What Are They Thinking: Two Guilds Gear Up for Digital Media Dominance
Cue up the soundtrack from Newsies: “In 1899, the streets of New York City echoed with the voices of newsies, peddling the papers of Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and other giants of the newspaper world. On every corner you saw them carrying the banner. Bringing you the news for a penny a paper. Poor orphans and runaways, the newsies were a ragged army without a leader, until one day all that changed.”
Could history repeat? Could the digital newsies of 2015 throw off their laptop shackles and join the union, following the gaggle at Gawker?
Asking that question even three months ago seemed nonsensical. Now, though, in the wake of the overwhelming pro-union vote at Gawker, many in the new content creating industries are humming a different tune. Publishers, already challenged by brutal ad competition and continuing need for hyper-growth, now wonder about a potential new challenge to their survival and growth.
In this drama, billion dollar start-up valuations collide with wider societal questions of pay equity. Supply and demand, long lopsided on the web, gets at least a rethink. Two unions, eager for new dues-paying members as their own coffers thin, smell new opportunity, blood in the digital water, as unionist reporters schedule a four-day-long conference, a “National Convergence to Organize Digital Media”, in Louisville Oct. 8-11.Both the organizing unions will participate in the session.
First published at Capital New York
Follow Newsonomics on Twitter @kdoctor
The quick movement towards Gawker unionization can hardly be considered a precedent. As one union leader put it, “Nick [Denton] practically waved the union home.” Few peer owners and top execs will raise such welcoming hands, wary of what a union may mean to their workplaces and bottom lines. Still, Lowell Peterson, head of the victorious Writers Guild of America East union, which won the 75 percent tally at Gawker, says he expects another couple of votes within the next 12 months at New York City content shops.
WGAE’s five full-time organizers find themselves competing with an AFL-CIO cousin, the News Guild, traditionally the union organizing daily newspaper reporters, as both work the same hustings.
Newest Media! Venture Capital! Battling Unions! Maybe, Newsies II could be in the making.
Let’s consider this new landscape and what’s formed it.
Clearly, a much wider societal question looms in the background. Many Americans feel the deck is stacked against them. Pay equity—getting one’s fair slice of the pie—hangs in the air for 2016 election, even as $15-an-hour minimums start to sweep a few big cities.
The big valuations of the biggest digital media companies offer some wonder for the journalists helping boost those values; will I get mine when the company sells to (fill in the blank), or at its big I.P.O.?
Then, there’s the old reliable: bad bosses, those who may operate lower-wage, less-than-supportive workplaces. Finally, there’s management instability. Several observers point to the current management woes, restructurings and layoffs at Al Jazeera for instance. Staff there may find a union an antacid for its unease.
Yet, digital news shops can rightly claim to be unconventional employers, workplaces and workforces. The dozen or so big companies—whose growth has been more spurred by venture investment than explosive revenue—don’t largely serve as conventional targets for labor organizing. The Vices, Voxes, HuffPosts, Buzzfeeds and Business Insiders, largely based in Manhattan, have borrowed cultures from Silicon Valley (the companies, if not the hit HBO comedy which from my experience is a satiric masterpiece). Chill work environment, chilled drinks aplenty and allure of cold cash in exchange for writing. Many—but not all—enjoy relatively benign, if not benevolent management.
Many, maybe most, of the staffers pride themselves on their independence and self-direction, suspicious of what traditional labor organizations may bring to their jobs.
Yet, these workplaces serve as Rorschach tests of our digital time.
Check out the rows and rows of tables at the content factories of 2015. Visit almost any of the high-flying digital news startups re-populating downtown Manhattan, and you’ll find the same boring landscape. Rows of tables fill large, often featureless, rooms. If the company’s gotten a new round of financing, more tables get added. Sitting at the tables, the content creators, a k a journalists, of our time. It’s a post-office, post-cube world, stripped to the bare essentials: Surface, chair, computer and the talented humans tapping away.
Are these New Age temples of freedom, enabling the mobile human to publish freely, quickly and cheaply as no humans in the past could do? Or are they contemporary sweatshops, milking the great supply of budding journalistic talent, as demand for it remains narrow and targeted? (Stories like the Times’ recent foray into Silicon Valley liquid diets, including the ingestion of noxious protein powder drinks that allowed workers to stay tethered like digital Teletubbies to their desks, lend some credence to this argument.)
The grandparents of these writers might at first say the latter, having worked in crowded places themselves only blocks away, but then again, there’s a lot they wouldn’t recognize about our world.
The unions’ pitches are moderate, emphasizing fair, equitable and minimum pay standards, fair treatment and a balance of power with management. News Guild President Bernie Lunzer emphasizes the “democratization of expectation.”
“It’s not just about money,” he told me, emphasizing that each workplace is different, and that digital media start-up workers “shouldn’t expect the New York Times deal.”
In a Q & A, Gawker staff writer and union leader Hamilton Nolan lays out the multi-point logic joining up.
One simple talking point: Digital news jobs are “under-monetized,” says WGAE Executive Director Peterson. He also says his union looks ahead to perhaps tougher times in the trade. “We see an opportunity here to lock in benefits and not wait for the downturn.”
Further, union leaders can talk politely about work–life balance issues, as News Guild President New Bernie Lunzer will do.
Then, there’s the reality. The Daily Beast has been mentioned as one of the few union shops, a legacy of its short-lived, shotgun marriage to Newsweek. What’s been the reality of what’s been a union shop now for five years?
Overall, the Guild’s representation at The Daily Beast has adjusted, but not derailed, the work of the upstart news company. “We’re in a very, very, very different business,” than traditional news companies, says Beast managing director Mike Dyer. “We need the ability to pivot.” Pivoting, of course, means flexibility in work practice.
Overall, the company accommodated Guild basics, including minimum annual raises (to which merit raises can be added) and severance policies. On work hours—the Guild, like most traditional unions, starts with the standard of an evenly apportioned 40-hour workweek – the Beast agreed that a relatively small number of edit staff could be considered the equivalent of “shift workers”—those who work primarily on the Beast’s “Cheat Sheet,” which requires regularized updates.
For others, “overtime” requirements are significantly looser, as they are at most decently operated non-union shops: Follow a story into the long hours or couple of days, and take some compensatory time soon after.
“The news cycle doesn’t operate 9-5,” says editor-in-chief and managing director John Avlon. “We work hard to create a high-metabolism, high-morale newsroom.” Within that ethos, he concludes, “Agreements can work.”
We can see on vacation policy, a divide between a new breed of employer thinking and vacation policies long favored by the guild. The Beast’s Guild-represented covered editorial employees, about two-thirds of its total of 40, receive a set number of days per year. Non-union covered ones share in the same policy as Beast business and tech employees. That’s an “unlimited vacation policy,” now often favored by start-ups, exhorting staff to take what they need—as long as their work is well done.
Overall here, understandable equity concerns speak a different language than a one taking hold in the newer content-producing workplace, but the conversation seems to have been civil.
So, what can we expect in the next year? Clearly, both unions see opportunity and are already strategizing on how best to pursue it.
While the Writers Guild of America East won the Gawker election, it’s the smaller of the two unions, its membership of 4,000, mainly composed of TV writers. Yet, its members write news, and Peterson has made the digital workplace a priority.
“We’ve immersed ourselves in the digital media and technological change,” he says, adding that skill-building workshops now form a key part of the union’s benefit offer to members.
As video gains in ascendance against text—Huffington Post has recently talked about creating one video for every two text pieces—TV-based WGAE can claim more of a logic in workplaces that traditionally would have been organized by the News Guild. The Guild, with 26,000 members, has been working,largely out of the public eye, to organize the new text-and-video producing workplaces. The Guild saw its membership peak more than 20 years ago at 35,000, and has seen 5,000 dues-paying newsroom members at the dailies disappear in the unending layoffs and buyouts.
So, for the Guild—in both the U.S. and Canada—organizing is simply a matter of math. The big, largely venture-funded digital news companies have created more than 5,000 new jobs themselves.
The Gawker vote may have piqued imagination, but it’s a retail building of support that can lead to other successful votes. Critical mass—a knot of union sympathizers—helps a lot. Sometimes, a timely management stupidity or two greatly helps.
Still, this process can take a long time. The News Guild has been trying to find a way into the Huffington Post for at least four years. To force an election, a union must get “cards” signed by at least 30 percent of an eligible workforce, and that’s not an easy number to get to among independent-minded writerly millennials.
Overall, the beginnings of the process don’t appear much different from the scenes we’ve seen in Hollywood labor movies like Norma Rae and Matewan. Organizers talk with would-be union card signers over a beer or coffee. Perhaps, the operative slogan for 2015 isn’t “Aux barricades, mes frères,” but “aux baristas.”
