Digest 11/29/2021

All Wirecutter wants for Christmas is a union contract. Also, return-to-office labor battles inch forward, secretive hedge funds make further gains, and more.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR WIRECUTTER

All Wirecutter wants for Christmas is a union contract. Specifically, a $300,000 total increase to minimum salaries for their 65-person unit, which would constitute just 0.029% of the $1 billion the Times recently reported it now has in cash. However, delays and unsatisfactory bargaining sessions have the unit staring down the barrel of 2022 with demands still unmet, prompting the unit to strike from Thanksgiving through today, Cyber Monday.

According to Intelligencer, the separation between Wirecutter and the rest of New York Times editorial (the Times acquired Wirecutter in 2016) was apparent both in attitude (“its work was openly sneered at by some longtime [Times] staffers”) and salaries (“Even Times fellows, which are yearlong full-time jobs in the newsroom designed to train emerging journalists, receive a significantly higher salary than the starting rate for Wirecutter writers”).

Following the announcement of the strike, former Wirecutter employees came forward on Twitter with their own experiences. Tim Barribeau, who left Wirecutter in August, wrote that “management didn’t think talent was worth fostering internally” and told junior employees that “they wouldn’t be internally promoted.”

Sabrina Imbler, now a science fellow at the Times, echoed Barribeau’s tweet, writing “I left Wirecutter in 2018 in part b/c I was taken off a team that I loved and wanted to grow on, and reassigned to a very different team. No one asked for my opinion about the work I wanted to do or who I wanted to work with.”

Despite this, the value of Wirecutter’s work couldn’t be clearer. Wirecutter recruited 10,000 subscribers in its first month behind the Times paywall, according to Intelligencer. Even during the strike, Wirecutter occupied a section on the Times front page and appeared in Friday’s print pages.

The Wirecutter site and socials may still be suggesting it’s business as usual, but they’re actually being propped up by management and freelancers while the unit is on strike. Tweets from the Wirecutter account during the strike have been met with intense backlash from readers who refuse to cross the picket line during the unit’s demonstration.

Nick Guy, senior staff writer at Wirecutter and chair of the Wirecutter union, says the unit has not heard from management since the strike began. Because of the divide between business and editorial, the unit does not have access to data that could shed a light on the traffic or monetary impact their strike and calls for a boycott are having on the company, but they hope the demonstration will have made an effective statement ahead of their December 6 bargaining session.

“Ideally, management will demonstrate that they realize how important these outstanding issues are to us, and how hard we’re willing to fight for them, with counters that are far closer to what we’re asking than what they’ve been offering,” Guy tells Study Hall over email. “We can absolutely have this contract done before the end of the year if management comes back with realistic numbers.”

COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Elizabeth Weil is joining New York Magazine as features writer.

— Roxana Hadadi is joining Vulture as a TV critic.

— Jonathan Guyer is joining Vox to cover the Biden administration’s foreign policy.

— Gina Cherelus is now a general assignment reporter for New York Times Styles.

— Sarah Sloat is leaving her role as senior science editor at Inverse to go freelance.

— Tirhakah Love is leaving her role as a reporter at The Daily Beast to join New York as a senior writer.

— Dan Q. Dao is joining the relaunch of the international edition of Vietcetera as international digital director.

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund in question in The Atlantic piece “A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms,” announced an offer to acquire Lee Enterprises, the publisher of 77 daily newspapers in 26 states, plus an additional 350 weekly, classified, and specialty publications. Following the announcement, Lee Enterprises’ board of directors unanimously voted to adopt a shareholder “rights plan” that would make it more difficult for Alden Global Capital to buy them out. The decision was made due to the fund’s “track record of rapidly acquiring substantial control or ‘negative control’ positions in other public companies,” per a statement from the Board.

— Following an unfair labor practice charge filed by Guild members at Meredith in regards to a proposed return-to-office plan, the National Labor Relations Board dismissed the charge, but put in writing that employers have “an obligation to bargain with the Union over the RTO/vaccine mandate plans,” codifying a debate that’s currently playing out at Hearst, and likely many other offices as RTOs pick up in 2022.

— A NY trial court judge temporarily upheld an unusual order that bars the New York Times from publishing or seeking out certain documents related to the conservative group Project Veritas. “We’re disappointed that the order remains in place, but we welcomed the opportunity to address the court directly on the serious First Amendment concerns raised by a prior restraint,” the Times responded in a statement, per The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr.

— The weird relationship between Gawker and owner Bryan Goldberg was finally tested after the media mogul purchased Emperor Napoleon I’s hat for $1.43 million at auction. The first thing to note: Goldberg appears to have prevented Gawker from publishing the story for two months, since reporter Tarpley Hitt included the September timestamps of their initial conversation, and noted that Goldberg “did not let Gawker break this story.” Also, this: