, help us raise our voice.

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