Upstairs Downstairs at the Philadelphia Inquirer

By Ralph Cipriano for BigTrial.net

At Philadelphia Media Network, they’re staging an Upstairs Downstairs saga with no end in sight.

In the newsroom of the Inquirer, Daily News and philly.com, members of the NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia have posted signs commemorating the grim fact that they’ve gone more than 3,500 days without a raise. And now management wants 30 union members to take a buyout next month, or else more layoffs may be on the way.

But for the independent contractors and officers of the fat nonprofit that owns PMN, the cash bequeathed by the late philanthropist, Gerry Lenfest, never seems to run out.

Even when management’s grand plans for reviving the hometown papers don’t pan out, nobody who lives upstairs has to worry about taking the hit.

Diane Mastrull is an Inquirer business reporter and weekend editor who’s president of the NewsGuild. When asked about how her members were reacting to the latest round of buyouts, she wrote in an email, “The reaction has been utter disgust — in the newsroom, finance, circulation and advertising.

“My members in each department have endured reorganizations time and time again and have embraced change like champs,” Mastrull wrote. “They are appalled that when leadership mandates fail, it is they who are punished, not the ‘Publisher of the Year’ or other managers who are architects of those changes.”

Mastrull was referring to Publisher Terry Egger, who last year was named Editor & Publisher’s Publisher of the year. Egger did not respond to a request for comment. In February, the NewsGuild, which represents more than 300 employees, including reporters, editors, photographers, and sales reps, declared that it had no confidence in Egger’s leadership.

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And things are getting worse according to the union president.
“Over and over I have heard a fear I’ve never heard before — that we really have no viable plan,” Mastrull wrote. “That’s a scary environment in which to marry, buy a house, have children, and plan for retirement.”

The No. 1 guy on the newsroom seniority list has his own doubts about what management is up to.

“It’s fair to say there’s a sense of betrayal,” wrote Inky columnist Stu Bykofsky in an email.

“We haven’t had a raise in more than a decade, and dozens of new people have been hired over the past year — young quality people — and now the company wants to shed dozens,” said Bykofsky, who has no plans to take the buyout.

“People are free to draw their own conclusions.”
But for the officers and contractors employed by The Philadelphia Foundation, the nonprofit that owns Philadelphia Media Network, it’s a different story. According to a 990 tax return filed in 2017 with the IRS on behalf of The Philadelphia Foundation’s $60 million Special Assets Fund, its officers and independent contractors are thriving

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Allergies plaguing you? Better skip this

The pollen season has become more prolonged over the past 20 years. And doctors in New Jersey are treating more patients for allergies

Briana Vannozzi reports for NJTV News

For seasonal allergy sufferers sneezing is the sound associated with spring. And if you feel like your symptoms are stronger and lasting longer, experts say you’ve hit it on the nose, no pun intended.

“We’ve seen an increase of pollen over the past two decades and things don’t seem to be getting any better for our community,” said Angel Waldron, director of communications for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

You can find pollen everywhere, coating your outdoor furniture and cars, that layer of green dust wreaking havoc on the eyes, nose and sinuses. Nationwide, more than 50 million Americans are affected by allergies. According to the AAFA, it’s the sixth leading cause of chronic illness in the United States.

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“Pollen season has extended from 11 to 27 days over the past 20 years. It used to be mostly March to May that you would see pollen counts increase during the spring season. But now you can find pollen from February and to June,” said Waldron.

“We’re seeing an increased number of patients who are sensitized, as well as we’re seeing an increased number of things people are sensitive to. It’s no longer one or two items,” said Rutgers University allergy and immunology specialist Dr. Leonard Bielory.

Trees, grass, ragweed

Bielory says the overall climate has changed, causing the New Jersey season to start earlier and last longer. Trees pollinate first, beginning in February or March depending on how early warmer weather comes. Then comes grass pollen in June and ragweed at the end of August. But weary noses get little reprieve.

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Hundreds of Puffins Washed Up Dead on an Alaskan Beach. Here’s why.

This latest mass-mortality event is another sign of the Arctic’s rapidly changing climate.

Ed Yong reports for The Atlantic

Tufted puffins
Tufted puffins look like gussied-up versions of the more widely known Atlantic puffins.TRYTON2011 / SHUTTERSTOCK

Lauren Divine first heard that the birds were dying on October 13, 2016, when one of her colleagues stumbled across the corpse of a tufted puffin while walking along a beach on Alaska’s St. Paul Island. The next day: another carcass. Soon, several of the island’s 450 residents started calling in with details of more stranded puffins. Some were already dead. Others were well on their way—emaciated, sick, and unable to fly.

Nestled in the middle of the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia, St. Paul is the largest of the four Pribilof Islands, which together support more than 2 million seabirds. Dead individuals aren’t uncommon. Divine’s team, which works on environmental issues that affect St. Paul’s Aleut community, would usually expect to find one or two on its monthly beach surveys. But that October, “you couldn’t walk more than a few steps before having to pick up another bird,” she says. “It was pretty apparent that something was really wrong in the environment.”

The team stepped up its surveys, braving biting winds and crashing waves to comb the beaches on all-terrain vehicles. Over the next few months, it located more than 350 bodies, a rate that was about 70 times higher than normal. Stranger still, most of these birds were tufted puffins—a species that very rarely washes up dead. In the previous decade, the team had only ever found six puffin carcasses, and never in the winter months. It seemed that the puffins had become the latest species to experience a mass-mortality event—a large-scale die-off, of a kind that’s becoming more and more common.

To work out how many puffins had actually died, Timothy Jones of the University of Washington used the locations of the known bodies and data on local wind patterns to simulate where the dead birds were coming from. He estimated that between 3,150 and 8,800 tufted puffins perished in the final months of 2016.

What killed these birds? Most of them were intact, with no signs of either predator attacks or disease. Some of them had saxitoxin—a potent poison made by algae—in their stomach, but at levels almost 100 times lower than what would be considered safe for humans to eat. Instead, the most likely cause of death was starvation. The birds were extremely thin, with weak flight muscles and very little body fat. “They literally didn’t have enough to eat and became weak to the point of death,” says Julia Parrish of the University of Washington, who led the study.

Tufted puffins look like fancier versions of the more widely known Atlantic puffins, with elaborate yellow eyebrows that sweep backwards down their neck. On land, they have a clownish, goofy disposition. But in the sea, they become grace personified, using their streamlined body and sickle-shaped wings to fly underwater in pursuit of small fish.

But what if there are no fish to pursue?

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Kushner wins again in Jersey City fight

 Chris Fry reports for Jersey Digs – May 29, 20193

Stalled One Journal Square Lot Jersey City 2
One Journal Square could’ve been a transformative project for the area. Now the site sits stalled, leaving a massive hole in the heart of Journal Square, Jersey City. Photo by Darrell Simmons/Jersey Digs.

The bloom of spring hasn’t been particularly rosy for Jersey City’s lawyers, as the city will be forking over $137,000 in legal fees following a double dose of bad news at the courthouse.

The first setback happened just as the calendar turned to May and stems from the blockbuster Federal lawsuit filed by Kushner Companies last year. The case alleged that anti-Trump bias from the city was the root cause behind the company’s stalled One Journal Square project, and Kushner had filed a request for records from the city regarding various tax abatements that were granted to other developers at the time.

After the city told Kushner their request was “overly broad,” the company filed an Open Public Records Act (OPRA) lawsuit and won a favorable ruling from Judge Francis Schultz in Hudson County Court. The city will have to turn over the requested records and is liable for legal expenses because Kushner was the prevailing party, and Schultz ruled on April 29 that Jersey City will have to pay Kushner’s legal fees of $95,000.

On the heels of that ruling, another OPRA lawsuit has not gone the city’s way. This one stems from a legal challenge over the Sixth Street Embankment, an abandoned elevated freight line that the city wishes to turn into a park. The land is owned by Steve and Victoria Hyman, who filed a lawsuit in 2016 over an ordinance that the city passed that was meant as a step to acquire the land.

The Hymans were seeking bills, invoices, vouchers, and communications between the city and outside parties as part of their case and filed a separate OPRA lawsuit looking to obtain them. Last week, a two-judge appellate panel affirmed the city violated OPRA for not turning over the records and ordered they pay the Hyman’s legal bills of $42,000.

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Jersey Shore lawmakers scramble to fix unpopular rental tax law

Nicholas Pugliese reports for WHYY

In this file photo, a summer rental sign is seen in front of a home just one block from the ocean, in Belmar, N.J. (Mel Evans/AP Photo, file)
In this file photo, a summer rental sign is seen in front of a home just one block from the ocean, in Belmar, N.J. (Mel Evans/AP Photo, file)

New Jersey lawmakers are moving to exempt many Shore-goers from an unpopular new tax on home rentals, but it’s still unclear when the change would take effect — and who exactly it would help.

A vocal group of renters and owners has been pushing for the change since last year, when lawmakers worked with Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, to create a nearly 12% tax on short-term rentals.

The law was intended to make accommodations booked through online marketplaces such as Airbnb subject to the same taxes as hotels and motels.

But the way the “Airbnb tax” was written, it applies to all rentals lasting less than 90 days not booked through a real estate broker, including Shore properties filled with the help of yard signs, classified ads, Facebook groups or personal connections.

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The Assembly voted unanimously this week to approve a measure, A-4814, that would make the tax apply only to rentals arranged through marketplaces where bookings can be offered, reserved and paid.

That would spare renters who arrange their stays directly with property owners. The change would take effect immediately upon being signed into law by the governor, according to the bill.

But Sen. Vin Gopal, a Democrat from Monmouth County sponsoring a companion bill in the upper house, said he wants to amend the measure so the exemption applies more narrowly to owners with two or fewer units and their guests.

And under his bill, the change would not take effect “until the first day of the first calendar quarter beginning at least 60 days following the date of enactment” — meaning Oct. 1 at the earliest.

Asked which version would be the one eventually sent to the governor, Gopal said he didn’t know.

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