Unions get welcome reception in digital newsrooms
THE BIG news at Slate magazine last week wasn’t anything published on its website. Journalists at the online publication, frustrated by stalled union negotiations, voted to authorise a strike against their owner, Graham Holdings Co. The vote was nearly unanimous, 52-1.
What’s striking about this potential strike news is that Slate has a union in the first place. The magazine was a digital pioneer, founded by Microsoft Corp. in 1996, and later purchased by The Washington Post Co., which became Graham Holdings after it sold its eponymous newspaper to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013. Throughout most of its existence, Slate’s newsroom was union-free. That changed in January when it organised under the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) and began bargaining for a contract.
Slate is part of the wave of unionorganising that has swept over the digital-media industry over the past three years. One by one, journalists employed by the once-scrappy startups and venture-capital darlings of the Internet have banded together to negotiate collectively.
Gawker Media – publisher of Deadspin, Gawker and Gizmodo – was first up in mid-2015. It was soon followed, domino-like, by Salon, Vice, ThinkProgress and HuffPost. Last year, newsrooms at Fusion, MTV News, Thrillist
The unionisation trend draws together two of America’s most troubled institutions – organised labour and the news business. The former has been losing members for decades amid globalisation, changes in the economy and ‘right to work’ laws. The latter has been undermined by disruption from the Internet – including by the very digital media organsations that are now banding together to bargain collectively.
and the Intercept voted in unions to unionise. This year, Slate, the Onion and Vox Media followed suit.
Some “legacy” news outlets are part of the trend, too. In January, journalists at the Los Angeles Times voted overwhelmingly to join the NewsGuild, the union that has long represented workers at news organisations, including The Washington Post and The New York Times.
The 244- 48 vote followed 136 years in which the Los Angeles Times’ newsroom was without union representation, and came after nearly two decades of moralesapping cutbacks under the Times’ previous owner, Chicago-based Tribune Publishing Co.
Earlier this month, Tribune recognised the WashingtonBaltimore NewsGuild as the bargaining agent for employees of the Baltimore Sun’s suburban newspaper group.
The group includes one of America’s oldest newspapers, the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, the target of a gunman who killed five in June. The New Yorker and New York magazine have also signed on with the NewsGuild.
The unionisation trend draws together two of America’s most troubled institutions – organised labour and the news business.
The former has been losing members for decades amid globalisation, changes in the economy and “right to work” laws. The latter has been undermined by disruption from the Internet – including by the very digital media organsations that are now banding together to bargain collectively.
The organising trend among these newsrooms reflects the growth of digital sites into mature businesses, with huge audiences, large staffs and multibillion-dollar valuations, said Lowell Peterson, WGAE’s executive director.
“These aren’t companies aggregating videos of cats on skateboards anymore,” he said.
“The business models and the staffing models have stabilised to the point where people think, ‘ I can make a career out of this.’ And the next thought is, ‘How can I make my career better?’ Collective bargaining is a way to improve careers,” he added. Indeed, in their formative years, digital companies had a reputation as latter- day sweat shops, with low pay and brutal hours. The somewhat exaggerated legend at Vice Media was its “22 rule”:
Hire 22 year olds, pay them US$ 22,000 a year, and work them 22 hours a day.
But that was then. Under the labour agreement ratified in 2016, full-time employees at Brooklyn-based Vice won a 29 per cent pay raise over three years and a guaranteed a minimum salary of US$ 45,000 per year.