Journalism's visionary leaders and the voices missing from the room
Somebody is missing from the upcoming International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, Texas.
The journalism policy space is exploding with activity right now, and one of the big concepts up for discussion that I strongly support is “replanting.”
The gist of replanting is that it should be somehow easier for commercial newsrooms to convert to nonprofit status (like the Philadelphia Inquirer did) or that it should be somehow harder for hedge funds to acquire more local newsrooms (as the Illinois legislature is proposing).
Some people, usually people whose rent and health insurance isn’t currently dependent on a newsroom job, have ideological convictions that the commercial journalism model is fundamentally broken or immoral. My own views on such things, as somebody elected to Guild leadership by a bunch of my fellow journalists who are just trying to hang on for dear life, are much more crassly pragmatic: I’ve concluded it’s necessary to support pretty much whatever idea will sustain quality journalism jobs. I will have the conversation, whatever it is.
To that end, one of the attractive things about replanting and pooling journalists’ labor inside nonprofit firms is that there are more philanthropists out there interested in supporting journalism. Great. Good journalism costs money!
And look: It’s also just harder to advocate for donations or for much-needed policy interventions that will inevitably benefit the Wall Street dead-enders who now own and (poorly) operate a lot of local newsrooms, to the irritation of practically everyone. (My members just settled a strike in Palm Springs and Gannett is still whining about it, per its usual past practice of labor-management cope.) Tragically, these fools are nonetheless still responsible for a massive number of journalists’ jobs, and so unfortunately they still have to be part of the conversation if we’re doing anything meaningful to support journalists right now and not at some abstract point in the future, after the glorious revolution, sometime after all the rest of my fellow journalists have been laid off.
Anyone annoyed by anything I’m saying here needs to come to grips with the reality that, statistically speaking, many of my fellow journalists are currently hanging onto the last journalism jobs they will ever have — unless the trajectory of things change. Hence why I, and many other journalism do-gooders, are spending a lot of time this year trying to bend that trajectory.
Next week, many of these journalism do-gooders are gathering in Austin, Texas, for the 25th anniversary International Symposium on Online Journalism. There’s going to be more than 70 speakers, many of whom I respect, many of whom hold very important positions in our industry and whose contributions will be necessary to making good change happen.
But as I scrolled down the list of speakers, I had the feeling that I often have when scanning the journalism-futures space lately, which is the realization that once again, apparently nobody involved in the convening of a ton of people to talk about the state of journalism thought it was necessary to secure at least a single speaker from any of America’s many journalism unions or journalist membership organizations to talk about the roiling social movement that has been fomenting chaos in newsrooms in pursuit of a better future under increasingly intolerable conditions.
I’m talking about anybody from the international The NewsGuild-CWA or my colleague Susan DeCarava’s NewsGuild of New York local to talk about the explosion of newsroom unions and the necessities of legislative policy; anybody from the Writers Guild of America East to talk about the revolution and the collapse of venture-capital funded digital media, and the most humane thing that could come next; anybody from SAG-AFTRA to talk about the dissatisfaction and headcount reductions of public media workers at a time when nonprofit newsrooms are being touted as our future; or anybody from the Freelance Solidarity Project of the National Writers Union to talk about the forms of journalistic cooperation that are still possible after journalism labor has become so fissured. Or maybe somebody from several of the interesting new journalist-operating co-ops getting started!
Instead, as I scrolled down the list of more than 70 ISOJ speakers, I counted no less than three news executives who sit across the bargaining table from the journalists in my own local alone. Perhaps this is a good time to mention that the conference is being held in the same city where my members at the Austin American-Statesman are set to go out on strike against Gannett tomorrow. (If you are attending the conference and reading this and suddenly feeling bad, I give you permission to expiate those bad vibes by donating to the Austin Guild’s strike fund!)
I felt similarly let down as I scanned the recent important issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science on “Media Policy for an Informed Citizenry: Revisiting the Information Needs of Communities for Democracy in Crisis.”
From what I could tell in the issue’s many (excellent) wide-ranging articles on the crisis in local newsrooms, the only author who appears to have offered a scholarly assessment of the labor upheaval shaking up those newsrooms in the decade since the Working Group on the Information Needs of Communities published its Report for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was Texas Tribune editor Sewell Chan, a former NewsGuild-CWA member himself who sat across the table from me after serving as a management representative for the Los Angeles Times:
Most journalists do not have the luxury of temporizing as their institutions and livelihoods crumble. They’ve held down multiple unpaid internships (Falquero 2021); known nothing but precarious economic circumstances; taken on side gigs (Abrahamian 2018); been bought out or laid off numerous times before the age of 30; organized labor unions (Liedke 2022) to fight for stronger workplace rights (Fu 2021); experienced burnout (Elizabeth 2021); made less than $40,000 a year after decades of service; and not been empowered to contribute their ideas for digital innovation. They don’t have time to read the FCC report or studies like it. That’s why I’m speaking out now. The stakes are too high for practitioners to sit these debates out.
Well said.
But why is it necessary to also hear it from journalism labor advocates? To bring this back to replanting, winning a good journalism public policy fight or converting your newsroom to a nonprofit doesn’t mean you’ve created a future. Amidst a newsroom labor dispute, by definition it becomes up for debate who’s actually speaking on behalf of local journalism. (Spoiler: I always think it’s the journalists.)
Let’s look at the Long Beach Post and Long Beach Business Journal, the largest news organization in one of California’s largest cities, which converted from for-profit to non-profit status in December under a new initiative called the Long Beach Journalism Initiative. OK! Sounds good!
But within three months, the Long Beach journalists had decided they needed to unionize with my local as the newsroom’s economic future seemed uncertain amid concerns about mismanagement. Turns out “uncertain” was an understatement. Management decided to lay off nine of the 14 staffers after they went out on strike demanding recognition of their union and to negotiate over the incoming cuts to their jobs, as is the journalists’ right under federal law.
As recounted by the local publication FORTHE:
They have not returned since that day, forcing the Post’s website to become a gallery of wire copy and rehashed police press releases. [Jason] Ruiz, who was not one of the employees on the chopping block, said he and the two other reporters still on staff remain on strike in solidarity with their former colleagues.
“We recognize there’s a financial issue as with all newspapers,” he said. “The main point of what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to save this goddamn paper.”
That night, former and striking staff members drafted a proposal that included pay cuts, reduced hours, and even furloughs as an effort to save jobs. They sent it off to Evans and the three-person board of directors, but the bosses did not budge.
“I sent a message to the board asking if they would like to consider this. I waited until I heard back from the majority, and the consensus was that we needed to proceed with the planned cuts immediately given our urgent cash flow issues,” Evans said.
The next morning, nine staff members received calls informing them that they had been let go. There would be no severance pay and their health insurance would lapse by the end of the week. These latest cuts followed a round of layoffs last fall when the organization began transitioning to a nonprofit. What had been a staff of 26 in August was reduced to 17 in October and now stands at only eight. Of those, only three are full-time reporters with a visuals editor, executive editor, and fellow rounding out the newsroom.
“Everyone on staff, as well as our board of directors, knew that this move to a nonprofit carried with it considerable uncertainty and risk,” the CEO Melissa Evans told local media after the layoffs. “Our financial circumstances were the only reason for these cuts. The employees who were impacted by these layoffs today are talented journalists and support team members, and they did not deserve to be out of a job. But our obligation to our donors, to foundations, and to our readers is to ensure that the Post and the work we do survives this critical transition.”
First off, if you are a philanthropist or a foundation whose commitment to local journalism somehow requires the laying off of local journalists, I would like to have a word with you.
Secondly — I guess the cat is out of the bag on this one — the current situation at Long Beach Journalism Initiative since then has not especially become more tenable, but it has an obvious solution.
On Wednesday, Evans publicly disclosed that the organization has been in negotiations with its journalists to hand the organization over to them in a letter to Post readers, which also included what I would describe as a series of unadvisable public attacks on the employees she’s trying to negotiate a settlement with — including over allegations of wage theft for unpaid labor during the transition to nonprofit status.
Look. This is not my newsroom, and I don’t really know what is going on with the management over there. But it is painfully obvious that the responsible thing to do at this point is to set ego aside, put heads down, hammer out a deal to resolve everybody’s problems, shake hands, make a grudging declaration of peace even if it feels really annoying to you personally, and let everybody move on with their lives and careers and journalism-saving.
You can’t build a future for local journalism surrounded by a picket line of local journalists, but god help us if there are journalism leaders out there who are going to try.
The reality, as you've chronicled in this (actually wonderful) newsletter, is that the levers controlling the organizational operations of news is what's broken. Totally agree. We need to be encouraging former reporters to pick up the baton again and start running with it out of a sense of duty -- rather than this current era, which consists of trained journalists constantly feeling like shit because they aren't savvy enough to maintain a career in the field. A single individual might not be able to replace a local newspaper, but one person with a journalism background can focus on a single topic to consistently cover in a way that isn't so intrusive it dictates the other parts of life. And when the Private Equity, conglomerated operators all kill over (or lose interest), it'll be those little dutiful side projects that'll become the seeds of superior news organizations run by the people making the news. I don't get the sense that this is being acknowledged at an event like ISOJ, which seems far more invested in preventing old news orgs from backsliding even if it maintains the awful status quo.