Study Hall Digest 1/29/2018

Hi

So last week we started with the good news that the Los Angeles Times had unionized. Now the bad news: the paper is run by complete psychopaths. Lewis DVorkin, the paper’s editor-in-chief until late last night, apparently routinely yelled at his staff, talked in meaningless platitudes about content and #gifs and digital everything, and had no discernable plan for the future of the paper, although he did have a painting of the words “Dream Bigger” overlaid on a vintage typewriter in his office (maybe his worst offense). Well, now he’s gone, replaced by Jim Kirk, who seems like maaayyyybe he’ll be a better fit.

The Times and its parent company Tronc (honc if you love tronc) also appear to be creating some mysterious, separate entity that may or may not turn into a scab operation to undermine union efforts, and that’s being led by some famous journos like Louise Storey, formerly of the NYTimes. So now you know who to give shit to if it turns out to be a scab opp.

Speaking of anti-union efforts, what is the point of this piece pitting media workers’ unions against more traditional laborer unions?

And speaking of union bashers: here’s an interview with Jonah Peretti.

If you looked a local journalism and said, “boy this is important, but I think the journalists are making too much money!” then I have some good news for you: Google has created a platform where you can write and post local news for free.

The Toast is deleting its archives for mysterious reasons.

Today in The New York Times is bad.

Nationalize Felix Salmon.

Kate Lee, who used to work at Medium, now is leading editorial strategy at WeWork. Apparently WeWork needs an editorial strategy! We’ll see if that editorial strategy is as resoundingly successful as Medium’s has been.

AN INTERVIEW WITH HAMILTON NOLAN, OF SPLINTER NEWS, FORMERLY OF GAWKER, ON UNIONIZING AND HOW FREELANCERS CAN HELP

SH: Why’d you want to be part of a union in the first place?

HN: TV writing is a great job and it’s a lucrative job. And the reason is because they organized a whole industry a long time ago. That’s a model that I look at. I thought if we could organize our whole industry like that, it’s gonna be better for everybody.

Do you think that it is a comparable industry? Do you think that TV writers are paid more because of their union or because their industry is doing better? Or both?

It’s definitely both but I think it’s honestly mostly due to the fact that they organized the whole industry and it’s been organized for decades. What organizing an industry can really help you do is to get a fair portion of the revenues of the industry. If it’s a more lucrative industry, obviously the in number might be higher, but percentage-wise, I think when you get that leverage to the whole industry, you can get a fair chunk of what the industry is making, regardless of the industry.

Do you worry at all about retaliation as media companies form unions, like what happened at DNAInfo and Gothamist?

I don’t personally. I think they were kind of outliers in the sense that they were owned by a right-wing Trump-loving billionaire, which is not the case for most New York media outlets. That said, it’s obviously possible for those things to happen and it’s an option that employers have. There’s some level of risk but realistically, as long as the business is making money, there’s really no reason for them to shut it down.

What are the tangible ways that being in a union has made your workplace and life better?

In our case, our union contract got us things like annual raises and guaranteed severance pay. It protected our healthcare, and it has rules about editorial independence — who can and can’t fool with our editorial content. When Univision bought us, they picked up the contract so all that stuff stayed the same. We got to keep our same healthcare, we kept our same salaries, we kept our same raises. So it was really important for continuity for us because if we hadn’t had a union contract, all that stuff could have changed.

Have you been surprised by Vox and Slate and all these “liberal” places, and how shitty the bosses have been toward unions?

Yeah, I actually was a little surprised about some of the places, particularly Vox and Slate. I mean they’re probably the two biggest offenders in the distance between their editorial tone and the way that the bosses actually treated the union drive. The fact that Jacob Weisberg is gonna run an anti-union campaign, or that Vox is gonna run an anti-union campaign just kinda blows my mind a little bit. But another good reason to organize is you get to see who your friends really are at work. It’s easy to say you’re a liberal until you start talking about money, and then you see where people stand.

Do you think there’s a role for freelancers in all of this?

It’s a really important issue because obviously there’s so many freelancers in the industry. By labor law you have to be a full-time employee in order to be a member of the union. But one thing that places have done—including ours—is that when they bargain the union contract, they try to get provisions in the contract for freelancers. One thing I would say is if you’re a freelancer and you are working with a place that’s unionizing, make sure you’re in touch with the people organizing and talk to them about what your needs are too, and make sure that your voice is getting heard. It’s also possible to have groups of people that aren’t in a union that are still sort of organized groups that can sit down and talk about ways to improve working conditions. Like the Writers Guild has a few different groups—documentary filmmakers and animation people and different segments of the industry that aren’t actually in the union—but they still kind of come together through the WG and have groups and have discussions within their industry about ways to organize within the industry.