At Gawker Media, the editorial writers are restless and talking union.
Hamilton Nolan, a senior editor, revealed on the site Thursday that he and other writers had huddled with the Writers Guild of America East with the aim of forming a union chapter to deal with the company owned by Nick Denton.
There is “no one burning issue, but a basic pay scale and a fair and transparent system of compensation was something a lot of people were looking for,” Nolan told Media Ink via email.
He said that about 30 editorial writers — out of a workforce that he estimated to be between 60 and 90 persons — gathered in the downtown WGA East offices Wednesday.
“Currently, we’re getting people to sign union cards,” said Nolan. “If we collect cards from a majority of employees then the union can move to get certified.”
WGA East officials had not returned a call by presstime.
And Denton’s reaction to the news?
“Relaxed,” he insisted to Media Ink. “We all know writers are a bunch of communists. The editorial board here is nicknamed the Politburo after all.”
If Gawker is unionized, it would join the Daily Beast as one of the few digital outlets to unionize.
The Daily Beast went union during its short-lived merger with Newsweek, which was already unionized by the Newspaper Guild.
That forced some immediate pay hikes on the Beast, led by Tina Brown at the time, to bring it to parity with the Newsweek writers.
But when Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp ultimately sold off the money-losing Newsweek to IBT Media, the Beast stayed unionized. IBT fired virtually all of the remaining staff and restaffed with nonunion employees and claims to have returned to break-even status in recent months.
Newspaper Guild President Bill O’Meara said the Guild recently negotiated a new multiyear contract for the Daily Beast edit side. “They came under contract when they merged [with Newsweek] but the new contract we negotiated is for Daily Beast only.”