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posted by takyon on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the look-for-the-union-label-hyperlink dept.

The Center for American Progress reports:

[June 3], Gawker Media voted to unionize. The stats: 107 of 118 eligible voters cast secret ballots, 80 of whom voted yes. Just like that, Gawker will become the first digital-only news site to have a union.

Hamilton Nolan, longtime Gawker writer, announced the editorial staff's decision to organize in a post this April. At the time, he listed the motivations: that a union "is the only real mechanism that exists to represent the interest of employees in a company," the continued pursuit of fair and transparent salaries, and the ability to make a little history as the first major site of its kind to organize.

According to Gawker senior writer Sam Biddle, who answered questions via email, "The origin of the union isn't any particular grievance or crisis---we all love our jobs and our workplace, and thought a union would be a great way to protect that, and make it even better for ourselves and our colleagues." In his five years at Gawker, he doesn't recall unionizing being "seriously discussed."

"I think it happened now because the [Writers Guild of America, East] was so enthusiastic about making this happen for us," he said. "It didn't take very much convincing, to be honest."

[...] Both [WGA and Gawker] insist the desire to form a union arose from a desire for the perks of organization, not as a reaction to poor working conditions.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Vanderhoth on Tuesday June 23 2015, @10:34AM

    by Vanderhoth (61) on Tuesday June 23 2015, @10:34AM (#199813)

    Between Unionization, GamerGate and the Hulk Hogan trial there's a good chance that PoS media company is going to burn. Even if Gawker is successful in defending their "right" to host Hulk Hogan's sex tape their liability insurance will be shot. What friggn double standard garbage they denounce the "fappening" and Jennifer Lawrence nudes, which is good, but then they're 100% against removing Hulk Hogan's sex tape even after they were already ordered by a judge to do so.

    It's a miserable blog conglomerate (Jezebel, io9, Deadspin, Jalopnik, Gizmodo, Kotaku) that just needs to go away, especially Jezebel and Kotaku. We don't need crap sites pushing clickbait gossip trash agendas than actual news.

    The majority of real news sites isn't even real news anymore it's almost exclusively opinion pieces filled out with assumptions and poorly checked or misrepresented facts.

    --
    "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday June 23 2015, @11:29AM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 23 2015, @11:29AM (#199831)

    especially ... Kotaku

    I like the idea of a containment board for insane-tier SJWs and hope they don't go under for that reason. Could you imagine a horde of Kotaku refugees descending on us? Ugh.

    The other sites in their pig sty serve a similar purpose for clickbait. Now you can look at a clickbait headline, look at the gawker in the url, and skip it. But smear that kind of outlook across the entire internet and its going to lower the quality of life for everyone.

    I agree with your evaluation of the quality of their "product" but thats precisely why I hope they stay over there in their own dedicated cesspool instead of corrupting everything.

    • (Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Tuesday June 23 2015, @02:32PM

      by Vanderhoth (61) on Tuesday June 23 2015, @02:32PM (#199895)

      Could you imagine a horde of Kotaku refugees descending on us?

      I feel so short sighted now. I hadn't considered what it'd be like when Kotaku goes off like a stink bomb and they spread over the rest of the net... Well there's always Polygon ^_^

      --
      "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Aichon on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:29PM

    by Aichon (5059) on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:29PM (#199926)

    Yeah, my first thought when I heard the news: <sarcasm>couldn't have happened to a nicer company.</sarcasm>

  • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @07:55PM

    by gman003 (4155) on Tuesday June 23 2015, @07:55PM (#200061)

    Hey, io9 is decent sci-fi reporting (not great but okay), and Jalopnik is pretty good (Foxtrot Alpha and Flight Club in particular, but even their regular car bloggers are good).

    Gizmodo, however, is worthless, and Kotaku is 30% tolerable reporting buried under 70% crap.

  • (Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday June 24 2015, @01:00AM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @01:00AM (#200181) Journal

    io9, bwahaha. This is kind of offtopic, but in a strange cosmic coincidence I'm watching a The Sarah Connor Chronicles episode where Sarah Connor comes across a trans woman. So Sarah Connor chews her out for being “fake” and some bullshit about wombs (q.v. her blowing up on Miles Dyson in T2). Hey, I watch it for the explosions! (And Summer Glau playing a kick-ass female terminator!)

    So, I go off to the internet(s) to see what other folks think about Sarah Connor's obvious transphobia and cisgynocentricism. (Is that a word? I know I've encountered the phenomenon before.) Lo and behold, it's an io9 article that completely misses Connor's obvious transphobia and what that might mean in the larger themes of consciousness and being that the series explores (or pretends to at least).

    (If anyone cares to duckduckgo it, I'll somewhat cede the article's points about the importance of having a even minor character who's a trans woman and who's not also some psychopath or man-in-a-dress-looking-for-gay-sex, but eh, that's not the point!)

    SJWs… what can you do? They keep missing the target!

    • (Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Wednesday June 24 2015, @10:40AM

      by Vanderhoth (61) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @10:40AM (#200315)

      You can never make some people happy.

      It's like women in video games. I love games that have leading women Xenosaga, Final Fantasy (Several of them), Parasite Eve. In one breath someone will tell you there aren't any good female characters in games, in the next they'll tell you women are too sexualized. It's like, so which is it, do they not exist or do you just have a problem with them. When developers do put women in their games they get criticized for it, when they leave them out they get criticized for it BY THE SAME PEOPLE (I'm looking at you Jonathan McIntosh & Anita Sarkeesian)

      And the f-ed up media plays it all up for clicks and agendas.

      --
      "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday June 24 2015, @11:16AM

        by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @11:16AM (#200325) Journal

        Yep. Along those lines, my pet peeve is that if you point out strong female characters like Xena, Janeway, or Carter (Stargate) from shows that pass the Bechdel test with flying colors, then you'll get someone telling you that they don't count because they were written by people who can't write women.

        It's like they simply cannot understand what a strong woman is. All though, it's probably a difficult concept in the SJW mind, which starts from a philosophy that victimhood is honorable and virtuous (as far as I can tell).

        • (Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Wednesday June 24 2015, @12:05PM

          by Vanderhoth (61) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @12:05PM (#200338)

          ^ this ^

          The issue with "Strong women" is that's something different to everyone. In the interest of equality, I wish we could get away from that. No one seems to ever question whether a male character is written well. Male characters can be anything, drunks, abusers, victims, bullies, worriers, assassins, peasants, muscles, scrawny, ugly, beat up, hansom. You can literally litter a battle field with male bodies and no one will bat an eyelash.

          Throw in a women and people lose their minds. This is the reason there aren't *more* females or why the default is almost always male, no one cares about men, but you cannot make people happy when it comes to women. You're always going to offend someone, which is why the female characters that do exists almost always have specific traits. Abnormally strong (for a women, often stronger than male counterparts who are larger), badass doesn't care what people think of them, often a loaner, almost no character flaws, really shallow back story, almost always "beautiful" (no scars, bruises, scratches, thin, hour glass shape).

          I don't really like the term "SJW" because it's kind of a catch all for "I don't like that person", but I do see some very specific behaviours from people that seem to always be offended by something, even when they get EXACTLY what they were bitching about. Again, Jonathan McIntosh and Antia Sarkeesian come to mind. In the new Dishonored 2 game you have a choice to play as either a man or women and Anita bitched that the developers should have made it a female ONLY lead. What's worse is they have the funding to make what they want themselves, to demonstrate what should be done, but would rather complain about other people not doing it right.

          --
          "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe