Good luck. I'm curious what you feel about the following:
These days news publications generally have a pretty weak business model and a lot of competition. Does it still make sense to have a union in this case? Why?
Unions are about more than compensation, they can also fight for working conditions, like the ability to work from home and the processes involved in termination, which are both at issue in this strike.
Contrary to perhaps popular misconception, if the business is unprofitable, unions aren't going to demand a larger piece of a disappearing pie. If there isn't money to be paid out, there's nothing to fight over. Leading a union or negotiating for a union does not fundamentally turn you into an unreasonable person at the negotiating table.
Something I've learned from 404 media is journalism actually has a fine business model. People are willing to pay for good journalism.
The problem is (much like the rest of the economy) what passes for news media is incredibly top heavy and bloated with managers, executives, and shareholders who suck up money without providing any value.
For every journalist there are 15 managers and editors hired for nepotism reasons. The NYT is full of people like that who do nothing but trot out right wing editorials supporting whatever war the US is involved in[4] or attacking people who think the world can be a better place[3]. I used to pay for The Atlantic but for every Ed Yong writing amazing science articles there's a right wing editor like Jeffrey Goldberg[1] sucking up money and shitting out right wing propaganda[2].
This article[0]from 404 said it well.
>Then I went to work for VICE, and made working at VICE part of my identity. I wanted the company to succeed so badly because I believed in what we were doing and I believed in the institution. I worked zillions of hours of unpaid overtime, took on side projects, canceled vacations to do work, worked on vacations, and made incredibly hard decisions, thinking that, if I did my job well enough, the company would succeed and we would get to keep doing what we were doing. I spent the vast majority of that time doing work that made money for an over-bloated apparatus that existed to make a bunch of middle managers and executives large salaries and bonuses and to benefit a founder who is now retroactively denigrating our work in an attempt to cling to whatever relevancy he can find by catering to conspiracy theorists and the right.
I hope journalists leave the old right wing media like the NYT and Washington Post and start their own things focusing on journalism. I gladly pay for that.
> For every journalist there are 15 managers and editors
Really? I don't believe this at all. I have not seen a properly edited published piece online in over a decade, and it continues to get worse. From obvious spelling errors and sentence fragments to full blown loss of coherent thoughts. The obviousness of multiple contributors' work being mashed together with the same information being repeated multiple times within the piece clearly shows that no editor is looking over the work at all. No editor worth their salt would allow that kind of work.
These days news publications generally have a pretty weak business model and a lot of competition. Does it still make sense to have a union in this case? Why?