Employees at Gawker Media, the parent company of websites like Gawker and Deadspin, are planning to unionize.þþ“Every workplace could use a union,” Hamilton Nolan, a senior writer for Gawker, wrote Thursday in a blog post announcing the move. “A union is the only real mechanism that exists to represent the interests of employees in a company.”þþHe added, “A union is also the only real mechanism that enables employees to join together to bargain collectively, rather than as a bunch of separate, powerless entities.”þþMr. Nolan, who has worked at Gawker since 2008, said in a phone interview that the effort to organize was still in its early stages, a point he also made in his blog post. But he added, “It’s been something that a lot of us have probably thought about in an abstract way for a long time.”þþOn Wednesday evening, about 30 Gawker Media employees, representing most of the Gawker blogs, met with union organizers over sandwiches and beer at the Writers Guild in New York to discuss the unionization process and hash out their concerns about the company. The meeting lasted more than two hours.þþ“It was a very good discussion, and everybody got to say their piece,” Mr. Nolan said. “At the end of it, the interest level was really strong.”þþMany details — including which employees will be eligible to join the union — are still being worked out. The current thinking is that only nonmanagement newsroom employees would be able to join. Gawker Media said it had 116 news employees, which includes both writers and editors, across its media properties — though the line between editors and writers is blurry. Employees discussed the unionization efforts on Thursday at the company’s weekly meeting.þþGawker Media has recently experienced a number of executive changes. In December, Nick Denton, the company’s founder, announced that he was stepping down as president and would be sharing managerial responsibilities with a board of six managing partners. In a memo about the change, Mr. Denton also urged the company to focus more on good, relevant writing and less on producing viral articles.þþTommy Craggs, who was named executive editor of Gawker Media as part of the management overhaul, has been a vocal supporter of unions. In 2012, when he was the editor of the Gawker Media sports site Deadspin, he wrote a laudatory remembrance of Marvin Miller, who had recently died and was a labor leader who built the Major League Baseball players union into a force that transformed the sport.þþ“My sympathies are pretty clear to anyone within editorial and within the company,” Mr. Craggs said about the unionization attempt. “I don’t think there’s any great secret that I support Hamilton’s efforts.”þþMr. Denton seemed similarly serene.þþ“I’m intensely relaxed,” he wrote in an email. “We’ll see how the debate among the journalists plays out.”þ
Source: NY Times
