I've got a new job

Waging a new fight for local journalists across the U.S.

At Capital and Main’s 2024 Exposés gala, accepting an award on behalf of the L.A. Times Guild. (Capital and Main)

It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment for local news — in a good way, finally.

This morning, I joined the nonpartisan think tank Rebuild Local News as Senior Policy Advisor. I’ll be helping them build capacity in the short term as a bevy of U.S. states undertake the most ambitious efforts to support local journalists since the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the 1960s.

Over the past year alone, New York, Illinois and California lawmakers have proposed public policies aiming to inject more than $350 million into local news production. The states of Washington, Hawaii and Oregon and have now jumped in, introducing their own ambitious journalism funding measures over the past month alone.

These particular state frameworks differ in the details, but the bills have a central idea in common: In a country that lags far behind other democracies in public funding for journalism, the public or Big Tech (or both) should subsidize the professional local journalists who form the bedrock of the information economy. If you want more local journalism, make it cheaper to employ local journalists.

But the execution of these policies, and others like them, raise knotty philosophical and political questions about how to define bona fide news outlets and journalists. You have to honor the First Amendment’s prohibitions against viewpoint discrimination. You also have to protect local media from Orbánization by government officials and exploitation by private actors.

I became a specialist on these problems in recent years as a working journalist and president of Media Guild of the West, where I coordinated journalist and labor advocacy on journalism legislation in the state of California. It turns out organizing newsrooms, bargaining contracts and being a relentless, meddling pain in the ass was perfect training for working with statutory language and coalition-building in areas of emerging policy.

And in my recent years of pain-in-the-ass meddling for my Guild, Rebuild Local News was the group I came to lean on most as a trusted source of reliable ideas and as a convener of the journalism world’s pluralistic stakeholders. I’m thrilled to pitch in.

Sadly, this also means my time leading Media Guild of the West is coming to an end. I took my buyout from the Los Angeles Times a year ago, and it’s just time to hand over the reins to another rank-and-file member.

When I was first elected president in 2020, the Guild was a one-newsroom local representing me and my coworkers at the newly unionized Los Angeles Times. Under my tenure, Media Guild of the West members and staff unionized nearly a dozen other newsrooms across Southern California, Arizona and Texas to become the premier journalism union in the Southwest U.S.

At a time when much of the journalism world and labor movement was shrinking, I got the privilege to lead something that was growing by leaps and bounds, lifting the working standards for hundreds of my fellow journalists along the way.

We organized strikes against the most exploitative employers in the news business and turned bad journalism jobs into much better ones, and became a case study for the legendary late organizer Jane McAlevey.

In California, we helped secure new legal protections for all California journalists covering protests and disasters, and some of our members formed a their very own news cooperative — the Long Beach Watchdog. (Media Guild of the West members just passed a resolution supporting more public policies that make it easier for journalists to run their own newsrooms.)

In the “right to work” states, where paying union dues or fees isn’t obligatory, I think all of our Media Guild of the West newsrooms have Guild membership rates greater than 90% — including in the heart of Greg Abbott’s Texas. (They jokingly call it y’allidarity.) I’d be shocked if there were much else you could get 90% of highly skeptical and independent-minded journalists to agree on, apart from the First Amendment (or yelling at Big Tech).

I’ll still be a rank-and-file member of my Guild, and I’ll still be a journalist, writing and yapping here and elsewhere. But it was the honor of my career to be at the head of the right group of people at the right time, joining the right movement, picking the right fights, for all the right reasons. Solidarity forever.