Reporters and photographers at “The Bulletin” are mad as hell and aren’t going to take this anymore.
In a news release the Source obtained July 8, unionized staffers at “The Bulletin” detailed their ongoing struggles to convince Carpenter Media Group, which obtained the daily from when it purchased EO Media Group in October 2024, to forego planned layoffs, pay a living wage and arrive at a contract agreement with its union. Bulletin staffers urged readers to sign an online petition and join an email campaign directed toward Carpenter Media Group. Barring corporate acquiescence, unionized staffers urge the paper’s readers to cancel their subscriptions.
Bulletin staffers, which include reporters and photographers, unionized through a Central Oregon unit of the Pacific NewsGuild in December 2023. At the time, “The Bulletin” was owned by EO Media. The staffers say “The Bulletin” currently pays about $21/hour, with the highest-paid reporter making around $25/hour. That’s not enough to track with the cost of living in Central Oregon. According to the Massachusetts Institute for Technology’s Living Wage Calculator, a living hourly wage in Bend, earned by two adults with two children, is $32.38. The estimate features geographically specific costs for food, childcare, health care, housing, transportation and other basic needs.
Unionized Bulletin employees also want to stymie the corporation’s intention to slash the newspaper’s already skeletal staff, which counts less than 20 editorial employees, seven of which are non-unionized editors and about eight reporters and photographers, according to the newspaper’s masthead. In early 2016, “The Bulletin” newsroom included about 35 total editorial employees, approximately 20 of whom were reporters, designers or photographers.
Carpenter Media Group is headquartered in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and now owns more than 250 publications in the U.S. and Canada. The company has been on a shopping spree in recent years, scooping up media companies concentrated in the Northwest, including EO Media Group, Pamplin Media Group and Sound Publishing, as reported by Poynter Institute. Carpenter acquired more than 30 publications in Oregon alone. When Carpenter became the owner of “The Bulletin,” it rolled out layoffs which ensnarled the night city editor and several lower-level journalists.
In the press release, the authors beseeched the public, reminding them that community journalists are community members, as well.
“Reporters at ‘The Bulletin’ are your neighbors,” business and health reporter Suzanne Roig said in the release. “We care about our community, but we can’t afford to make Bend our home without support from our readers.”
After the initial layoffs last year, Carpenter indicated it intended to continue letting people go, setting the senior-most reporter and photographer — and another photographer — in their crosshairs. Roig said the reporter is most likely her.
“Everyone was just reeling from the fact that EO Media was having so much trouble they had to put us up for sale,” Roig told the Source in a phone conversation from where she now lives in Tacoma, Washington. She regularly travels to Bend to report stories, she said.
The Pacific NewsGuild stepped in to stall further layoffs.
Courtney Scott, the Pacific NewsGuild’s executive officer, has been attending bargaining sessions with Carpenter’s lawyer and its in-house Bulletin representative, who’s also an editor. Scott said she made the case that, according to labor laws, Carpenter can’t initiate layoffs while bargaining with the union, unless it can demonstrate an economic crisis with financial reporting. As a private company, Carpenter’s profit-and-loss sheets aren’t publicly available. Carpenter wouldn’t make them available to the union, according to Scott.
“Show us you don’t have the money and then we’ll bargain over it,” Scott said. “And they wouldn’t do that, which to us says they absolutely do have the money. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have any problem showing it.”
Scott said she and unionized employees stood firm, unwilling to negotiate layoffs until they have a contract in place that would raise wages and give structure to how layoffs would be rolled out, for example.
“We’re not saying they can’t lay people off; we’re just saying they can’t do it in whatever manner they want, and they can’t do it before we have a contract,” Scott said.
Scott will enter another bargaining session on behalf of the union with Carpenter in the coming week.
Scott said the layoffs and pay restructuring that Carpenter initiated at the “Everett Herald,” which it acquired in 2024, serves as a harbinger for “The Bulletin.” Carpenter offers wages, in some cases, barely above the city-minimum hourly wage of $20.24. For an employee to make $21.50, they’d have to meet a daily quota of three stories a day, Scott said. Coming up short comes out of the staffer’s paycheck. Scott is presently negotiating a contract between Carpenter and Herald employees.
In the initial press release, unionized Bulletin staffers made clear they aren’t asking readers to cancel their subscriptions today; only if Carpenter doesn’t meet their demands. Presently, the union has initiated a letter-writing petition campaign they hope will flood the email inboxes of Tim Prince, the CEO and president of Carpenter Media Group, and John Carr, the new publisher of “The Bulletin” and Carpenter’s regional manager. The Source reached out to Carr and Prince at Carpenter Media for comment; neither responded by press time.
“We hope the public will support us by signing the petition in support,” Roig said.
The initiative was completely worker-decided, Scott added, explaining that they chose this course from a buffet of options the union presented.
Subscriptions at “The Bulletin” currently run $18/month.
Roig and Scott said the union has had difficulty getting Carpenter to negotiate the contract. Beyond living wages, the unionized staffers are lobbying for severance and job protections. Reporters and photographers at “The Bulletin” are already grappling with the 37 ½ hour workweek Carpenter put into place. Employees were given the option to work a four-day work week with unemployment insurance payments to cover the fifth day, which Roig says is too little to make up the difference.
In the meantime, Roig said she worries about the local knowledge that is disappearing from “The Bulletin” newsroom.
“‘The Bulletin’ has been in Bend for more than 100 years, covering the community’s successes, losses and barriers,” Roig said. “And we want to be able to continue to tell the community’s stories. Writing is not factory work.”
Editor’s note: Peter Madsen worked as a feature writer at “The Bulletin” between 2016 and 2019.
This article appears in Source Weekly July 3, 2025.
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Very few make a living wage in Bend.
I’ve been here long enough to recall when the Bulletin was truly an exceptional newspaper.
Gene Barton…Bob Shotwell…the list goes on.
Sadly those days are long, long gone and over with.
Today the employees are scuttling their own ship advocating against an out of state owner who truly isn’t interested nor inclined to respond favorably. EO got out while the getting was good and cut its losses.
Bottom Line Up Front – the Product produced by the Bulletin (news) is below par with other and newer news/entertainment providers here locally. In today’s competitive marketplace this translates into dollars and cents. Can’t afford to pay? Can’t afford to play.
Bend media is MIA. This is what the City of Bend and Brooks Resources and the developers want. If Bend had real media……..residents would be shocked at what is happening under our noses.
First order of business for the new owners of The Bulletin is to bust the union and start fresh.
The Bulletin is completely irrelevant to what is going on in Bend and has been for many years. Remember, this is not a chicken and egg situation. Advertising goes where the readers go and the readers abandoned ship a long time ago.
As for the union … out with it. This helps nobody and as long as the union continues to use words like “demand” they’ll get no sympathy. They think they can dictate who can be laid off? Are you kidding me?
It is no surprise to read all the anti-union comments here. Far too many residents enjoy a lifestyle that relies on low wage workers–whether it be local journalists, the folks who serve their lattes and bag their groceries, or the people who cut their big green lawns. We still do have “poverty with a view” here.and unions–at the Bulletin, in health care, in our schools, in government, on the buses, and more–are fighting to improve the living standards and working conditions of all of the people who actually do the work that make our lives better. Sign the petition and support these workers. To my sisters and brothers at the Bulletin, I say “hang in there. There is power in a union.” Thank you for this article. –Michael Funke