Meet the Publisher
Mr. Vega's reputation was earned while the publisher of the Detroit News Agency, the agency that ran the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. During his tenure, Vega got into with the unions over work practices and compensation packages and as a result, 1400 employees- from production on down to Editorial- walked off their job and went on strike. The strike lasted more than twenty months and led to the crushing of the union by the management, no easy feat in such a union town as Detroit Rock City. During the strike, the paper wound up losing more than $100 million and lost 30% of it's circulation, but still managed to get a paper out every day of the strike. When strikers blocked distribution trucks, Vega managed to still somehow get the papers out via helicopter. Vega claims he was merely streamlining operations, modernizing the way the paper worked and getting rid of redundancies. The union claimed that Vega was a union-busting heavy with a Mr. Burns-like heart who brought in scab-workers and security goons to break the strike. It was during this period where Vega got his nickname (which he claims to like) "Darth Vega" and it was during this period where things got so hot and heavy he had to move into a window-less office to avoid harm and carried around a gun.
The hiring of Frank Vega leads to all sorts of questions. Mainly that of why him? It's especially interesting in light of the fact that the union contracts are up July 1 of this year. It's pretty easy to surmise that a newspaper that's already cut their writing staff to the bone (see disappeared and early-retired columnists) and cut benefits would turn next to wringing concessions out of the union as a way of getting more blood out of stone. The issue has even been raised by the Gavster himself, a man who knows all about broken unions (sorry- we couldn't help it), when he told the Examiner in an interview last week that one of the issues that he'll probably have to face over the upcoming year is a newspaper strike.
Of course, Vega could have just given a really gosh-darn good job interview. We shall see.