Study Hall Digest 11/6/2017

Study Hall Digest is periodically renamed Media Hell Week when things are particularly bad. ;[

Hi

Today, journalists and their supporters will rally at City Hall in New York to support the fired workers from DNAinfo and Gothamist. To me, this is a positive sign: Yeah, it sucks that the company was shut down, and it sucks all these people are out of jobs, but without unionization there would be no rally and fighting back against billionaire Joe Ricketts would be even more futile. What DNAinfo and Gothamist workers are doing, with the help of their union reps and comrades, is a step in the right direction. We need to politicize media workers now and take the business of media into our own hands.

What happened last week was not the fault of unions. Vice, Vox, the Village Voice, The Daily News, Patch, countless others—nearly every media organization has been on a prolonged bloodletting for years. Sometimes it’s more abrupt, as is the case with DNAinfo and Gothamist. Sometimes it’s much slower, but the result is the same – corporate media owners suck their properties dry and leave media workers with nothing. Gothamist was profitable and no workers there thought the sale to DNA was a good idea in the first place, but it enriched its owners, Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung, who were exploitative and expected hellish hour at low pay essentially since the founding of the ist sites. Many at the ist properties saw the writing on the wall when Chung and Dobkin made the sale: they wanted out, they wanted golden parachutes, and they didn’t give a shit about anyone else’s fate. DNA may have been losing money, but at a level Joe Ricketts was happy to fund for 8 years. He shut the sites down out of anti-union spite.

What DNA and Gothamist tell us is that we’re left with two options: do whatever the billionaire owners of media say, lose our dignity and get fired at the end of the day anyway, or organize and take this shit into our own hands.

What does that look like? Tyler Reinhard, the publisher of Mask Magazine, wrote back in 2015 that it was time to stop relying on advertising in media. Mask has built a successful small business from the ground up by charging a few dollars a month for subscriptions. That’s how Study Hall Digest works too—we make enough money to function because all of you directly support us. I think we can take this subscription model a lot further, creating an entire media company (or companies, plural) that relies on subscriptions.

It’s also time to take organizing further. The reason writers in Hollywood make more money that writers for media companies is that they’re mostly unionized. Not everyone needs to be unionized for the model to work—non-union TV writers still make lots of money (compared to freelance journalists at least) because a history of unionization in Hollywood has set high standards for pay.

So, I think the time is now to start discussing: how do we create a business model that works for all of us, and simultaneously, how do we organize effectively?

Final Thoughts

What would you do if you moved in with the Mayor?