Abstract
In mid-2023, a Facebook account called “Protect KGW” became active again after a 7-year hiatus. The ownership of KGW-TV (a U.S. top 25 market station) was once again fighting its unionized workers over labor conditions. At stake? Long-standing IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) protection for videographers and editors at the Portland (Oregon) NBC affiliate. This was no isolated incident: The account was created in 2015 when KGW’s IATSE members, alongside workers from IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) and SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists—the two unions merged in 2012), staged a unified battle with station owner TEGNA over jurisdiction, worker compensation, and other protections. Similar battles were being waged at the Seattle sister station KING-TV and other corporate-owned local television stations across the country.
During those 2015–2016 negotiations, I was a director at KGW and member of IBEW. In solidarity, the three unions participated in a demonstration in downtown Portland to draw public attention to how corporate owners were treating local newsroom employees charged with telling the community’s stories and keeping the powerful in check. Little did we know then that we were part of a wave of union activity washing over the United States and Canada. The unionization of digital newsrooms in particular, and across news media formats in general, has been on a roll ever since. The trend has caught the attention of various industry publications and academic scholars.
After decades of off-the-clock work, short turnaround time between shifts, and precarious just-in-time schedules with little reward, newsroom workers have taken to empowering themselves via unionized bargaining. They are banding together at unprecedented rates to collectively fight for better working conditions—whether that be in a new digital facility or a legacy newsroom trying to find its place in our rapidly changing media landscape. Unions are not a magic bullet able to instantaneously fix all newsroom labor-related issues. But they play a key role in culture change for many workers. Karin Assmann’s monograph explores these cultural changes. Her qualitative interviews with 45 journalists in 16 mostly digital newsrooms establish that despite extensive wish lists for workplace transformations, the biggest changes come from establishing community and empowering workers through union initiatives. Unionized workers told Assmann they were able to create boundaries around time, compensation, and severance—an ability many never felt they had before.
Such empowerment is a key component in unionization drives. Assmann uses a labor process lens to frame some of the issues journalists face. As described by Harry Braverman, Vincent Mosco, and many others, labor under capitalism, including in communication fields, is about power imbalances. Those who enjoy an abundance of capital have power; those who don’t must work under whatever conditions they have access to for survival. In the case of many U.S. newsrooms, the power holders are large corporations with multiple properties. They are publicly owned with stakeholders expecting maximum profits and minimal expenditures. Local TV newsroom workers often labor under conditions that emphasize more work by fewer people in shorter time frames to accomplish such goals, further empowering the capital holders at the expense of the laborers.
Corporate owners of legacy media outlets in the United States have illustrated this tendency since the implementation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and its subsequent “updates.” The Act triggered an explosion of horizontal and vertical integration allowing the highest bidders—those with the most capital—to swallow up as many media outlets as they could get away with. Now, one entity can own hundreds of television and/or radio stations around the country and even multiple outlets within a market, along with their digital and sometimes print assets. For instance, according to its website, Nexstar Corporation currently owns or operates 200 television stations across the country in 116 designated news markets (out of 210 total), reaching 212 million people. Gray Television and Sinclair Broadcast Group boast similarly astounding ownership numbers and audience reach.
To further improve levels of corporate and stockholder financial profit from media properties, the labor power of news workers is often exploited to maximize surplus value while reducing overall labor and benefit costs. Assmann shows this via journalist conversations about uncompensated overtime, a lack of safety-net protections, and unequal salaries among workers of different genders and races.
This is where unions step in. By banding working peers together and negotiating collectively, unions help level the playing field. They raise the wage and benefits floor for everyone, including those ineligible for union membership. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports nonunion workers in 2023 made only 86% of the wages of unionized laborers. The U.S. Department of the Treasury notes union workers are more likely to receive employer-sponsored health care and other fringe benefits. In addition, pay disparities based on gender and race are smaller among unionized workers than those not part of a collective bargaining unit. These positive impacts benefit all workers within a company, regardless of individual union membership status.
In addition to such easy-to-quantify benefits, through unionization, Assmann’s respondents found that not only were they bargaining collectively, but also forming a stronger working community. The words used throughout the manuscript highlight this community, often built around terms of resistance. Solidarity with union peers. Creating “safe spaces” to combat being “surveilled” by management trying to “pry” into conversations. In newsrooms with trusted union stewards, journalists felt enabled to push back against management. This, in turn, impacted reporting, with journalists considering some of their sources and stories in a new labor-related light.
These unionized work communities are also setting up the next generation of newsroom managers, who may have a different mindset regarding employee relations and onboarding. I admit I was surprised by how prevalent dysfunctional onboarding seemed to be for several of Assmann’s participants. It was an open secret when I worked in newsrooms that the human resources managers worked in the company’s interest and not in the workers’. Still, one would think that companies would want to ensure employees knew their version of the rules. Yet, Assmann’s interviewees agreed: “Across the board, the shared sentiment was that the union was doing management’s job, only better.”
Is this intentional on the part of newsroom management, or is something else going on here? Was this the case prior to unionization or did the newsroom owners decide to save some (more) cash on human resources by letting the unions take over that part of their job duties? These findings illustrate the need for outside intervention, if basic questions about benefits and pay are being answered better by those outside of the company than those within it. No wonder that “caution and mistrust” were the “baseline sentiments” expressed by workers.
Newsroom workers deserve better than this. Journalism is supposed to be the Fourth Estate, acting as a watchdog of the powerful and keeping communities informed. Unions are one solution, but newsroom managers and, more importantly, station owners need to stop treating those in newsrooms like robots in the name of profit. As job descriptions combine and news cycles speed up, I find newsroom workers worrying about the impact of work overload on the quality of their reporting (see “News Work: The Impact of Corporate-implemented Technology on Local Television Newsroom Labor,” in Journalism Practice). Todd Belt and Marion Just, in “The Local News Story: Is Quality a Choice?” published in 2008 in Political Communication, and Jesse Abdenour and Daniel Riffe, in a 2019 Journalism Studies article “Digging for (Ratings) Gold: The Connection Between Investigative Journalism and Audiences,” establish that better quality journalism often means larger audiences. Larger audiences mean more profit through ad sales. More profit equals happier owners and stockholders. This is a win-win for everyone.
And yet these days a large portion of local newsroom workers consider themselves burned out. Many are considering leaving the business. In 2023, Elizabeth Djinis summarized for Poynter research finding that three-quarters of younger journalists are experiencing work-related burnout. Collective bargaining is one way that workers hope to avoid burn out, job dissatisfaction and, ultimately, job abandonment.
Another factor unions are trying to address to decrease worker dissatisfaction is a lack of diversity in newsrooms. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was touted as a way to level the media playing field and allow for a diversity of media owners and voices. In reality, the exact opposite has happened. Media voices have homogenized, with content focused at the largest audiences with the strongest advertising demographics, often at the expense of diversity and representation. Recent studies focused on gender and race and ethnicity show that stereotypes, misrepresentation, and sexualized depictions are still rampant across media platforms and add to (mis)perceptions. It is therefore unsurprising that the end results, for the moment, are so disappointing and that calls for more diverse representation in newsrooms are so loud. But we can hope that bringing issues of disparities in representation, pay, and working conditions to the forefront will garner more attention in unionized and nonunionized newsrooms alike.
The main focus in Assmann’s monograph, as with many recent media unionization studies, is digital native or print/digital newsrooms. Assmann herself admits broadcast journalists work under different conditions than those in the digital realm. The labor issues addressed by unions, however, are common across most news media outlets, whether new media or legacy. While reading this digital-focused study, I often found myself—a legacy television newsroom worker—saying “me, too”; I recognized the issues discussed here. We are all members of the same media community. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel that some of Assmann’s newsroom participants really didn’t understand the role of unions. As unions empower the disenfranchised, those who already enjoy some power often do not see the need to pay for help, in this case in the form of union dues. They should understand not only where their dues go but also that, much like themselves, union organizers don’t, can’t, and shouldn’t work for free. Like any other organization, a union isn’t magic; it doesn’t fix all problems and can’t necessarily prevent layoffs—another gripe quoted in the monograph. What the union can do, however, is provide rules about how changes happen in a workspace, including what steps must happen leading up to any layoffs and decisions about who gets laid off.
This is why my former colleagues at KGW are again fighting their corporate owners to prevent what the Northwest Labor Press calls the “uberization” of news videography. Again, their Seattle colleagues are fighting the same fight. As Assmann makes abundantly clear, this fight is not limited to any particular type of newsroom, any newsroom ownership corporation, or any newsroom position. In a time when journalism is being attacked as fake news and journalists are threatening to leave the industry in droves, we need to work together even more as a collective community to improve working lives and resist corporate greed.