The journalism trust problem that a nonprofit newsroom can't fix
The journalism trust problem that a nonprofit newsroom can't fix
The public isn't the only stakeholder group with grievances against the news industry.
Journalism is built on trust, which is why it’s alarming when the public loses faith in the news media. Worryingly, many journalists don’t trust their news organizations either.
I recently read a new academic study of journalists by University of Georgia journalism professor Karin Assmann, who previously studied whistleblowers’ declining trust in traditional news media. (It turns out laying off or reassigning reporters from specialized beats does not exactly inspire sources to engage in potential career-ending leaking.)
This time, Assmann’s subject was the wave of unionization that swept U.S. newsrooms over the past decade. For “We’ve Got a Union, Now What?” in the Journalism & Communication Monographs academic journal, Assmann interviewed 45 journalists in 16 U.S. newsrooms to ask them about the highs and lows of their own guilds, which included The NewsGuild-CWA, Writers Guild of America East and SAG-AFTRA.
It’s not all sunshine, which is one of the things that makes Assmann’s study an interesting read. My alma mater, the Los Angeles Times, is featured, though I wasn’t interviewed.
Every newsroom is a little different, but it’s what they have in common that’s so striking. Journalists tend to like the elevated camaraderie that comes with unionizing and pushing for a first contract, Assmann found. (Many of us also like the union wage premiums, freer speech, and greater pay equity that tends to result.)
In fact, journalists’ particular brand of camaraderie struck Assmann as unusual. Traditionally, among workers, research suggests “a sense of belonging and collective identity is tied to identification with and loyalty to one’s organization or brand, as much as it is to co-workers.” But among the journalists Assmann interviewed across 16 newsrooms…
“…Participants here rarely conveyed this type of employer identification and solidarity. The deep sense of community and belonging that was expressed by the majority of participants emerged despite their employers’ identities and was always mentioned in connection with their union. The news outlet’s brand or ownership was never mentioned in this context as a positive community- or identity-building factor. In fact, several participants explained that joining a unionized newsroom opened their eyes to problematic labor-management relations.”
The across-the-board distrust of management was such that “of the 45 journalists interviewed, 32 mentioned the union’s Slack as the place where they felt safe and productive, away from management’s prying eyes.” Most journalists interviewed additionally “brought up their passion for and mission to protect journalism and how the union supports that mission” — often in spite of their employer’s own efforts:
“This too was a common theme: that not management, publishers, or owners set the tone or uphold professional values, but that it is up to the workers, led by their union, to protect journalism and carry out its higher mission. Vice reporter Cindy [probably a pseudonym] says that her colleagues are not particularly loyal to the organization. After all, it did not treat them very well. Instead, they look to the union for orientation around professional norms and values.”
The interviewees also looked to their own guilds to effectively do the job of human resources, where “across the board, the shared sentiment was that the union was doing management’s job, only better”:
“…The fact that journalists see their union, in some instances, as the most stable entity in their workplace indicates that a parallel bureaucracy is emerging. The overwhelming critique from journalists in every newsroom that their human resources department is understaffed, uncaring, or incompetent is coupled with anecdotes about the union’s ability to micro-manage and problem-solve.”
Put crudely, one of the major features distinguishing the news industry is a state of overt class conflict between journalists and the newsrooms they work for.
What’s so interesting here is that the conflict has extended into nonprofit newsrooms, far beyond the private equity, hedge fund and venture capital-backed media companies that provoked many journalists to rebel in the first place.
A broken social-contract theory facing journalists in journalism
When I moderated a panel at the Investigative Reporters & Editors conference in Anaheim earlier this year about how to use your newsroom union to protect your journalistic ethics, we took audience questions anonymously via text message, most of which were about nonprofit journalism and its own issues more broadly: opaque board decisions, questions about funders and their own conflicts of interest, etc. These are, effectively, questions reflecting a lack of trust — or, framed more positively, a desire for verification and accountability.
The sociology explaining why journalists unionize tends toward the virological: Some of us had experience with unionization from a previous newsroom; our friends and peers in the industry have been unionizing; journalism union campaigns have had a sectoral educational effect because they’ve been waged publicly over social media; journalists were motivated by broader social pushes for justice in the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, etc. The union-avoidance firms hired by news employers think similarly. They treat journalist unionization like a contagion to be fought through bureaucratic prophylaxis. Cue the antibiotic memos from the publisher and the soul-sterilizing captive-audience meetings.
Recently, I’ve also been thinking about journalism unionization within an older family of thought — the philosophy of social contracts, and what happens when they’re broken. Maybe journalism unionization should be thought of as less dependent on what each news company does than what Wall Street and Silicon Valley did to journalists more broadly over the last 20 years.
In an old academic paper called “Breach of Trust in Hostile Takeovers,” Andrei Shleifer and Larry Summers talk about how private equity bleeds dry workers, suppliers and consumers by breaking long-held “implicit contracts” — freezing pensions and pushing off raises, hardballing existing vendors, gouging longtime customers, etc.
If you’re a journalist, you know what an implicit contract looks like. The whole practice of journalism depends on implicit contracts. You can be an intern in your first day on the job, and the mayor’s office calls you back because your newsroom is known to operate fairly and professionally and have things like codes of ethics and corrections policies. The readers buy and maintain subscriptions in anticipation that tomorrow the newsroom deliver quality news, even if they have no idea what that news might be yet. Randos seeing the title of your publication on Google might know it to be reputable and click through to your site. These are implicit contracts, and they can take time and investment to build up.
Well, it turned out you can make quite a bit of short-term money breaking and renegotiating these kinds of implicit contracts in journalism. But what’s insidious is how the violation of these implicit contracts with workers can benefit what might otherwise be less predatory employers.
A nonprofit newsroom, for example, may have extricated itself from unreasonable shareholder demands for return on investment. That’s great. But a nonprofit tax status doesn’t mean your newsroom escaped the shattered labor market that Wall Street created for you. In fact, as an employer, you’re a managerial beneficiary of Alden Global Capital’s handiwork: There’s more skilled labor on the journalism market competing for fewer quality jobs, and that labor is more willing to take on freelance, temp and contract work that tends to suffer from wage and benefit penalties compared to traditional jobs.
The expansion of grant-based support for reporting work often relies heavily on more fissured work — short-term journalistic projects carried out by temps and freelancers not equally covered by collective bargaining agreements or given health or retirement benefits. In other words, you’re doing the same old journalistic work, just now maybe with even worse pay or fewer rights, meaning that the philanthropic donors for the project aren’t just your local community foundation but the journalists themselves. Inside the journalism world, the grant-based New Jersey Civic Information Consortium is often touted in lieu of other systemic policy reforms, but I don’t see any requirements for fair labor standards for grant eligibility there. Tiny grant programs can be good for certain things. Funding permanent jobs or repairing journalism’s broken social contract with journalists isn’t one of them.
Nonetheless, in journalism policy debates, you’ll sometimes hear nonprofit or digital startup advocates advocating for a burn-it-down approach to legacy media with fading models. In a news industry with declining margins, a stalling number of startups, a greater dependency on philanthrophy and public support across the board, and sluggish job growth, it should be clear that “burn it all down” is just the continuation of the Aldenization of the journalism job market by other means. That’s why journalists will end up with a newsroom union regardless of who you’re working for, and why those newsroom unions need a movement for sectoral reforms directed toward sustaining job growth to help repair the damage.