Digest 11/15/2021

Wirecutter and Hearst unions turn up the pressure, Insider deals with Barstool's Portnoy, and more.

WIRECUTTER AND HEARST UNIONS TURN UP THE HEAT 

Last week, two prominent digital media unions took action against their employers. Editorial staff at Wirecutter, the New York Times’ product recommendation website, have endured two years of contract negotiations with the Times; mounting fears that a contract won’t be signed before the end of the year are fueling threats of a digital walkout during the week of Black Friday. Of the many issues on the table, the most notable is management’s refusal to provide more than a .5% guaranteed wage increase, despite inflation currently sitting at 5.4%. While there has been “some movement” since the union went public with its grievances early last week, the union announced on Thursday that there hasn’t been enough movement to call off the impending walkout.

At Hearst, months of unproductive conversations around return-to-office plans have resulted in the union filing an Unfair Labor Practice against the company. 

“At some point at the beginning of the summer, we were told that we were going to have to go back to the offices starting on Labor Day,” a Hearst employee who wishes to remain anonymous tells Study Hall. “The union was like, okay, well, this is a change to the work environment, so we have to bargain over it. That is one of the rules.”

The employee says that while discussions were ongoing between the union and Hearst, the company nonetheless continued to announce decisions about the return-to-office plan that appeared to be being made irrespective of union discussions. 

“On November 5, the union filed an unfair labor practice, or ULP, with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB),” the Hearst union announced on November 8 in a memo obtained by Study Hall. “It’s our position that management is making a unilateral change to our work circumstances without adequately bargaining over the change as required by federal law.”

“Do we wear masks in the office? How many people fit in the elevator? Is it just going to take forever to get up to your office? What do you do if you test positive? What if you want to keep working remotely? Are they going to fire you?” The employee says these were some of the specific questions they had for management. “They answered some of them, not all of them sufficiently, and essentially it just got to the point where they weren’t bargaining in good faith.”

In Hearst’s return-to-office plan, also obtained by Study Hall, some of these questions are addressed. For instance, Hearst’s plan limits elevators to five passengers per car; if an employee tests positive, the document lists a protocol that includes contact tracing. However, the document says employees who do not feel comfortable coming in are encouraged to use their sick days, and that “failure to show up in the office on your scheduled days, without a reasonable accommodation granted or without appropriate approval for time off, could result in termination of employment based on job abandonment.”

The union has requested delaying the return-to-office date to January 2022 for bargaining to account for not just those who wish to return to the office, but those who want to remain remote or work hybrid. As of now, Hearst is requiring employees to return to the office starting today, but the discussions are still ongoing. At G/O Media, employees were required to return to the office on October 18, but according to The Daily Beast, many didn’t show. 

“I think the ideal outcome is for management to communicate with the union, to really hear what employees are asking for, to hear our concerns, to listen, and to create a dialogue with respect and with safety at the forefront,” the employee says. “[And also take] into account the many, many different individual responses to these unprecedented times and understand we’re all just trying to do the best we can.” 

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DAVE PORTNOY WAGES WAR AGAINST INSIDER

Following Insider’s report containing accusations of sexual misconduct from a number of women against Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, Portnoy has been on the warpath. On Twitter, the 44-year-old has been relentless in his attacks on Insider CEO Henry Blodget, editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson, reporter Julia Black, and a handful of other women journalists who did nothing more than retweet the article. For some employees, there was a question of whether Portnoy’s online behavior should be considered a realistic threat to their safety, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. The source says Insider management stressed that employees should feel safe to come into the office.

On Thursday, Portnoy teased a press conference to address the situation, repeatedly tweeting things like “tik tok” [sic] at Black and Blodget. In the press conference held on Thursday — a livestream featuring multiple technical difficulties — Portnoy once again denied claims that he had sexually assaulted the women interviewed in the article. 

Portnoy has used the article as an opportunity to target other, mostly women, journalists, including Mina Kimes, Susie Bankarim, and Laura Wagner. Wagner is no stranger to Portnoy’s ire, having been previously harassed by the founder for coverage like his comments about ESPN’s Sam Ponder. Bankiram and Wagner have gone private on Twitter following Portnoy’s recent tweets in response to their support of the article. 

In one of his tirades, Portnoy bet that neither Black nor Carlson would “last the week.” As of today, both are still employed at Insider, and Insider continues to stand by Black’s reporting.

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MOST CLICKED LAST WEEK  A report on Facebook that included a chart of the most popular publishers on the social media site showed that news organizations like CNN, the Washington Post, NPR, and the like are just as popular as sites like The Blaze and whatever ‘conservativebrief.com” is. 

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— First, a huge apology to Nick Catucci, who was my literal editor at Embedded and who I completely forgot to mention last week is now the senior editor of all those newsletters at The Atlantic. Please accept this top billing as my apology. 

— Molly Tolsky is now the editor of both Hey Alma and Kveller. 

— Jack Herrera is headed to Texas Monthly to work as a staff writer with the title senior editor. 

— Zoë Schiffer is joining the tech investigations team at NBC.

— Geoffrey Morgan is leaving the Financial Post for Bloomberg News.

— Alice Barnes-Brown has joined Culture Trip as commissioning editor. 

— Yolanda Machado is joining Entertainment Weekly as their digital night director.

— Brittany Shepherd is joining ABC as a politics reporter ahead of the midterm elections. 

— Chloe Angyal is joining VICE News as senior editor. 

— Former managing editor Genetta Adams is leaving The Root.

— Julia Black has joined Insider as a correspondent. 

— Sarah Jacoby has joined the Today Show as a health reporter. 

— Marin Cogan and Rachel Wilkerson Miller are joining Vox as senior correspondent and editor, respectively. 

— Stuart Thompson is joining the New York Times as a disinformation reporter.

— Nico Lang is starting at Xtra Magazine as an editor. 

— Jazmín Aguilera is leaving The Cut and joining the L.A. Times as head of audio. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— Workweek, a new company from Becca Sherman and Adam Ryan, is taking a creator economy approach to digital media. Nicole Casperson, Matthew O’Brien, Jared Dashevsky, and Ryan are the first writers making content for the platform, and more creators will be announced in the coming weeks. 

— Sylvère Lotringer, founder of Semiotext(e) press, has sadly passed away. 

— Max Clark, fashion editor at VICE’s i-D magazine, has been suspended after over a dozen women, many of whom were junior employees working in fashion and media, accused him of sending them inappropriate messages according to The Guardian. The accusations were collected over Instagram and presented to VICE, who said in a statement to The Guardian that they’ve “retained an independent, outside investigator to investigate the claims.” 

“It is shocking that another senior figure at VICE has once again been accused of harassing multiple women when the company claims to create a supportive and inclusive environment,” the VICE UK union said in a statement on Twitter. Through his lawyer, Clark has denied the claims. 

— Politico has agreed to voluntarily recognize the Politico union.

— The Daily News union says owner Alden Global Capital is making changes to their healthcare including higher co-pays, higher deductibles, and loss of HSA match.

— Ozy Media is now facing federal investigations after a downfall that most notably included the New York Times revealing that chief operating officer Samir Rao allegedly impersonated a YouTube executive on call with Goldman Sachs.