Staff at digital-only news outlets, faced with job uncertainty, have campaigned for union recognition. Jem Collins charts their progress


Organising the digital world


W


hen the now 26-year-old Ruby Lott-Lavigna joined Vice UK back in November 2017, it was not quite the smooth landing she had hoped for. Just a few months into her new role, rumours began circulating of a fresh round of


redundancies. The global company had already cut 60 jobs as part of a now infamous ‘pivot to video’ in 2017, as well as laying off 20 people in 2016. In short, this would be the third round of redundancies in just as many years. “I didn’t feel like there was much progression, I didn’t feel


like there was much security,” she says. “And I sort of got to the point where I thought: ‘well, what is there to lose exactly?’ ” She began by restarting the movement to unionise from


three years’ before, bringing together a collective from across the newsroom. “We kind of grew from there,” she explains, with the first


small groups meeting secretly off site to discuss their grievances while eating home-baked vegan brownies. However, unlike previous unionisation attempts at both


Vice UK and other digital-only outfits, this time momentum kept going. Over months, membership grew, until the chapel had a majority of NUJ members across editorial, production, and post-production. Then, in July 2019, Vice UK announced it would voluntarily and formally recognise the union, making it one of the first digital-only chapels in the UK. It certainly felt like a big moment for digital unions in the UK; was it also a catalyst for something bigger? Unionisation is tough for online-only outlets and they are


still nowhere near reaching a conclusion. While the NUJ can boast a varied presence across Fleet Street, broadcasters and regional publishers, its footprint in the digital world is smaller. AOL granted union recognition in 2005, but Vice UK is the first major breakthrough since then. Even this was a struggle, taking more than three years. In contrast, The Journalist understands it took little more than a year to set up a chapel at the i Paper after it was sold by ESI Media in 2016. “Digital journalism platforms echoed the start-up culture of the US tech scene at first,” explains Jane Martinson, a former media editor at the Guardian. “It was a world in which workplace rights were not necessarily prioritised.” Her


16 | theJournalist


observations are not just a theory. In 2015, founder and CEO of BuzzFeed Jonah Peretti told staff that unionising wasn’t “the right idea” for the company, “particularly [for] writers and reporters”. Drawing comparisons to tech companies such as Facebook and Google, he claimed unionisation would stop him providing the “amazing benefits” that were the “incentive for people to pick BuzzFeed”. As the UK arm of the company came close to unionising in 2016, he ramped up the pressure, personally emailing staff warning them not to make “any irreversible decisions”, and the company’s head of HR flew to London to speak to staff directly. The hard-fought bid by Buzzfeed UK staff failed. Then, in November 2017, the company said it


was cutting jobs. A further round of redundancies in 2019 saw 200 people lose their jobs. More broadly, digital-only outlets axed some 1,000 jobs in just one week. Recently, Buzzfeed said it was ending its UK operations. “The digital-only news operations are still finding their feet,” says Freddy Mayhew, editor of Press Gazette. “I think it’s important to remember they really aren’t that old.” While he says cuts are part of an industry-wide struggle to “make digital pay”, he suggests other factors are also helping to drive a push towards unionisation. “I think it’s fair to say that the pure digital players broadly lean left,” he observes. “It’s also probably fair


“


What’s so brilliant is you have groups of people in different workplaces and they bring these ideas in and that strengthens everybody


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25