Digital Media’s Union Wave Helped Shape a Generation’s Thinking About Unions

When Maya Schenwar and her colleagues at Truthout began to talk about unionizing, the global economy had just imploded. It was 2008, and most people still thought of digital news outlets — particularly progressive or left-leaning ones like Truthout — as “blogs.” 

“At the time, a lot of people saw online writing as something that you did for free,” Schenwar told me in July 2025. Unionizing allowed them to change that narrative, to insist in public that what they did was work, “not just someone’s LiveJournal.” 

Legacy media, like the New York Times, had unions, and to most journalists, those were the dream jobs. But as the global economic crisis spread, the Truthout staff — around 20 people at the time — began to talk about their own precarity as well as the precarity they were covering, and to discuss what it might mean to make their own jobs into good jobs, jobs worth hanging on to. 

They signed that first union contract in 2010, the first all-digital news site to unionize. Their union drive had contained a lot of “firsts.” They had to figure out how to build trust virtually — they all worked from home and Truthout had no central office — and even had the country’s first virtual card check to verify employees’ signed union cards. In doing so, they laid out a path that workers at dozens of media outlets have followed. Transforming their own working conditions helped change the reputation and power of digital publications, and to shape a generation’s thinking about labor unions. 

Most of that organizing, over the past 15 years, has been split between two unions. The Writers’ Guild of America, 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, like Daily Kos, Business Insider and Military.com, plus 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 alongside nonprofit. Left-leaning sites might dominate, but the NewsGuild’s latest contract, ratified this July, is at The Hill. Unionization has helped to stabilize an industry that is notoriously unstable, and smoothed the landing when digital outlets go bust; writers and editors at each publication had their own particular reasons for wanting a union but the overall momentum created a wave that shows no sign of stopping. (The last time I sat down to write about digital media unions, in 2019 for New Labor Forum, the number of unionized outlets was less than half what it is now.)

In 2014, I was an early part of that wave as a staff writer at In These Times magazine, a long-standing left-of-center publication with a focus on labor reporting. It only made sense that we would have a union, but it allowed us to hash out issues with management as equals, to set boundaries around our work time and stabilize our employment. While I left the job shortly after we formed the union, the stability of the organization over time is due in part to a strong union contract. 

For writers at many digital media outlets, as with workers in many industries, three issues stand out: low pay, job insecurity, and long hours. Work from home, Schenwar noted, often means that you’re never truly off the clock. (I vividly recall getting emails from my boss at 2am when I worked at AlterNet.) “Bosses would approach this as, you are so lucky to have a work from home job, you have won the lottery,” Schenwar said. “Just because there was now a 24-hour news cycle didn’t mean that there should be a 24-hour work cycle.” 

It was the 2015 union drive at Gawker that put those issues front and center with the broader public. As Hamilton Nolan wrote in his book The Hammer, “Gawker’s parent company, Gawker Media, was one of several online media startups that had grown from shoestring operations into full-fledged profitable companies without ever stopping to build a lot of the workaday stuff that mature companies take for granted.” The job was fun, but stability was out of the question. And the endless demand for content and clicks meant that work was a pressure cooker, with writers played off against each other to encourage a never-ending speedup. You got 100,000 views on that piece you wrote in two hours? Great, but over there your colleague got 200,000 for a listicle. 

Media workers also saw unions as a way to fight pay disparities, discrimination, and harassment; unions could push for diversity in hiring and make issues that management ignored part of the discussion. The union drives at many outlets overlapped with the #MeToo movement, which spurred organizing and brought new interest in the stories of powerful men behaving badly. 

Media workers are expected to love our jobs both for their own sake — the pleasure 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 2010s and 2020s, that was more likely to be someone scrolling on their phone in the middle of the night, rewriting social media posts in a desperate attempt to get more eyeballs on their content. Bosses aren’t shy in using the language of the labor of love to pressure workers, to tell us that they’re lucky, that there are thousands out there that would be thrilled to replace us. But unions, as I’ve written many times, offer a way to put that love for the work into action in solidarity with one another, rather than in competition. 

Those union drives used workers’ creativity in new ways, made use of their research skills and social media presence to build power together and to try to strengthen rather than undermine their employment conditions. At Gawker, Nolan wrote, they turned private grumbling into a very public campaign, which “nearly gave the [WGAE] union organizers heart attacks.” 

Often, Nastaran Mohit of the NewsGuild of New York told me in 2019, publications agreed to voluntarily recognize the unions, only to stonewall at the bargaining table, hoping to drag out the contract process until the union fell apart. (This too is a common tactic across industries.) This is a problem at left-leaning publications as much as any other: employers who think of themselves as progressive, Schenwar noted, sometimes take it as a personal affront if their employees say that they need a union. Those bosses will often say some version of “Unions are great, but we don’t need one,” or “Unions are for those other kinds of workers, over there.” (BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti, for example, infamously said, “I think unions have had a positive impact on a lot of places, like if you’re working on an assembly line. . . I think I don’t think a union is right for BuzzFeed.”)

One of the reasons employers argue that journalists shouldn’t be unionized is that it compromises their objectivity. But objectivity is a myth, and the growth of digital media in part out of the blogosphere has helped dispel some of its more noxious characteristics. Unions helped with that too. The union, Schenwar said, “challenged that idea that we just have to be flies on the wall objectively reporting on organizing as opposed to ourselves being organizers.” 

With union protections in place, writers and editors have had more space to choose the topics that matter to them, to carve out beats for themselves and to better understand labor as a force that structures life for the vast majority, rather than a political special interest. Some, like Kim Kelly, who was a heavy metal writer at Vice News, pivoted to covering labor full-time, but even those who haven’t taken up the labor beat have helped to bring new energy to the labor movement. Gawker writers, Nolan noted, became the darlings of labor for a while. 

The union couldn’t save Gawker from bankruptcy, though it helped workers retain positions at the restructured company for a while. (Some of those former Gawker Media workers eventually departed the rebuilt G/O Media to form a worker-owned site, Defector.) Gawker isn’t the only outlet to crumble in recent years, but that’s a reality of the industry more than a consequence of unionization. Digital media still struggles to bring in revenue, and while it seems every few years a new wave of capitalists imagine that there are profits to be wrung from news and culture writing, they often get out as quickly as they got in. 

The media ecosystem is today in the middle of yet another transformation. The collapse of outlets like Vice and Gawker, the capitulation of mainstream outlets to Trumpism and their 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 both pre- and post-publication; editors and fact-checkers, social media staffers and maybe even publicists. When you write a newsletter, you do it all yourself. The incentive is not to do quality, fact-checked reporting, it is to do branded content that gets people parasocially invested in you. It is to be an influencer, rather than a journalist. 

The death of institutions hasn’t killed solidarity among journalists — I’m a member, for example, of the Freelance Solidarity Project at the National Writers Union, which provides resources for independent writers and has contracts for minimum standards with several publications. 

But our impulses toward solidarity have been blunted. Decades of social media optimized for outrage have primed so many people to have a hair-trigger response to any perceived slight, to start every conversation at maximum intensity with nonexistent good faith. As Nolan wrote, “Attempting to organize a union was the first thing in my life that forced me to spend an extended period of time genuinely listening to the positions of people who disagreed with me and pissed me off — not for the purpose of crushing them, but for the purpose of understanding them.” Organizing unions, he argued, “can force you to become a better person.” 

Organizing is the opposite of “owning” people on Twitter or BlueSky or whatever app you’re still on. It’s argumentative, but in a generative way. And union organizing, in particular, requires you to work in solidarity with the people whom capital — your boss, in this case — has chosen, rather than the people you choose for yourself. In the media, those people might have come from a similar background — certain universities are overrepresented, as are certain political tendencies, perhaps — but you’re still organizing people you would not have selected for yourself. 

The union wave, Schenwar said, helped produce “this growing sense of solidarity and this sense that your wellbeing as an individual journalist depends on the wellbeing of others.” It changed how she saw the world, and that informed her journalism, as it has for hundreds of workers who have been through a similar process. Right now, that sense of solidarity is urgently needed, as Trumpism cracks down on knowledge production in all sorts of ways. Our path forward — our collective future, as journalists and as a country — depends on us taking seriously the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all.