"As we move ahead, we need to be united as one organization with an important purpose — to help the company transform and thrive as a business, and to serve our readers world class journalism," the statement read. This is the second time in four months that a major Tronc newsroom has successfully gone the union route. In January, Tronc was badly defeated in a federally overseen labor vote at its dominant paper, The Los Angeles Times, despite a concerted management campaign to thwart the unionizing effort. Both the Chicago and Los Angeles papers have anti-union editorial traditions stretching back more than a century. Now, both will have unions. Just weeks after the overwhelming vote, Tronc struck a deal to sell the LA Times to one of the parent company's largest shareholders, Patrick Soon-Shiong. That deal has not closed, though it was expected to do so by late April.