The Year the Journalists Organized
Posted on Friday, December 31, 2021 at 7:09 PM
In the news: This year, over 1,500 journalists joined unions, a
movement that continues to gain momentum.
This was a banner
year for journalists organizing. Angela Fu of Poynter.org reports that
this year, 1,542 journalists from 26 different companies joined the
NewsGuild. It was the culmination of 35 different organizing efforts,
she says.
The move toward unionizing has only accelerated in
newsrooms in the last several years. But 2021 saw particularly high
numbers. Fu reports, “The NewsGuild, the largest union representing
journalists ... broke its annual organizing record. This year, 1,542
journalists from 26 workplaces joined the union. (The NewsGuild also
organized an additional 16 non-media workplaces, giving it a total of
2,128 new members in 2021). It set its previous record in 2019 when
1,499 workers, both media and non-media, joined the union.” Read more here.
Also
Notable
Publishing Struggles in 2021
Heading
in 2021, many publishers envisioned a return to normalcy after a tough
pandemic year. However, even with the widespread vaccine rollout, the
emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants threw a wrench in those
plans. Max Willens of Digiday.com notes in a recent piece that some
publishers have since abandoned plans to return to work in person. In
addition, publishers continue to grapple with the impending end of
third-party cookies. “Publishers expect alternate identifiers will play
a pivotal role in their businesses when third-party cookies are phased
out of the industry’s plans,” he writes. “But thanks in part to Google’s
extension of its deadline for deprecating those cookies to 2023, those
identifiers are not yet part of most publishers’ ad sales deals.” Read
more here.
What’s
Ahead for Local Journalism
Local newspapers have long been on
the decline, but that doesn’t mean local news is dead. Sarah Fischer
writes in a recent Axios.com piece, “New, independent digital outlets
and nonprofits have begun to fill some of the gap left by fading local
newspapers.” But traditional revenue will likely present ongoing
challenges: “New digital sites and legacy local newspapers alike are
finding it difficult to attract sustainable, commercial investment,
making philanthropic support and reader donations more important,”
Fischer says. Read more here.
Hong
Kong Editors Face Charges
Amid ongoing media crackdowns in
Hong Kong, “two former senior editors of Hong Kong’s Stand
News were charged with conspiring to publish seditious materials ...
after a police raid on the pro-democracy media organization that
prompted its closure,” report Clare Jim and Sara Cheng of Reuters. The
arrests come as part of China’s recently imposed national security law,
and others were arrested along with the two aforementioned editors.
“About 200 officers raided the online publication’s office, froze its
assets and arrested seven current and former senior editors and former
board members on Wednesday,” Jim and Cheng report. Read more about the
raid here.
AP
Style Reminders: Holiday Edition
Recently, the Poynter
Institute shared holiday-related AP style tips. The guide includes rules
for capitalizing or lowercasing holiday references depending on usage
and reminders for when to include or omit apostrophes. The guide also
covers holiday food and music. Read more here.
Report
on Paywalls Available
Thinking about putting some or all of
your content behind a paywall? What’s New in Publishing (WNIPM)
recently published a report on the various options available, including
hard and soft paywalls, “timewalls,” and others. The report is available
for download here.
Add
your comment.
Posted in (RSS)