By Madeline Papcun | UConn Journalism
April 2024
In the late 1980s, Barbara Selvin was working as a reporter at New York Newsday on the business desk when she became pregnant with her first child.
Selvin said she knew at the time that she did not want to continue working full time while taking care of a newborn baby, so she began looking into her options.
“Newsday did not have any arrangements for part-time work, although they did have generous maternity benefits,” she said. “So between your maternity leave and disability [benefits], you could be out for about five months, but then you were expected to come back to work full time.”
This was not her ideal scenario. Selvin decided to put her investigative skills to good use, beginning a new reporting project on her own time. She talked to other reporters, managers and human resources departments at the 20 largest newspapers in the United States to learn about their family work policies.
Explaining this to me while sitting at a high-top table by the elevators in one of Columbia College’s buildings in Chicago, she laughed. “This was 1987, so newspapers were a big thing. Newspapers were still fat and happy in 1987.”
Selvin presented her findings to Newsday, pointing out that they were “not competitive” in terms of what they offered, and proposing the company offer a job share.
“That seemed to me the easiest to implement because you would have two people doing one job,” Selvin said. “You would have one budget line.”
Newsday agreed to try it out, though Selvin noted their plan was “not a true job share” in that her “partner” was not another reporter on the New York Newsday business desk as she was, but an editor at a different Newsday newspaper.
Additionally, their “shared budget line” only came with one set of health benefits — so Selvin had to rely on her husband’s benefits.
“We both lost vacation pay, sick pay, personal time, disability insurance, long term insurance; there were like six or seven or eight benefits that we lost, so essentially we both took pay cuts to do this,” Selvin said.
Newsday also limited the job share agreement to 18 months.
“But still we were able to continue being in the newsroom, which was what we both wanted,” Selvin said.
At the time, the Graphic Communications International Union invited Selvin to participate in contract talks on the issue of how to accommodate people who wanted to work part time and not just for caregiving reasons.
“It could also be book leave, which is a big thing in news,” Selvin said. “And Newsday was, at the time, the sixth largest paper in the country. It was a destination paper, people came there after they worked at other daily papers.”
“It was a prestigious job to have and so you had top level reporters who wanted to write books and people who were committed to their work as journalists and didn’t want it to stop.”
In the 1990 contract, the GCIU included a provision allowing union members who were full time at Newsday for at least three years to take a minimum of three months and up to 18 months in a part-time position for reasons including “care of young children, elderly parents or disabled family members or other family difficulties that present the employee with serious problems.”
The contract allowed employees on a part-time, family-work schedule to keep their healthcare, though other benefits such as paid vacation, personal days, or holidays that occur on days they were not scheduled to work would be lost.
Selvin was pregnant with her second child in 1990, and took advantage of this new opportunity. When 1992 “rolled around,” Selvin was coming to the end of her second 18-month part-time position.
“They finally said ‘Hey, you gotta either come back or leave,’” Selvin said. But now, with two kids under the age of four, Selvin still wanted to work part time. Newsday would only allow her to do so if she was filling in for another reporter that was on leave, which she did, switching to the Discovery desk to do so.
Then I had the nerve to get pregnant again,” Selvin said.
Again, Selvin was involved in the contract talks. Now, the Newsday company agreed to have an open-ended part time with full prorated benefits.
“Perfect! Everything! Exactly what it should have been in the beginning,” Selvin said.
But, she was not eligible to participate, because she wasn’t covered by the union anymore being a part-time employee. She asked management to reinstate her in a full-time position so she could take advantage of this, and they said they would have to think about it
Two months later and seven months into her third pregnancy, Selvin’s request was denied.
“They told me no, they didn’t want to set a precedent, but I could come back anytime and they’d find something for me,” she said. “I’m still mad about that and I knew that I would never go back to Newsday after that.”
Selvin left her career as a reporter. She stayed home taking care of her three kids for about five years.
“I did slowly go crazy,” she said. “I kind of threw myself into this project and then that project.” She even published her initial findings on the family work policies of the 20 largest newspapers of the time in the September/October issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.
Then, Selvin went into teaching journalism at the college level. In 2007, she became the first full-time professor of Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism “…after helping to design what was then the first School of Journalism in the SUNY system and after seven years as an adjunct instructor in Stony Brook’s former journalism minor,” her bio explains.
“I did find my way into teaching journalism and I loved it,” she said. “That’s what I did for the next 25 years.”
Selvin noted her love of teaching highlighted her influence on others.
“I could see the impact I was having on people’s lives much more clearly than I could from my seat in the newsroom,” Selvin said.
Still, had she been able to extend her part-time reporting position back in the 1990s, Selvin “no doubt” would have stayed.
“I would have loved to have had a longer career in the newsroom. I would have loved to have gone on, I was a good reporter and I would have really liked to push myself,” she said. “On the other hand, I had fun being with my kids.”