Digital Publishers Cross New Territory in Merging Companies With Unionized Staffers

A slew of recent media mergers put these employees in the middle

When media companies merge, questions of redundancies in operations, strategies and staffing naturally arise. Oftentimes, employees are left confused. But what happens to two newsrooms that have both unionized under different unions?

Seeking fair working conditions amid a tumultuous time in the industry, staffers at Vox Media and New York Media unionized, New York Media in December 2018 and Vox in June 2019. The new media conglomerate will have to build itself around a framework established by union contracts among Vox Media’s editorial and video staffs and a looming contract with New York Media’s editorial staffers. 

And as mergers and acquisitions continue in the media industry, so will questions about how those publishers grapple with another trend in the digital media industry: the influx of unionized newsrooms, particularly when baseline working conditions like starting salaries and predetermined raises are already set.

Vox Media and New York Media maintain that they won’t actually be...

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This story first appeared in the Dec. 2, 2019, issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.