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An Organized Workforce is Part of Growing Up: Gawker and the Case for Unionizing Digital Newsrooms

Mon, May 28, 9:30 to 10:45, Hilton Prague, Floor: M, Chez Louis Salon

Abstract

In June 2015 Gawker Media became the first for-profit digital news organization to unionize its editorial workforce. They did this with the same ethos of "radical transparency" that had been the hallmark of Gawker’s editorial policy. In May, a week before holding the election, members of the organizing committee published a post inviting the staff to respond to comment on how they were going to vote and why.
The paper analyzes this post and its comments to understand their motivations for and rhetoric around unionizing among this group of culture workers and its implications for Gawker as workplace, and the broader digital news industry. I also draw on other Gawker texts, reportage, memos, press releases and first person accounts of working there, to situate Gawker’s unionization within an organizational history, from a media gossip blog to a news organization, as well as within the growing industry of digital news outlets.

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