NEW YORK—The 180 staffers at ProPublica, a top investigative news website, are going wall-to-wall union with the News Guild of New York. Management granted voluntary recognition after more than 90% of the news and business staffs signed union election authorization cards.
The staffer-organized ProPublica Guild’s success continues an accelerating unionization trend in the news industry: Growth in absolute numbers, as well as union share, in a business whose bosses have drastically shrunk it in this century.
Just in the last few years, even two historically union-hating newspapers, The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, have unionized with The News Guild–especially just before the Tribune Co. was seized by the worst of the rapacious, vicious and secretive hedge funds, Alden.
Faced with the same downsizing threat, so have staffers at dozens of other newspapers, even in the union-hostile South. Examples abound in Florida and Texas, two top “red states” politically.
In its 15-year history, ProPublica, funded by foundations and contributions, has stepped in with top investigations that newspapers undertook in previous decades but now lack the staff to do so.
That fills a void caused by the implosion of local newspapers and by fewer investigative staffers at top regional papers, as the Internet completely devastated newspaper ad revenue and publishers either failed or were unwilling to find new revenue sources. Their response: Cut, cut, cut.
As a result, newspapers in general and investigative reporters in particular, have been decimated in this century. They’ve been sold, closed or fallen victim to secretive hedge funds who swoop in, buy the paper, sell its building, slash its staff, then sell or close it, walking away with profits and leaving “news deserts” and broken workers and families behind.
ProPublica has filled part of the vacuum and garnered six Pulitzer Prices for investigative journalism in its 15-year history. It may well walk away with more: This year alone, its staffers broke the stories of the hidden and expensive gift trips and lodgings from Republican big givers to right-wing Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
But the intensive effort for such probes have come at a price of breakneck work for the staff, especially in the last three months of every year, in the drive to produce quality stories eligible for submission for Pulitzers and other prizes. The prize push pushed the workers to unionize with the News Guild of New York, TNG-CWA Local 31003.
In the mission statement from the employee organizers, to all staffers and management, the workers said unionizing “is essential to preserving ProPublica’s values and making it a fairer, more secure workplace regardless of turbulence within the [news] industry.”
“We, the employees of ProPublica, built our newsroom to be a leader in investigative, data, research, audience, visual and engagement reporting and, thanks to generosity of our donors, shown a nonprofit business model can be successful,” the statement said. “We are proud of our work’s pursuit of justice and transparency and seek to hold our own newsroom to the same standards.”
ProPublica/Texas Tribune investigative reporter Vianna Davila, who dreamed for years of working at ProPublica, explained to the Guild: “Now that I’m lucky enough to be here, I believe the ProPublica Guild will help us preserve our newsroom mission and continue to ensure this is a place where all ProPublica workers, whatever their specialty, can grow and thrive.”
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