The Washington City Paper reports that the WashPost guild has been busy negotiating salary for Web reporters. As the company completes its newsroom merger of print and web, the Web employees—which have gone a decade without union representation—are coming under the umbrella of the newsroom union.

But it's not that smooth, of course: Post management has proposed that the web producers start at $40,000.

Newsroom interns earn $44,416 yearly.

A guild statement explains all the duties a Web producer may be expected to handle:

Producers are expected to, among other things, update and maintain editorial content; assist in developing and producing monthly feature packages and tools; create new content for the website, including live streams of breaking news events and updating existing content; work with web publishing systems; and gather, write and edit news stories for text, photographic and video presentation. Producers are also expected to stay abreast of breaking news and help mobilize coverage where necessary; seek to enhance online pages with photographs, multimedia and other tools; and think creatively about element highlights.

The guild says it's negotiated producers' starting pay up to $42k, but that's still less than a (print) intern.

It also says that the Grey Lady agreed to salary equity between web and print, which may be a bad move: why would "If your biggest competitor is doing it, you should too" be a convincing argument?

The City Paper notes that the guild has pledged to "strive for salary equity at The Post for as long as it takes."