Recently, The M Network was invited to join the bargaining team for One Herald Guild as they attempt to negotiate their first contract. One Herald Guild is the labor union, made up of journalists, that formed at The Miami Herald. They have been in contract negotiations with their parent company, McClatchy, for over two years. (941 days as of June 30, but who’s counting).

You might be asking yourself, why would a marketing and branding agency join a newspaper reporter’s labor union bargaining team?

For starters, as a company, we believe that high-quality, trustworthy, accurate journalism is foundational to any well-functioning community. Whether journalism takes the form of a written story, a photograph, or a video, this stands true. Journalism is essential to our democracy. Not when it provides salacious or sensational entertainment that garners clicks and shares but rather when it provides crucial information about the community, when it holds elected officials and government agencies accountable for their actions, when it presents multiple arguments on critical issues, and, most of all, when it delivers unbiased facts from which readers can develop ideas and opinions to arrive at their own conclusions.

For The M Network, The Miami Herald is a particularly vital resource for our clients.

For the public relations side of our business, we rely on mutual respect and good working relationships with reporters who we know will get the story right – even when their reporting casts our clients in a not-so-flattering light. Of course, we know that a reporter’s job isn’t to make our clients look good, but we rely on them to get the facts right no matter what.

As for the advertising side of our business- please make no mistake, we don’t just purchase ads in The Miami Herald because we need to reach their audience. Many tools and resources reach that same audience. Often, those other tools are also more efficient and cost-effective. More important than reaching an audience, we are eager to have our clients associated with high-quality, trustworthy organizations doing global good in the name of journalism; The Herald brand has been one of them. So, you see, it’s not The Herald’s audience we buy into, but rather the association with their brand.

Those two things brought us to the bargaining table in support of the One Herald Guild. In both our public relations and advertising practices, we rely on high-quality, reliable, trustworthy journalists who do their job passionately beyond reproach, without fear or favor. The fact that McClatchy has been negotiating this contract for two years and 211 days tells us that, until now, they have not been serious about investing in the one thing at The Herald that The M Network cares most about- journalism.

As a community publication, we aren’t concerned with the technology McClatchy invests in or the contracts they finalized with other newsrooms from Boise, Idaho to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and Modesto, California. We care about South Florida and The Miami Herald.

What matters to The M Network and other advertising and public relations firms in South Florida and The Americas, for that matter, is associating our clients with professionalism, excellence, and truthfulness. Those attributes are most significant when defining what a brand stands for. And the brand of our Miami Herald has long been built upon the quality and integrity of its journalists.

Simply put, this is why we are at the bargaining table supporting the One Herald Guild.