Staff at the New York Daily News and Forbes walked out on Thursday, adding to growing unease in the US newspaper industry in a week when the Los Angeles Times fired more than 100 journalists.

Mike Gartland, a city hall reporter and Daily News union steward, targeted owner Alden Global Capital with a reference to one of the paper’s most famous headlines, Ford to City: Drop Dead, a 1975 response to President Gerald Ford’s refusal to offer New York a financial bailout.

Gartland posted: “Alden to News: Drop Dead. Defend the Daily News!”

Once home to legendary reporters including Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, the paper is a shadow of its former self.

The Daily News “once boasted the ‘largest circulation in America’ and was 4,000 employees strong,” the union said. But “by the year 2000, circulation dropped by nearly half and the publication underwent several rounds of devastating job cuts. Since the spring of 2022, 27 people have left and the [News] Guild staff now totals 54 people.”

Citing changes to overtime policy and “chronic cuts” as fuel for the first Daily News walkout since 1991 – the year the paper was bought by the British press baron Robert Maxwell – staffers planned a 24-hour operation. Protesters rallied outside the Broadway building where the paper uses a co-working space, having closed its Manhattan newsroom in 2020.

Alden, a “vulture” fund known for slashing newspaper budgets in search of profits, bought the company that owned the Daily News the following year.

“Alden wants to act as if we are not being chiseled,” Gartland said. “We’re not going to engage in that intellectual dishonesty. In reality, we’re being crushed for cash. As a result, staff is diminished, which means our ability to cover the city is diminished. We believe this is bad for New York.”

Ellen Moynihan, a metropolitan desk reporter, said: “Everyone I work with cares so much about this paper and this city, but Alden only cares about extracting money instead of investing in us. Reporting and producing a newspaper is not a job that fits neatly into an eight-hour box, and if we are not allowed to report the news as it happens, stories go untold.”

Alden did not immediately comment.

At Forbes, a financial news outlet based across the Hudson River in Jersey City but owned by an investment company from Hong Kong, employees went on strike for the first time to protest lack of progress in bargaining talks, two years since forming a union.

Andrea Murphy, a reporter and the Forbes union chair, told Bloomberg that managers were “dragging their feet and slow-walking this whole process. We’re hoping [the strike] shows them that we are serious.”

The walkout was planned to last three days. Forbes said it was “working diligently” with the union but “disappointed by the decision to stage a walkout”, though it respected the right to do so.

As an election year gathers pace, with Donald Trump poised to win the Republican presidential nomination again, national and local US newspapers are experiencing increasing staff unrest and major cutbacks.

Last week, Sports Illustrated employees received an email saying many of them would be laid off in the coming days. On Tuesday, staffers at the Los Angeles Times were told the company was laying off at least 115 people – roughly a quarter of its staff.

In December, the Washington Post said it had met a target of 240 voluntary job cuts – notwithstanding its ownership by Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world. A month earlier, in November, Condé Nast announced it would be laying off a whopping 5% of its work force – equal to roughly 270 employees.

This week, more than 400 staffers at Condé Nast, which is the parent company of Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ and more, took part in a 24-hour work stoppage after the company revised the plan, according to CNN, and laid off 94 unionized members – 20% of the Condé Nast Union. However, Condé Nast’s director of corporate communications says the organization “didn’t revise its plan – the 94 union members were a part of the originally announced 5% layoff”.

Earlier this month, staff at the Baltimore Sun were left “aghast” when it was bought by David D Smith of Sinclair, a conservative media company with a track record of enforcing editorial control.

Margaret Sullivan, a former senior editor at the Washington Post and the New York Times, author of Ghosting the News and Newsroom Confidential and now a Guardian columnist, wrote: “Alden, reviled in the industry for strip-mining newspapers all over the country, was the Sun’s most recent owner. The once-robust staff has shrunk to well under 100.

“But it turns out that Alden has something going for it: its executives don’t care about the content. That’s terrible, on one hand, because they ruthlessly slash the number of journalists in order to maximise profit. But they generally don’t impose their politics.”

On Thursday, speaking to the Guardian from the Daily News rally in Manhattan, Gartland said more than 95% of union members had turned out. After pausing to explain the strike to a group of passing kids, he summed up the role the Daily News has long played in New York life.

“For a lot of people here, this is like our dream job. And to me, I have an emotional attachment to this paper. I grew up with this paper. This has traditionally been the paper of working people in New York City. The thing that’s so good about this job is we get paid to talk to interesting people and we get paid to serve our readers, who need information to make decisions about their lives.”