Gawker Media may become a union shop. The company’s editorial staff will hold an election on Wednesday to determine if its reporters will join a union, including all staff writers of its popular sites like Jezebel, Gizmodo, and Deadspin. It's a watershed moment not just for Gawker, but for the media industry as a whole---the first time such a vote has taken place in a digital-first newsroom.
But it's not exactly a revolution. Collective bargaining may be a new idea for young publishers like Gawker, but journalists have a long history of organizing—staffers at the New York Times, the Associated Press, and countless regional newspapers are, in fact, already organized. If anything, the union campaign at Gawker is a sign that everything new is old again.
Digital news upstarts, and tech companies in general, have largely tamped down the will to organize by offering employees competitive salaries and benefits, flexible workplaces, and corporate cultures that preach employee empowerment. But the members of Gawker’s staff who are campaigning very publicly to organize its writers say that’s not enough. They want the kind of power that comes from having the terms of their employment spelled out in black-and-white, a contract as a shield against the pervasive uncertainty about how the business of media works today.
The question is whether the freedom needed to navigate that uncertainty can survive the rigidity that can accompany solidarity. The campaign at Gawker has already stirred internal strife, as some writers have complained that the vote has been rushed and that the move to come together has created toxic acrimony that instead is pushing employees apart.
If Gawker nevertheless decides to unionize, the impact of the result and how it plays out could radiate beyond the world of digital media. It could spur tech workers in general to think harder about what seems like a very old fashioned idea: seeking stability through collective protections in a business world defined by upheaval.
Founded in 2002, Gawker is among the old guard of new media—and its move to organize seems to stem from some uncertainty about its future. “People are happy working here,” Gawker senior writer Hamilton Nolan, who has largely spearheaded the movement, tells WIRED. “People just want to keep the good things we have and bring the things that are flawed up to a standard level. If we get the union, we’ll have it if things turn bad one day.”
If the majority of Gawker’s staff votes “yes” in the secret-ballot election Wednesday, it can then elect a bargaining committee to negotiate a contract with Gawker’s management. Once the contract is fully negotiated, staffers will vote on whether to approve it. Union contracts can govern employees’ salaries, raises, time spent at work, vacation, and firing practices, among other employment issues. They are typically renegotiated every few years.
Until now, Gawker staffers haven’t had much say in the company’s decisions. In meetings about what the union could accomplish, Gawker writers have talked about how to make working at the company more equitable and transparent, including wage floors, an established system for raises, a legally binding severance policy, and more clarity in company decision-making. (Gawker says it already offers severance.) “But there’s one thing everyone agreed on,” Nolan adds. “We don’t want to fuck with the freedom we have. No one wants to change that.”
Organizing may seem like an odd fit for Gawker, which is known for its unbounded editorial freedom, anything-goes attitude, and unapologetically capitalist founder Nick Denton (who says he’s “intensely relaxed” about the current vote). But unions are not anything new in publishing.
Journalists first started unionizing nationally in the 1930s. “At the time, there was a lot of consolidation, mergers, buyouts, and issues in journalism,” says Bonnie Brennen, professor of journalism at Marquette University, who studies the labor movement and the press. “Daily newspaper sales were dwindling. And, of course, we had the first major challenge to print journalism with the rise of radio.”
The American Newspaper Guild was established to push back against these challenges—and to give journalists a voice against money-hungry publishers during the Great Depression. “Eighty or so years later, we have similar problems in journalism. It’s not the new thing in town. There are journalists who work for free, who take unpaid internships, who work long days,” Brennen says.
A union gives workers the collective bargaining power to help determine how they want their workplace to operate, typically ensuring equitable pay, job security, and fair working conditions. But so far digital-only publishers haven’t really had to reckon with what those principles look like when spelled out in the crystal-clear terms of a binding contract. “This is an industry built up from scratch, thrown together,” Nolan says. “But it’s grown into a real industry with real money. You can’t just run on people hiring their buddies and slapping each others’ backs.”
And yet, as in the 1930s, when journalists debated whether it would diminish their prestige to be a part of a labor group, Gawker staffers don’t all agree on what it would mean to organize. Ahead of the vote, the company opened a public forum on their publishing platform Kinja where writers and editors could explain how they plan to vote during the election. “I’m voting no, unions suck,” wrote Gawker features editor Leah Finnegan.
"People say they don’t want to have anything in the contract that limits our workplace flexibility, or that makes it harder for management to operate nimbly. But when the impulse of self-preservation kicks in, I wonder what choices will be made," pondered Gizmodo senior photo and video editor Michael Hession.
Other writers have complained that the shift to unionize is happening too fast, that the extremely public process has created a toxic environment for writers, that communication has kept remote workers in the dark, and that contract workers will not be included in the decision.
“I am so disillusioned by the process we have undertaken so far that I have little faith in our ability to band together and negotiate a contract that improves our collective standing,” argued Deadspin staff writer Kevin Draper.
Unionizing does change how any company interacts with its workers. That’s the whole point. But a contract doesn’t just delineate what a company has to provide for its employees. Brennen explains that it can affect workers’ individual freedoms, too, making it difficult (or impossible), for example, to negotiate independent raises.
But Gawker Media’s executive editor Tommy Craggs expects a union will only make the company stronger by codifying ad hoc practices to make sure writers wants and needs are evenly met. “I am politically, tempermentally, and, almost, sentimentally supportive of the union drive,” Craggs tells WIRED, although as a manager he won’t be voting or able to join it.
Even Gawker owner Denton seems open to the idea. When Craggs approached Denton with the news, “he gazed off into the distance, gave me a half smile, and shrugged,” Craggs says. “There’s an element here where he likes being a media trouble maker and zizgging when everyone’s zagging. We’d be the first to do this.”
Denton didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the union vote.
If Gawker writers do end up choosing to unionize, other digital-first publishers such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox may need to prepare for similar efforts in their own newsrooms. “When workers organize and it leads to contractual gains in an industry, it can gain momentum,” says Christian Sweeney, the deputy organizing director of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. “We’ve seen that in lots of different industries.”
Then again, this is a world in which Gawker offers “a gorgeous office with weekly breakfast and lunch” (plus health benefits and a 401k). BuzzFeed provides a competitive salary (plus stocks!), and Vice touts “paid time off, free snacks, coffee, and soda” in a “cutting-edge” workplace. What more could employees really want?
This is the question Gawker writers will have to answer on Wednesday, and unions will have to answer if they hope to organize other digital-first newsrooms. Media startups today like to align themselves with the culture of Silicon Valley, where companies like Google and Facebook have made it their mission to out-compete each other by offering competitive salaries, stock options, and perks like free transit and dining. The employee-centric workplaces of today’s new media shops are a world apart from the dangerous manufacturing and textile jobs of the past. Workers today have it pretty good, journalists at Gawker included.
And yet the culture of Silion Valley also demands a kind of absolute devotion to a company’s mission that can lead to a deep ambiguity about where workers stand, even when they think they have everything they could possibly want.
"Sometimes those jobs are very demanding,” says Lowell Peterson, executive director of the WGA East. “Having a collective voice to say to management, ‘Wait a minute, you’re working us too hard,’ or ‘How about this career development path instead of that one?’ is still crucial.” No matter how many free snacks you get.
