65 Editorial Workers at Wired Are Threatening to Strike (axios.com) 51
"It's Friday night and I'm meant to be on my first vacation in a year," tweeted a senior writer at Wired. "But instead I've been bargaining with Wired management all day — and will tonight and into the weekend to get a fair deal."
65 editorial workers at Wired are threatening to strike for two days if they can't reach a contract agreement with their publisher, Condé Nast, by July 12. "The employees argue they aren't being paid equitably despite the fact that their work helps drive some of the company's most lucrative traffic days," reports Axios: High-profile writers are joining the union's push, arguing Wired workers should be treated equally to those at other Condé Nast-owned publications, especially when it comes to rights over their work.
"While Condé Nast owns our work, it's fair practice to allow writers and creators to share in the bounty when the work they produce is resold to others — and the company has agreed to that principle by giving full-time New Yorker writers a piece of the action when their work is reprinted by others, or sold to filmmakers," Steven Levy, editor at large at Wired and a contributor there since the magazine's 1993 launch, said in a statement provided to Axios by the union. "We've been asking for exactly the same terms that the New Yorker writers got in their contract, but Condé Nast won't even discuss this with us."
"It's insulting to imply that Wired creators are less deserving than other Condé employees," he said. "And it's not like our work isn't valued outside the company — a Wired story was the basis of a best-picture-of-the-year Oscar...!"
The first union to come out of Condé Nast was on behalf of employees at The New Yorker in June 2018. Ars Technica and Pitchfork launched their own unions the following year. Wired voted to unionize in April 2020.... Earlier this year, Condé Nast employees from publications that hadn't yet unionized, including Vogue, Bon Appétit and others, formed a union representing around 500 editorial workers.
The article also notes successful negotiations at tech sites BuzzFeed News and Vox Media — and shares one more strategic detail:
The Wired workers threatening to walk are asking their supporters to sign an online petition pledging "no contracts, no clicks." (That is, if the workers fail to reach a deal by Tuesday July 12th, "do not click on any WIRED links or shop through WIRED on July 12th and July 13th. Do not cross the picket line.") But if they do reach a deal by Tuesday, "please continue to click. Support union publications!"
65 editorial workers at Wired are threatening to strike for two days if they can't reach a contract agreement with their publisher, Condé Nast, by July 12. "The employees argue they aren't being paid equitably despite the fact that their work helps drive some of the company's most lucrative traffic days," reports Axios: High-profile writers are joining the union's push, arguing Wired workers should be treated equally to those at other Condé Nast-owned publications, especially when it comes to rights over their work.
"While Condé Nast owns our work, it's fair practice to allow writers and creators to share in the bounty when the work they produce is resold to others — and the company has agreed to that principle by giving full-time New Yorker writers a piece of the action when their work is reprinted by others, or sold to filmmakers," Steven Levy, editor at large at Wired and a contributor there since the magazine's 1993 launch, said in a statement provided to Axios by the union. "We've been asking for exactly the same terms that the New Yorker writers got in their contract, but Condé Nast won't even discuss this with us."
"It's insulting to imply that Wired creators are less deserving than other Condé employees," he said. "And it's not like our work isn't valued outside the company — a Wired story was the basis of a best-picture-of-the-year Oscar...!"
The first union to come out of Condé Nast was on behalf of employees at The New Yorker in June 2018. Ars Technica and Pitchfork launched their own unions the following year. Wired voted to unionize in April 2020.... Earlier this year, Condé Nast employees from publications that hadn't yet unionized, including Vogue, Bon Appétit and others, formed a union representing around 500 editorial workers.
The article also notes successful negotiations at tech sites BuzzFeed News and Vox Media — and shares one more strategic detail:
The Wired workers threatening to walk are asking their supporters to sign an online petition pledging "no contracts, no clicks." (That is, if the workers fail to reach a deal by Tuesday July 12th, "do not click on any WIRED links or shop through WIRED on July 12th and July 13th. Do not cross the picket line.") But if they do reach a deal by Tuesday, "please continue to click. Support union publications!"
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It's no surprise that a China apologist like yourself would celebrate a race to the bottom in wages.
There's nothing spoiled about profit sharing. Rather, its lack is abusive.
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Yes, the editors should definitely demand their share of the profits. 10% of virtually zero is what now? I look at my Google News feed and for every Wired story, there are 40 other "stories" from what appear to be randomly generated "news" outlets. And if I am stupid enough to click on one, it's just an illiterate slide show with zero value. How can there possibly be any money left in this business to share?
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Yes, the editors should definitely demand their share of the profits. 10% of virtually zero is what now?
The argument is that the profits are significant. If they weren't, why employ these people in the first place? Just for fun? I assure you that they are not doing that.
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I have no idea why that would be except that an awful lot of Americans seem to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, not the wage slaves they really are.
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The only reason they are even afloat is ads. A lot of those pages, if you try them with a browser that doesn't use some form of ad blocking, either via the VPN service like Mullvad, or via a browser extension, the pages will be unreadable with all the video ads and the other Javascript shit, and there is a good chance you will be redirected to some form of "giveaway" scam, and have to reload the page again from another source.
With the absolute trash for journalism we have. One side has OK stuff, but you h
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The Wall St bailouts in 2008 was ridiculous, the ones that gambled and destroyed the economy were never held accountable.
There were more bailouts in 2020; the Fed poured in money to save the stock market, and again the top got rich and the bottom gets the inflation.
The government should stop interfering in the markets. Plenty of Bernie Bros want that to end. End the Fed. Also, there are very few anti-war politicians. Not all Bernie Bros are socialist idiots, some of use just don
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Journalists (Score:1, Troll)
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Better to just trust your corporate masters, right? They will surely act only in your best interest. Aren't these boots delicious?
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I fully support these strikes (Score:3, Interesting)
Like all rags that are losing money because they hire twitter professionals instead of journalists and editors, I fully support maximum financial punishment for said rags.
The faster they go out of business, the faster this idiotic phase of twitterism as journalism and clickbait generation as editorial work can end and maybe, just maybe we can go back to journalism.
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Funny part is, that doesn't stop such "strikes" from the "If I believe it, it's true" generation of wankers with liberal arts degrees. Just look up into hilarious stupidity that is buzzfeed news strike. They claim that strike of those fired is still ongoing.
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Funny part is, that doesn't stop such "strikes" from the "If I believe it, it's true" generation of wankers with liberal arts degrees.
Question: who, in your opinion, won the 2020 US presidential election?
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Biden/Harris? What kind of a stupid question is that?
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It's about as stupid as your assertion that left-leaning citizens are the ones with an epistemological problem, when compared to the large section of society that votes Republican.
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That's good to hear. About 40% of the American right-wing electorate still believes that Trump won. Until that changes, nobody to the right of Karl Marx has any business accusing anyone else of gullibility.
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The problem is that you think sites like realrawnews are "journalism" and that any legitimate news you don't like is "fake".
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Thank you for informing me what I think and the site I should visit for the first time.
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Yes, you should visit legitimate news sources for the first time. Be aware, however, that truth is very dangerous to your worldview.
What will you do when you discover that Hillary Clinton wasn't secretly executed by the military?
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Isn't the joke supposed to be that people who she doesn't like suicide? You know, like people who Putin doesn't like? It's just that her enemies tend to use guns and bullets, while Putin's enemies use gravity and high buildings.
Also, I did post an update to my previous post. You should stop doing what your name suggests you doing. Because that propaganda about drugs destroying your brains? You appear to be demonstrating a good example of it.
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I'm not here to defend your insane beliefs.
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No, really, do less drugs. First you do all that insane mental contortions to pretent I didn't describe the guy behind the site your linked to a tee, and now you're trying to pretend that me explaining the joke your referred to is "insane beliefs".
Have you tried actually interacting with posts you're answering in a coherent and sane way?
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Update to previous post: so I went to that site you recommended and clicked "about":
>Real Raw News is owned and operated by Michael Baxter, a former mainstream journalist and former English teacher.
Now, what did I just complain about above?
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Wow. You'll believe anything printed on a crazy conspiracy website, won't you?
Let's see if you can learn basic critical thinking skills.
That website claims Michael Baxter was a former "mainstream" journalist. If that's true, why doesn't he say who he worked for? Why does he keep that a secret? The answer is obvious, of course. If he said which news outlet he worked for, we could very easily verify his claim.
Let's see if we can verify that claim ourselves anyway. Can we find a mainstream reporter named
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Wow, did this trigger your cognitive dissonance. I asked you a single question, the answer to which was self evident.
And to maintain your ideological bubble, you just did some incredible mental contortions rather than note that this guy was the literal example of what I was complaining of. And that I described him with incredible accuracy in just a handful of words, because that I know enough about these people to know what it is that they think is valuable about themselves.
Considering the quality of modern "journalisming" (Score:5, Insightful)
I could not possibly give less of a shit about this.
If they're being paid AT ALL for the crap they write, they're being overpaid.
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Having skimmed a bunch of Wired content cross-posted to ArsTechnica (another Condé Nast site) on the weekends, Steven's deluded. It's a rarity that their work is of a similar caliber to Ars' own. It's obvious within a few paragraphs when you're reading a Wired cross-post. The depth and detail is almost always sub-par.
Now, I get it that Wired's audience is more Joe Average than Ars' is, but
Re:Considering the quality of modern "journalismin (Score:5, Insightful)
Who wants to bet that Condé Nast is pro union (Score:3)
... except when it comes to its own people?
Errr. I hope that's not your best example (Score:2)
Being the basis for someone else's work, that someone else who paid screenwriters and directors and invested untold dollars in order to win an Oscar isn't really overwhelming evidence of your genius.
It's like trying to stake claim to a beautiful building, by saying you broke your leg leading to the development of the plaster cast removal tool which formed the basis for the oscillating multitool the builder used during construction.
Greedy Money Grubbing Editors (Score:1)
The hit a couple a buttons, decide which articles support their agendas, or rewrite them to protect their interests, and now want a percentage of the work they didn't do.
Please do go on strike (Score:1)
And never accept management's offer because I want to stop seeing your articles on ArsTechnica.com
Fundamental issue with today's web (Score:3)
There are many, many, many web sites out there where the structure is pretty much as follows:
Tier 1: The owner, and individual or group who are actually making at least some money from the site. Some bring in quite a lot, but they're in a tiny minority.
Tier 2: The people who actually manage the site and/or generate the content. They get important-sounding titles like "editor" or "associate" or "contributor" and put numerous hours in every week on the hopes that it will eventually turn into a real paying job - but, right now, they get paid a pittance (if they get paid at all).
The fundamental problem is, in aggregate the sites don't bring in anywhere near enough money to pay all those editors / associates / contributors a living wage - and there's little hope of that changing.
Huh? (Score:1)
Have you seen that magazine? They have like five articles max per issue, they don't need 13 editors per article. One guy can oversee five articles, fire the rest of the 64 pieces of dead weight.
I like that they are sticking up for themselves... (Score:2)
I like that they are sticking up for themselves against a corporation that is likely paying it's CEO millions while most of the workers may 50K a year.
With that said, I have a strong feeling most non-creative writing will be largely replaced by AI and machine learning. A huge portion of "news" could easily be replaced by AI and if we didn't have entertainment news could be ushered in even sooner.
When I think of that, I wonder just how valuable these people think they are or how important their actual job is
Wired? (Score:2)
They should just quick (Score:3)
Conde Nast is also owned by Advanced Publications, the same company that directs Reddit to censor free thought on it's platform. I can only hope Conte Nast and in turn Advanced Publications goes out of business, the world would be a better place.