Digest 4/26/2021

State of the unions, Gawker reboot, clickbait from 1905, and more.

STATE OF THE UNIONS

The wave of media unionization that has been swelling for the past few years is reaching new heights. This past week, a handful of high-profile unionization efforts with the NewsGuild of New York have dominated industry news: 

• New York Times tech workers announced they had formed a union on April 13. Since then, Times management has declined to voluntarily recognize the 650-person union. The Times voluntarily recognized the Wirecutter union in 2019, and the Times newsroom is unionized as well.
• The New Yorker union, which represents fact-checkers and copy editors, continues to battle it out with Condé Nast after three years deadlocked in bargaining. Staff voted at the end of March to authorize a strike if need be, and were joined by the staff of Ars Technica and Pitchfork, which are also owned by Condé. New Yorker union members rallied April 25 in New York and are organizing a May Day rally. 
• The Pitchfork union, which joined the New Yorker union at yesterday’s rally, continues to battle management over fair pay — former staffers have provided testimonials about underpayment at the site. Staffers authorized a work stoppage last summer in response to union busting.
• On April 19, editorial workers at Insider (formerly Business Insider) announced that they are forming a union, numbered at over 300 members, and comprising a majority of the publication’s editorial workers. Still, Insider management has said it will not voluntarily recognize the union, instead requesting a vote with the National Labor Relations Board. Insider union has said that 83% of eligible editorial workers opted to sign union cards, so they are certain they will win the vote. (The bargaining process that comes after may be fraught.)

I spoke with Insider senior finance reporter and union member Rebecca Ungarino, who told me that the organizing efforts had begun pre-COVID-19, in mid-2019, but that the pandemic further galvanized workers. “Once the pandemic hit, it exposed inequities in so many industries,” said Ungarino. “We [felt] like it was the right time for Insider to come together and lock in what we love about the company and try to strengthen it in other areas as well.”

The union’s goals include greater transparency around the use of metrics to evaluate performances (a leaked email revealed that writers’ work is evaluated in part based on “impact points,” which track high-profile Twitter shares and aggregation); greater pay equity; diversity and inclusion; and just cause employment, which offers workers some protection from layoffs. 

While the pandemic exposed fault lines in the media industry, Ungarino said the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020 also galvanized the staff to fight for diversity and inclusion in the workplace. “Many in our newsroom, including myself, were participating and being vocal about our support of Black Lives Matter…at that point, as with so many news organizations and companies in the US, [we were] coming to terms with the fact that we have incredibly white leadership,” she said. The union’s goals include the creation “enforceable policies regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion,” including fair pay.

Just a refresher on the state of the media industry: 2020 saw record highs in media layoffs, after an already fairly disastrous 2019. An estimated 28,637 job cuts hit the industry as of October 2020, and the industry was further battered by declining ad revenue due to the pandemic. Unless you have a public persona you can monetize in the form of a subscription newsletter, your financial security in media, even as a staffer, is not guaranteed. Unions are one way forward for employees of traditional media companies, providing protections through just cause and some transparency around managerial dealings and diversity initiatives. It makes sense we’d see a wave of organizing efforts from workers during such a tumultuous time; for that matter, it also makes sense we’d see resistance from management, who want to be able to cut staff as conditions change rapidly. 

“I feel like I can better support my colleagues and my colleagues can better support me in a union,” said Ungarino. “Once the pandemic started and we did see people facing unreal pressures — it only made us more confident in our desire to unionize.”

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LONGREAD OF THE WEEK As candy-pink cherry trees and magnolias bloom in New York City, I keep reaching for a phrase from Henry James’ writing on California. Describing the region’s flora, James wrote in 1905 that “everything is larger, intenser, braver, with a kind of conscious insolence of success.” Queens is not LA, but I like to think our flowers display this bright insolence. That line comes from a piece in the TLS by Philip Horne, which is paywalled, so you can find a PDF here. In addition to containing some nice lines about the Pacific and orange groves, it’s a fascinating window into newspaper publishing in the early 20th century — the piece narrates a Los Angeles Times interview that James repeatedly tries to wriggle out of, which ends up running under the headline “REAL HENRY JAMES, HE REALLY SAID IT.”  — Erin Schwartz

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Leah Finnegan’s Gawker is launching with a handful of writers you might know: Jenny Zhang, Sarah Hagi, and Kelly Conaboy. (More on that below.)

— The Boston Globe has a new Washington bureau chief in Liz Goodwin. 

— Bari Weiss and Andy Mills are teaming up for a podcast project that seems cursed. What could be better than putting together someone who enjoys being wrong and loud with someone who produced an award-winning (then award-returning) podcast that was wrong and loud. Anyways, the forthcoming podcast with Bari Weiss is, I’m sure, going to give quite the insight into how private schools are handling conversations about racism.  

— The glamorous TV people over at CNN have a bunch of promotions and at least one new hire in ex-Politico staffer Natasha Bertrand. 

— Freelancer Katelyn Burns has snagged a column berth for MSNBC Daily.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— Just as the New York Times poached all the best reporters and commentators from its competitors, so now is Substack attempting to poach the Times’ big-name journalists, enticing them with hefty advances. Insider reports that Elizabeth Bruenig was offered $200,000, which is double her Times salary, while Taylor Lorenz was offered $300,000. (Neither Lorenz or Bruenig have publicly commented on the offers or announced plans to leave their jobs at the Times for Substack.) As Matt Yglesias learned, you can likely make far more than that through subscriber revenue. With journalist-influencers guaranteed more money in the newsletter business, how will institutions at the Times keep them around? 

— Moderators of one of the Binders groups — Facebook groups for women in media that are notorious for internal drama — decided to open the group up to people of all genders after some conflict over the posting of a Fox News opportunity during the Chauvin murder trial. 

— Quibi, which had seemed dead and buried with its golden arm, is returning, with all content  rebranded all as “Roku originals.” (Roku acquired Quibi in January.) All the shows will be available for free on the ad-supported Roku channel.

— Data firm Parrot Analytics has found that the demand for Netflix is slipping amidst all the intense streaming competition. Netflix is still dominant, but competitors like Amazon Prime Video and Hulu are gaining traction.

— Bustle Digital Group’s Gawker relaunch, which got off to a rocky start in 2019 when its journalists walked out over concerns regarding the workplace bigotry of editorial director Carson Griffith, is back on track. Former The Outline editor Leah Finnegan is on board as editor-in-chief, and now Sarah Hagi, Jenny G. Zhang, and Kelly Conaboy have announced they’re coming on as staff writers. Griffith, meanwhile, is no longer attached to the relaunch and is pursuing a lawsuit against the Daily Beast for reporting on her alleged inappropriate workplace behavior; she has dropped a lawsuit against Maya Kosoff, the former Gawker employee she claims is behind a smear campaign.