#postguild — Public Fediverse posts

The Washington Post’s site, apps and print edition featured many more anonymous sources than usual Thursday–in the form of generic “Washington Post Staff” bylines above previously-filed stories, reflecting the one-day strike called by the paper’s union to protest 18 months of unproductive bargaining with management over a new contract and the more recent threat by management of newsroom layoffs.

I know that union reasonably well. The Post Guild provided me an immense amount of help when the paper ushered me out the door almost 13 years ago–I still have the union card I didn’t get until the last few months of my tenure–and every year since has provided new evidence of journalism’s susceptibility to toxic management. Solidarity is a good thing.

So I honored the union’s request to avoid engaging with the Post’s output Thursday as best as I could (the print edition showed up on our front lawn anyway) by doing nothing that would make the paper any money that day. The exercise of shunning the Post reminded me that we do have other quality local news sources that often beat the Post to stories around here–ArlNow and Greater Greater Washington come to mind.

But watching an actual Post walkout also reminded me of how much things have changed since I was there.

We had a byline strike in 2002, but the last actual walkout had happened when I was four years old–and ended badly for the union. Seemingly endless rounds of buyouts that escalated from 2008 onwards, paid for by the unicorn of an overfunded retirement fund, did suck the joy out of the newsroom. But for years we could tell ourselves that the Graham family’s private ownership was our rock and protected us from indiscriminate layoffs to meet a quarterly-earnings number.

And then Don Graham shocked the entire extended Washington Post family by selling the paper to Jeff Bezos. The Bezos bucks made enough of a difference fast enough to make me think that the paper had turned a permanent corner–the staff grew, the paper reopened bureaus it had shuttered and stationed correspondents in places it had neglected, the CMS apparently became less toxic, and Posties I saw around town no longer had metaphorical rain clouds over their heads.

(Post journalists also didn’t let up on Amazon after Bezos put down his $250 million for the paper, regularly reporting serious problems with fake reviews and workplace safety at that company.)

It’s depressing to see that the paper’s prospects, at least in management’s eyes, have dwindled so badly that the Post is now planning layoffs and, from what other ex-Posties report, grotesque cutbacks to local coverage.

It’s dismaying to know how much worse things are at many other publications–my former client USA Today comes to mind–where journalists probably envy Post employees who are demanding raises, not just continued employment.

And it’s outright enraging to see that the entire online advertising ecosystem, the subject of federal and state antitrust lawsuits targeting Google’s alleged abuses of market power, continues to compensate publishers so poorly.

But I continue to think, possibly foolishly, that people don’t set out to make themselves dumber about current events, and that business models must exist to sustain journalism that makes people smarter. And I continue to pay for a Post subscription–which I hope will lead to more money going to the people whose valuable work I appreciated reading Friday.

https://robpegoraro.com/2023/12/08/solidarity-with-striking-posties/

#bylineStrike #DonGraham #JeffBezos #organizedLabor #PostGuild #Posties #solidarity #union #walkout #washingtonPost #WashingtonPostStrike