When Maya Shinwar and her colleagues at Truth Out started talking about unionizing, the global economy had just collapsed. It was 2008, and most people still viewed digital news outlets – especially progressive or left-leaning ones like Truthout – as “blogs.”
“At the time, a lot of people saw writing online as something that could be done for free,” Shenoir told me in July 2025. Joining unions allowed them to change that narrative, publicly insisting that what they did was work, “not just someone’s Live Journal.”
Old media, e.g New York TimesThere were unions, and for most journalists, these were dream jobs. But as the global economic crisis unfolded, the Truth Out team—about 20 people at the time—began talking about the precarity of their situation as well as the precarity of the situation they were covering, and discussing what it might mean to turn their jobs into good jobs, jobs worth holding on to.
They signed their first union contract in 2010, and are the first all-digital news site to unionize. Their union campaign contained a lot of “firsts.” They had to figure out how to build trust virtually — they all worked from home and Truth Out had no central office — and they even had the first office in the country. Virtual card scan To verify signed union cards of employees. In doing so, they set a course that has been followed by staff at dozens of media outlets. Transforming their working conditions has helped transform the reputation and power of digital publications, and shaped a generation’s thinking about trade unions.
Most of this organization, over the past fifteen years, has been divided between two unions. The Writers Guild of America, the East’s online media sector, lists 21 names including Gizmodo Media Group, Salon, Hearst and Talking Points Memo itself, while the NewsGuild represents 38 digital-only news outlets, such as Daily Kos, Business Insider and Military.com, as well as 13 news services that also operate digitally, including Thomson Reuters. These examples alone give an idea of the breadth of digital media: personal blogs-turned-news organizations exist alongside well-funded startups; For-profit combined with non-profit. Left-leaning sites may dominate, but the NewsGuild’s latest contract, ratified last July, is on The Hill. The creation of unions has helped stabilize a notoriously unstable industry and has facilitated the decline when digital outlets go bankrupt. Writers and editors at each publication had their own reasons for wanting to unite, but the overall momentum created a wave that showed no sign of stopping. (The last time I sat down to write about digital media unions was in 2019.) New job forumThe number of union outlets was less than half of what it is now.)
In 2014, I was an early part of that wave as a staff writer In these times magazine, a long-running centre-left publication with an emphasis on business reporting. It made sense to have a union, but it allowed us to discuss issues with management on an equal footing, set boundaries around our working time and stabilize our employment. While I left my job shortly after the union formed, the organization’s stability over time is due in part to a strong union contract.
For writers in many digital media, as with workers in many industries, three issues stand out: low wages, job insecurity, and long hours. Working from home often means you’re never off work hours, Shinwar noted. (I distinctly remember getting emails from my boss at 2 a.m. when I was working at AlterNet.) “Bosses were approaching this with the understanding that you’re so lucky to have a work-from-home job, and you’ve won the lottery,” Shenoir said. “Just because there is now a 24-hour news cycle does not mean there should be a 24-hour business cycle.”
It was Gawker’s 2015 unionization campaign that brought these issues to the forefront of the broader public’s concerns. As Hamilton Nolan wrote in his book hammer “Gawker’s parent company, Gawker Media, was one of many online media startups that grew from lean operations into fully profitable companies without ever stopping to build much of the day-to-day stuff that mature companies take for granted. The job was fun, but stability was out of the question. The endless demand for content and clicks meant that the work was a pressure cooker, with writers competing against each other to encourage acceleration that never ended. Did you get 100k views on that piece you wrote in 2 hours? Great, but there your colleague got 200k for a menu.
Media workers also saw unions as a way to combat wage disparity, discrimination, and harassment; Unions can push for diversity in hiring and make issues overlooked by management part of the discussion. The union’s tours in many outlets overlapped with the #MeToo movement, which has spurred organizing and brought new interest in stories of powerful men behaving badly.
Media workers are expected to love our jobs for their own sake – the joy of doing creative work – and because of the importance of the work. Movies and TV shows celebrate the reporter who never sleeps, but in the 2000s and 2020s, that person was more likely to be the one scrolling through his phone in the middle of the night, rewriting social media posts in a desperate attempt to attract more attention to his content. Bosses are not shy about using the language of sweet labor to pressure workers, to tell us that they are lucky, that there are thousands of people who would be happy to replace us. But the unions, as they did written Often, we offer a way to put this love of work into practice in solidarity with each other, not in competition.
These union movements used workers’ creativity in new ways, leveraging their research skills and social media presence to build power together and try to strengthen rather than undermine their working conditions. At Gawker, Nolan writes, they turned private grumbling into a very public campaign, which “almost gave public opinion a shot.” [WGAE] “Union organizers are having heart attacks.”
Too often, Nastaran Mohit of the NewsGuild of New York told me in 2019, publications agreed to voluntarily recognize unions, but stumbled at the negotiating table, hoping to drag out the contracting process until the union collapsed. (This too Common tactic And that’s as much a problem in left-leaning publications as any: Employers who consider themselves progressive, Shenoir noted, sometimes take it as a personal insult if their employees say they need a union. These bosses often repeat the phrase “unions are great, but we don’t need them” or “unions are for those other types of workers out there.” (BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti, for example, He said infamously“I think unions have had a positive impact on a lot of places, like if you were working on an assembly line… I guess I don’t think a union is a good fit for BuzzFeed.”)
One reason employers argue that journalists should not join unions is that it jeopardizes their objectivity. But objectivity is a myth, and the growth of digital media outside of the blogosphere has partly helped dispel some of its more harmful characteristics. Unions helped with this as well. The union “challenged that idea that we should just be a fly on the wall and provide objective reporting on organizing rather than being organizers,” Shinwar said.
With union protection, writers and editors have more room to choose topics that interest them, to set beats for themselves, and to better understand labor as a life-shaping force for the vast majority, rather than as a political vested interest. Some, like Kim Kellywho was a heavy metal writer for Vice News, focused on covering the labor full-time, but even those who didn’t deal with the beat helped bring new energy to the labor movement. Nolan noted that the Gawker writers became workers’ darlings for a while.
The union was unable to save Gawker from bankruptcy, although it helped workers keep their positions at the restructured company for a while. (Some of these former Gawker Media workers eventually left the rebuilt G/O Media to form a worker-owned site, dissident.) Gawker isn’t the only outlet to collapse in recent years, but that’s more a reality of the industry than a result of unions. Digital media is still struggling for revenue, and while every few years a new wave of capitalists seems to imagine that there are profits to be extracted from news and culture writing, they are often out as quickly as they came in.
Today’s media ecosystem is in the middle of another transformation. The collapse of outlets like Vice and Gawker, and the mainstream media’s capitulation to Trumpism and failure to cover issues like the devastation in Gaza, has driven many journalists to Substack and other newsletter services, a re-privatization of media that has many consequences. When you work at a publication, you have built-in support for both pre- and post-publication; Editors, fact-checkers, social media workers, and maybe even publicists. When you write a newsletter, you do it all yourself. The incentive isn’t to provide high-quality, vetted reporting, it’s to provide branded content that makes people invest in you unsocially. You should be an influencer, not a journalist.
The death of institutions has not killed solidarity among journalists — I am a member, for example, of the National Writers Union’s Freelance Solidarity Project, which provides resources to freelance writers and has contracts for minimum standards with many publications.
But our motivation for solidarity has diminished. Decades of anger-optimized social media have primed many people to have a knee-jerk response to any slight, to start every conversation with the utmost intensity and non-existent good faith. As Nolan wrote: “Attempting to organize a union was the first thing in my life that forced me to spend a long period of time honestly listening to the positions of people who disagreed with me and upset me—not for the purpose of crushing them, but for the purpose of understanding them.” Union organizing “can force you to become a better person,” he said.
Organizing is the opposite of “owning” the people on Twitter, BlueSky, or whatever app you still use. It is dialectical, but in a generative way. And union organizing, in particular, requires you to work in solidarity with people chosen by capital—in this case, your boss—rather than with people you choose for yourself. In the media, these people may have come from a similar background – some universities are overrepresented, as are some political leanings, perhaps – but you’re still organizing people you wouldn’t have chosen for yourself.
The wave of unionization helped produce “this growing sense of solidarity and this feeling that your well-being as an individual journalist depends on the well-being of others,” Schenwar said. She changed her view of the world, and this influenced her journalism, as it did with hundreds of workers who went through a similar process. Right now, this sense of solidarity is sorely needed, as Trumpism suppresses knowledge production in so many ways. Our way forward – our collective future, as journalists and as a country – depends on us taking seriously the idea that one person’s injury is everyone’s injury.