Unionized journalists at The Bulletin earned a victory this morning, receiving their first-ever contract with Carpenter Media Group, the owner of The Bulletin.
The three-year contract shores up a 40-hour workweek, guarantees pay increases and adds just-cause protection and a severance guarantee, among other concerns.
Gone is Carpenter’s proposal of a weekly story quota that unionized Bulletin employees previously described as punitive. There is also a safeguard regarding generative artificial intelligence.
But the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild’s win didn’t come without rank-and-file cuts. Namely, two long-serving photographers, Joe Kline and Andy Tullis, were laid off in April.
Union member Noemi Arellano-Summer, who joined The Bulletin in 2023 and covers education and public safety, says her team is relieved the contract is in place after two years of negotiations.
“The Bulletin now has a contract and that feels really good,” Arellano-Summer said, adding that she’s disappointed that the contract necessitated layoffs which Carpenter had hinted at since buying EO Media — which owned The Bulletin, Redmond Spokesman and two dozen other publications — in October 2024.
Courtney Scott, a NewsGuild executive officer, told the Source the union was able to postpone those layoffs by holding Carpenter to laws that bar an employer from laying off unionized yet non-contract-holding workers without demonstrating the financial necessity.
“And overall, the biggest thing with any union contract is that management doesn’t have the right to do whatever they want anymore,” Scott said.
Bulletin staffer Suzanne Roig, who reported on local business, took a voluntary layoff in January. There are presently five unionized reporters, along with sole photographer Dean Guernsey.
Overall, Scott says she’s pleased with the agreement. She counts two big wins surrounding pay. While new hires still start at $20/hour, there’s a guaranteed 50-cent annual raise.
Headquartered in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Carpenter Media Group is the fourth-largest media company in the country, owning more than 250 newspapers in the United States and Canada. (In March 2024, Carpenter only owned 27 outlets, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.)
Among Carpenter newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, the Everett Daily Herald is the only other unionized newsroom. Two other unionized Carpenter newspapers are in Hawaii: the Star-Advertiser and the Tribune-Herald. (The Redmond Spokesman is included in The Bulletin contract, yet the newspaper doesn’t presently employ any unionized journalists.) Much of the contract’s language borrows from that of the Daily Herald, whose staff is about the size of The Bulletin’s. Similar contracts create parity among unionized newsrooms, Scott said.
“If Carpenter decides a new company-wide policy that they could implement to their hundreds of non-unionized shops, they have to bargain that with us,” Scott said. “So Bulletin reporters are no longer subject to the whims of people in Alabama.”
Jody Lawrence-Turner, a Carpenter Media Group content director who previously worked as a Bulletin editor, represented local management at the bargaining table. Bulletin publisher John Carr declined to answer questions the Source sent him.
While Scott says she’s generally pleased with the contract signing, she acknowledges that the starting wage is far less than the $25/hour rate NewsGuild had originally asked for after Bulletin employees formed the Central Oregon union chapter in December 2023.
Carpenter’s labor struggles made national headlines in October 2025 when four journalists at Alaskan newspapers published a joint resignation letter regarding “significant edits” the company made to an article about Charlie Kirk’s death, “appearing to yield to pressure from a Republican state lawmaker who had criticized the coverage,” The New York Times reported.
Editor’s note: Peter Madsen worked as a feature writer at The Bulletin between 2016 and 2019.
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