it's new media sky is falling moment instead of the promised golden age we're seeing rolling cutbacks and massive layoffs at digital dollars like vice and buzz feed is that it for workers rights or unions any match for advertising pressure from google and facebook we'll talk to organize as this week on the laura flanders show the place where the people who say it can't be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it well two thousand and eighteen was the worst year in media in a decade thousands of workers lost their jobs at old fashioned newspapers and newfangled digital media firms alike layoffs nearly tripled over the year before and this year is not looking good either job cuts announced in january alone were up nearly fifty percent buzz feed once a digital darling recently laid off fifteen percent of its workforce sending shock waves through the newsroom its editorial staff then announced that eighty union was forming to quote them we want to remain spry and competitive the union said in a statement but we reject the argument that we must choose between empirical platforms or submitting to the whims of a corporation here to discuss the situation that buzz feed in particular and the industry at large are albert an investigative reporter and union stalwart news nastar on mohit organizing director of the news killed of new york which is the biggest local in the largest union for news professionals that's the national news killed and labor reporter and union organizer kim kelly welcome or will have mukul on all sort this out i don't know who can let's start with what brought you to journalism i always think we're very critical of journalism and we sometimes forget why people go into it in the first place me now writing is the one thing i've always been good at and i grew up in a very like poor rural under resourced area and learning to read very early and getting into writing is kind of from chatsworth which is an incorporated community in the middle of it and i love the kids who grow up the way i do get out and get to tell other people stories are going to tell their own stories so that's something that's really important to me and i spent sixteen years writing about heavy metal  because that's my other love but in the past i guess three to four years i've become very involved in well vises organization efforts in the greater labor movement i kind of pivoted a little bit towards covering those issues as well album what did you imagine in life in journalism was going to be like and when did you remember when do you remember it first appealing to you really since as far back as i can remember almost a group really read the sports section sports illustrated growing up and as i got older i thought i read more social justice sorts of journalism and i think you know very curious about the world and i thought the world of the deeply unfair place i love to write in the love to tell stories and i saw that the stories that were kind of going on around me were i was growing up were really being told out as much as i thought they should be and so just made sense to me and really other than playing in the n f l there hadn't been there any other career path in my vision and i think you know really from the time of high school and i just been focused on how can i kind of tell these valuable stories that in any way might try to reveal why the world is unfair years ago really just starting out in the service sector working as a waitress and a bartender and starting to organize some of my colleagues and over the years i had the opportunity to organize in different industries organizing with with teachers and nurses domestic workers and i started to work with a new skilled about five years ago and have been doing that full time ever since well five years ago was a brilliant time to come into journalism i mean what an incredible decade it has been both on the good and the bad extraordinary explosion of possibility on the digital side tremendous tremors of crisis just about everywhere else i think what we want to talk about in this conversation is how these traumas have now hit digital which was supposed to be this sort of dreamscape where all the resources had gone to when they left the legacy press so who also talk about where we are right now kim do you want to sort of thing but i mean we're at a point where like you said like digital media is where the money was as well the hot sexy new journalism and now the money belongs to google and facebook because they control the advertising revenue and that essentially dictates what digital publishers are able to do pivot video that was such a great wonderful innovative thing that hit about what a year year and a half ago has been a matter of decimated so many publications and so many sectors of the industry because we found out that wasn't true were being swindled and thousands of people lost their jobs because a couple of rich tech people decided to light or some other rich people and all of us at the bottom were let go unpack that a little bit more what do you mean when we were lied to and swindled the algorithm i'm not you know i'm not a social media expert but i have enough friends who are that told me a little bit about the process they were sold this new facebook algorithm was going to make it well well what they were doing is they wanted to make it so that users of facebook could see like their their grandchildren or like argue with their race or uncle about trump like a fun stuff like that this was supposedly their response yeah responsible response they want rice and selection to write and then they went to the shows those sort of more personal things so digital publishers to revolutionize the industry and it was a key sandcastle absolute saying castle like it all just disappeared once the tide came back in and now all of those people who were hired to do video and all of the people that were laid off that had the business model that we were so optimistic by this idea that even though news itself might not be able to crack the code of how to be profitable we have this entire operation around us that had cracked that code  because of that obviously there was all this venture capitalist money that led to probably my hiring and a lot of people came after me but those you know that that money was based off of projections that i think in hindsight maybe were not realistic  changed was i think when that money was coming in and when that growth was happening you know i can't speak for the people making the decisions but it seems like the may have underestimated the degree to which really the tech companies have the control and situation and that and that so much of our business model relies on what we're able to get from the tech me like even though many of these situations into the meter new the problems are age old right it's still a matter of advertising funds that aren't there i mean that's john coming to you i mean venture capital they're on an adventure they knew this wasn't sure thing how come it's like al but not al but people like him are getting let go yeah well i think i think the explosion and the expansion in digital media mimics the expansion and explosion in many other industries where you have you have venture capitalists coming into an industry where they see or think that they can turn a significant profit and as him already laid out in albert that as well these were really outsized projections and what we're seeing now is a bubble sting and this of the bubble has been bursting for some time we're just seeing the heart maybe the hardest part of the most difficult period now we're seeing layoff after layoff after layoff or hundreds of jobs are being hemorrhaged and i think that fundamentally we have investors in media who do not care at all about  journalism they have absolutely no interest in local reporting in the craft of journalism they don't want these stories to be told because the same private equity partners that are coming in and pillaging these news organizations are already are also pillaging our communities they're pillaging our hospitals and our schools and so these are you know if you look at all didn't capital which was one of the big hedge funds that is now going after again it again is one of the biggest publishers in the country these are you know heath freeman you know anyone can do a rudimentary google search of this guy and you see kind of characters we're looking at and we actually had a group of journalists last year fly into nearest city from the denver post to go straight to the wild and come out in headquarters the protests you know that had happened to them at the post as it happened it completely decimated the newsroom asset stripping absolutely i mean stripping to the bone and so i think in many ways this is i you know i i don't want to use the term unprecedented because i think we do have to view this within a historical context that media has gone through many different phases and periods of growth and contraction certainly when print started to lose all of those adverse that advertising dollars we lost thousands of jobs in the ninety's and that was and it was so many of these publications were really stripped to the bone what's interesting to me though is will come to unionization in a second but when we talk about assets we still think people like album the  capital like album and others like the thing clear groupon on the television side buying up these old legacy papers buying up these local newspapers that have been around for decades there's still some assets there which is interesting to me assets enough that they're curious about and when you look at the statistics on subscriptions and we'll come back to digital in the second those old papers the ones where we said there was no value  have stayed fairly consistent even though advertising is quadrupled news reporting strong but something about local papers people still like absolutely i mean communities still want the public still wants to read the news whether it's print or digital we know that print revenue has gone down and print circulation has gone down but the end of the day there is value and there are assets to mine within these newsrooms and so it's not just about turning this enormous profit it's also about looking it's not just the players that are investing in these media companies in the smaller news and gobbling up the smaller newspapers they're also going in and looking at the staff sometimes it is a unionized staff they're going in and they're seeing how they can do more with less so why do you need to have fact checkers and copy editors and you know an entire photo department when you can just aggregate the photos and pull them from stock photos and have your reporters do the copy editing in the fact checking so saying to workers this used to be your role but now because we've let go twenty five thirty forty fifty percent of the workforce you're going to have to do this this this in this for the same salary and that's how you shrink it's how you you lower the labor costs and you start to turn a profit and you're suggesting though that there are of the choices you could make what are some of the choices being made at buzz feed and what role is the union playing up i think once kind of but if you knew had the number of here's how many people you have to lay off it became this kind of history of ok what are the areas that we most want to focus on and i think part of that is looking at what is the value that we can bring to the wider media landscape and i think part of that is consolidating into a case like if you look at our late newsroom now credit was for layoff that we have tech politics and investigations as well as you know some some other like the culture desk and some other things around that and it's just kind of channeling all our resources into what we see as the the biggest stories in america as opposed to competing on you know fifteen percent of the news media landscape maybe we compete on like eight percent and just focus all our resources there and think part of that is because we see our value not just to our readers but maybe even to like the shareholders and people that make money off of us is kind of breaking through this very chaotic new cycle that page views are no longer the currency of the realm as they seem to be for  five years ago now the currency of the realm is kind of this prestigious kind of getting your your brand name on the scene and cry on for twenty four hours you know breaking through into whatever like the x files newsletter in a morning but this idea or reason to what they're doing i'm sure at a corporate level they've done a lot of calculations and a lot of you know they thought about it a lot the recent wave of layoffs everyone who you know all the workers were sort of bamboozled they couldn't quite figure out why so and so is a little laid off or why this is happening there wasn't a clear plan that was laid out those presented to us at least from what i can tell from reading about it in the press are well voices new c e o is very interested in the television and digital side of the company editorial seems like it remains an afterthought which is unfortunate because that's you know those the bedrock of the company like by started in montreal as a punk magazine and the people that are still writing those stories and doing really incredible work and they consistently undervalued which is part of why we were the first unit to organize and unionize facon twenty fifteen so really i don't know what they're doing and i'm not entirely sure they do either but i mean i'm sure somebody who makes a lot more money than i do could come on and give you a very very well thought out beautiful business plan but i'm just a worker and from my perspective who knows you know we're going to talk about the union drive and after your successful one well as the last traditional i'm sitting here with folks from vice you could have that online media outlet that also has a television and cable channel these days well they're in a union fight they've got some good news from north of the border some more challenging news here and here to talk about it is going to tell us a little bit about how your situated what's your relationship to this  think i think you know just watching the last few years in this kind of explosion and organizing it's just been incredibly inspiring not just to see all of these workplaces organize but to see how they've all connected in such a way that they're sharing resources they're sharing experiences they're able to tell their stories through this very effective medium which is twitter and other social media platforms and so i think i think in that regard media workers have the benefit of being able to share what's happening internally in their workplaces very publicly and so that's been beneficial in holding employers accountable and putting serious spotlight on potential union busting are any anti union activity in the workplace that other workers in other industries don't necessarily have the benefit of so i think that's been really exciting to see that kind of open up a whole space where you have media workers across the landscape connecting with one another and being inspired by their struggles so in canada they were inspired by the vice us union and actually we just when we went public with our campaign  news in the u s our sister local up in canada that represents those vice workers they went public on the on the same day with their organizing drive and we got news that buzz feed germany also announced their tenth of former staff coun your new union i think was not just a product of the post layoff scenario this is been in the works for a while right correct for some folks that have been involved for years for most folks involv several months leaf and you actually were able to play a role in the terms on which people were let go yes and you know that that didn't magically appear at a finn air from thursday to the monday we're just it right there already been the sort of solidarity amongst folks in the newsroom and i kind of sense that we were kind of on this on this track and i think part of it was like when a lot of us first got to buzz feed it was kind of this new model this new business model and i think we all kind of wanted to give the company the benefit of the doubt and see kind of where this goes and how they're going to kind of change media give them a chance right and when the checks are blank it's very easy to kind of go along with it and i think once we had seen that kind of this our company which was supposed to be on the vanguard of figuring out the business model was beginning to struggle that the problems that we were we were immune to the problems hitting the rest of the industry i think it became clear to many of us that we needed to secure our protections in this kind of turbulent times and also get a seat at the table and i have a say in some of the decisions that are affecting us and as union changed your life jim oh my gosh without the advice union i so many people would have left it's really changed everything like i was part of the initial that i've been part of the whole thing i there's a reason that they called me union mom i guess i've been part of the whole thing in the beginning the reason there were reasons that we organize of course the biggest driving factor back  twenty fifteen was money well as an open secret that wasn't really much of a secret that at that point vices compensation packages were far below industry standard and people were suffering like people couldn't afford to live  williamsburg was not exactly a place we can get a sandwich for five dollars to live in the year it was is people having a very hard time that was a big motivator and they were on our second contract for editorial it's something that i'm very proud of that we managed to get in our latest contract editorial was the institution of salary floors for every job title and we waited that in favor of lower and more junior titles because those are the titles that people who are women are queer people of color who are immigrants the people that get screwed over the most they're that's the person's going to get the you know the starting salary writes we wanted to make sure that the very least that starting salary was going to be something reasonable i mean i was very low paid basically throughout my entire tenure i would gotten really big gray is if i had got laid off a couple of weeks ago where does five you know but wait i'm sure it's not fine i mean we do talk kind of blithely about layoffs and there are real personal costs something about your friends some some people really were devastated i have a friend who she's sheets not american she's here in a recent now she's worried about whether she's going to have to leave i have a friend who recently moved into a new apartment finally after getting a ten thousand dollar raise with and now he doesn't know if he's going to be able to afford that like there are people i have a friend who man this was one that maybe the angriest is one person who is the only person from his specific unit who is laid off who has done incredible work he was the one of the very few black voices at vice and he was someone who was formerly homeless who is now making this incredible work and now he's thrown back into precarity these are the kind of things that our corporate overlords don't think about when they're looking at numbers of job titles like these are people like i might be ok because i was going to quit in march anyway but most people are not people people have a job that they pour their poor all their life into because they're working in a creative field or making work that they care about they expect to be treated properly and taking care of like no one thinks that they're going to get the thirty year company job anymore like that's not the the job market we're in that's not the economy we're in like capitalism is winning but at the very least if you're going to pour your heart and soul into your work you should at least be treated like a person and not a number what are you moving on to yourself i'm freelancing i'm working on a book proposal i've got a couple really interesting things in the works i'm doing ok i had i recently had a my first piece in the washington post the other week i'm doing differently and keep our news industry vibrant growing healthy ecosystem people don't need the kind of venture returns of thirty three percent or whatever it was they were expecting but they could get thirteen or ten or twelve well i think the only way that's going to happen is by journalists and other media workers continuing to organize and there being a degree of public accountability that is so significant that this constantly is at the forefront of our conversations about i mean what is media is supposed to be great a public good where you know the fact that we have local news completely decimated across the country that's something that matters to every single structure and process that we depend on so i think that i think that especially with these last few years of local reporting local or local news organizations getting hit so hard what happened at the daily news here in new york i think the more this is part of the conversation there is more investment coming in the night foundation has raised one of the emmys as real we are seeing major million dollars in local reporting without you know we're seeing positive developments  nobody wants to rely on billionaire benefactors like the those that rescued the l a times from trunk we want we want different models and i think that that's part of i like him i don't pretend to  to have all of the source of rupert by our great in fact i don't think any of us for ten i think if anybody were to say that they have all of the answers i think the business owners the workers we're all trying to figure out how we make this a sane industry where workers can thrive and communities can get their news and so i think that's what we're all trying to do together is trying to at least bring accountability and attention to these issues there are some exciting models out there one is republique swiss paper has raised a record amount of money online the other one is the dutch correspondent that's due to launch this year that'll be a different more i'm not surprised that they're not located in the u s interesting new models out there i mean this is something i want to see the entirety of media pivot to you know worker and cooperative model because i think that's the only way we're going to see any true equity any true freedom any you know no one's going to take care of us but us even the friendliest billionaire is still a billionaire so he's still an exploitative expletive deleted you know like there's we can't depend on venture capitalist we can't depend on cool billionaires we can't depend we can't depend on corporations like the only people that are going to continue to push journalism forward are the journalists and if we're not being supported by these terrible entities we should just do it ourselves right ten second response from you i am glad you got the optimism i think we've seen from the fiction models a lot of places have tried including us that people are beginning to be willing to pay money for things online which i think was not the case for a while but that's around and can thank you so much really great conversation i look forward to more this is the laura flanders show you can find out more at w w