Conclusion
This report examined the landscape of unionization by local newsroom workers over the past five years, offering some initial insight about their place within the broader movement of union organization in media. This report indicates that workers in local newsrooms represent a significant and growing part of the media union landscape even as—and perhaps because—local news media are in decline.
Local newsroom workers have been overwhelmingly successful in achieving representation through their unions. However, this research does not address the effects union representation has had on workers. Future research should explore how successful these unions have been at negotiating contracts with management and if benefits, pay and workloads have improved for newsroom workers. Additionally, given the majority of local newsroom unions have achieved recognition through elections rather than voluntary recognition, future research should address what factors lead management to voluntarily recognize unions and whether or not that influences contract negotiations.
Of the newsrooms where workers have organized unions, more than 40% have changed hands within the year before or after workers unionized. Additionally, most of the newsrooms that changed hands are now owned by investment firms. Given the increasing frequency of mergers and acquisitions in local news, this perhaps is not surprising. However, this indicates that the volatility around a potential acquisition is a likely factor in the decision of newsroom workers to unionize but is not necessarily the sole driving factor.
However, experiencing or anticipating an ownership change is likely only one of many factors influencing the decision of local newsroom workers to organize unions, and future research should address other factors such as layoffs, wage stagnation, benefit cuts and the consolidation of editorial functions in regional hubs relative to unionization as well as the extent to which unionization mitigates such actions after a merger or acquisition. One limitation of this report is that we did not examine ownership changes in comparison with local newsrooms where workers have not organized unions. Unfortunately, it was outside the scope of our data but is an area for future research to address.
One of the more surprising findings in this report is that unions in right-to-work states have been more successful than those in union-friendly states at gaining representation. In fact, all local newsroom unions in right-to-work states have successfully gained representation, which raises questions about the value of unionization in states where the law is hostile to unions. Future research should examine what factors have made this possible, and in addition to understanding voluntary recognition in general, future research should specifically address the significance of voluntary recognition in right-to-work states. Further, research in this area should explore the success of contract negotiation between local newsroom unions and management in right-to-work states in comparison with negotiation in union-friendly states.
Finally, future research should explore what unionization means for the communities these local newsrooms serve, particularly as investment firms play a growing role in the local news landscape. New research has found that the acquisition of newspapers by investment companies results in decreased localization of news content as well as a lower volume of content overall. Future research should examine the effect of unionization on not only the consolidation of editorial and production processes but the effect of unionization on how much original and local news content newsrooms produce. In short, does unionization enable newsrooms to better serve their communities?
Appendix: Data and Methods
Identifying Media Unions
Ownership Data
Ownership Data
We used several approaches to gathering ownership information for this project. First, we combined our data about unions with our existing data about newspaper ownership (UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, 2020). This data was used to identify the owner and type of owner as well as the owner and owner type at the time the union was formed.
We used the same three labels of ownership types as Abernathy (2020) for newspapers — private, investment, and public— and categorized owners based on their status in the year before a newsroom unionized, at the time the newsroom unionized, and their current ownership. 13 We also reviewed press releases from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which often represents unions in broadcast stations, but we found no IBEW voluntarily recognized during this time period. Private companies are not publicly traded and include large companies that own a portfolio of media across different media formats as well as smaller companies that own only newspapers. Public companies are those which are publicly traded. Investment companies were identified based on whether or not the company met five or more of the following criteria (Abernathy, 2020):
- Stated interest of parent company is maximizing shareholder return
- Many properties acquired as a group from other media companies through purchase of entire companies or divisions
- Majority financial and/or operational control is held by a small number of institutional stakeholders, such as lenders, private equity firms, or investment fund managers
- The company was formed or incorporated within the past 20 years and is a relative newcomer to newspaper ownership
- Newspaper holdings are part of portfolio of non-newspaper companies
- Movement of individual newspapers within portfolios
- Two or more financial restructurings including bankruptcy reorganization, rebranding after selling the company, or flips between public and private ownership
- Private equity company, hedge fund, or pension fund has at some point during the past decade owned all or a significant portion of the enterprise
Because there are non-profit and public media in our data, we added one additional category, “nonprofit.” These news organizations have a nonprofit tax status, and we also included public media in the nonprofit ownership category to reduce the confusion of having a “public media” ownership type as well as a “public” company ownership type.
We identified the ownership of the 10 commercial broadcast stations in our data by first looking up the station online and finding its current owner on the station website. If this was not possible, we did a TV, AM, or FM query in the FCC’s databases. To find previous owners, we did an internet search for the station name, “owner,” and the relevant year to identify press releases and news articles about mergers and acquisitions involving the station. In most cases, the station had published an article announcing a new owner.
Right to Work Data
Right to Work Data
Finally, using location data for each newsroom, we identified which newsrooms were in one of the 27 “right to work” states in the U.S. using a list from the National Right to Work Committee (n.d.).
Statistical Analysis
Statistical Analysis
This study is primarily descriptive and relies primarily on the comparison of proportions and means. Data for this study were analyzed using the tidyverse set of packages and base R for statistical tests in RStudio. Unless otherwise noted, Chi-square tests for proportions and a t-tests for means were conducted, and significant results are indicated.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge the following for their support collecting data for this project:
Kayleigh Carpenter, CISLM Intern
Lucas Thomae, CISLM Intern
Sarah Vassello, CISLM Program Coordinator
The Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.