The news website ThinkProgress said on Wednesday that it would unionize with the Writers Guild of America, East, becoming the latest digital media outlet to organize in recent months seeking better pay and working conditions.þþ“For us it just seemed like a really natural step both for ThinkProgress and, especially as we looked around, for the digital journalism industry in general,” said Alice Ollstein, 27, a politics reporter at the site. The site’s management has recognized the move, said its editor in chief, Judd Legum.þþThinkProgress will join the websites Gawker, Vice and Salon, which have recently organized with the Writers Guild of America, East, and the American arm of the British newspaper The Guardian, which has done so with the NewsGuild-CWA, as part of an expanding movement.þþ“We’re a very young newsroom, most in 20s or early 30s, and a lot of us started our careers in the depth of the recession,” Ms. Ollstein said, speaking generally of the industry. “We were hearing this message constantly: ‘You’re lucky to have anything.’ We learned you can’t eat exposure, you can’t pay your rent with experience, as valuable as those things are.”þþNow, Ms. Ollstein said, ThinkProgress, like other sites, is hiring and doing well financially. “When our organization profits, employees should profit as well,” she said.þþLowell Peterson, the guild’s executive director, called it a further demonstration that collective bargaining was alive and well in the media industry. The union is in discussions with other media companies, he said.þ
Source: NY Times
