Trevor Metcalfe came to the Virginian-Pilot in 2018 to cover business. Two months after he started, the paper’s owners sold it and the Daily Press to Tribune Publishing.
“We started unionizing then because we just knew that the layoffs and the cuts were coming. And they did,” he said.
Metcalfe and his colleagues at the Pilot and Daily Press organized a one-day strike. They picketed outside the former Virginian-Pilot building at 150 Brambleton Ave. in Norfolk — a building that Tribune sold. It’s now the Pilot Place apartments.
Since 2018, staff for both papers has been slashed in half and wages have stagnated. Now, owners are moving to stop contributions to employee retirement plans, Metcalfe said.
Kendall Warner has been a photographer for both papers since mid-2022.
“I was really, really excited to work here,” she said. “I grew up in Virginia, and the Pilot has always been on my radar as somewhere I wanted to work. You know, they've always had a good reputation.”
Nearly two years in, though, Warner isn’t making enough money to stay in her apartment. She said when her lease is up, she’ll have to find something cheaper.
“That's really hard to keep going, you know, without retirement or any hope of a raise,” she said.
City government reporter Natalie Anderson said more is at stake than just reporters’ livelihoods.
“Democracy really suffers when local news suffers,” she said. “It means fewer eyes keeping tabs on local officials, school officials, how your taxpayer dollars are being spent. Local news journalists are the ones who sit through hours and hours of meetings, and they dig and ask questions to make sense of the world that you live in — to help you be more informed and engaged.”
Metcalfe said with a diminished staff, places like Poquoson and Yorktown don’t get the coverage they need.
“We don't have dedicated people in those positions who can really dig into the community and see what's going on, hold their community leaders, hold their city governments to account,” he said.
Metcalfe said he and others want to continue doing the work they consider a calling.
“But we're struggling to pay bills. A lot of us have second jobs. You know, it's just become unsustainable for us to do something that we really, really love,” he said.
The public relations company handling the newspapers’ owners has not responded to a request for comment.
A number of former Virginian-Pilot employees work for WHRO News. None were involved in writing or editing this story.
