Cohost Union News

The labor unrest in journalism continues this week as, starting at midnight tonight, at least eleven media publications owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital will simultaneously be on strike. This will be true through all of tomorrow at minimum.

(Four other publications covered by The Onion Union were also planning on going on strike, but they've reached a tentative agreement which has averted this. I've updated the post accordingly to reflect this. If you'd like, you can see the now-obsolete section of the post covering this under the details tag.)

I've, to a lesser degree on this account, profiled the circumstances of papers under Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund which has bluntly speaking been killing journalism around this country. (You could say that this hedge fund and its owners are some of the people with names and addresses.) A few days ago one of their publications, the New York Daily News, walked out. That was in protest of further cuts to the already-gutted paper, which is a signature of Alden ownership. Now other Alden assets are picking up where the Daily News left off.

Workers at the following places under their ownership are on a one-day strike tomorrow:

• The Chicago Tribune;
• the Orlando Sentinel;
• The Beacon-News (Aurora, IL), The Courier-News (Elgin, IL), The Naperville Sun, and Daily Southtown, all members of the Suburban CT Guild
• The Virginian-Pilot, Daily Press (Hampton Roads, VA), The Virginia Gazette, and Tidewater Review, all members of Tidewater Media Guild
• The Morning Call (Allentown, PA); and
• Tribune Content Agency, a syndication company which Alden owns through Tribune Publishing

(As there's been no unified call for the Alden papers, there is a possibility I have missed a publication in this column which is going on strike. If so I will update this post.)

Usual rules apply: do not cross the picket line and do not click on links from these publications or their social media pages starting at midnight. This has been explicitly called for by the Alden papers.

Post will be updated accordingly.

The labor unrest in journalism continues this week as, starting at midnight tonight, at least eleven media publications owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital will simultaneously be on strike. This will be true through all of tomorrow at minimum.

(Four other publications covered by The Onion Union were also planning on going on strike, but they've reached a tentative agreement which has averted this. I've updated the post accordingly to reflect this. If you'd like, you can see the now-obsolete section of the post covering this under the details tag.)

I've, to a lesser degree on this account, profiled the circumstances of papers under Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund which has bluntly speaking been killing journalism around this country. (You could say that this hedge fund and its owners are some of the people with names and addresses.) A few days ago one of their publications, the New York Daily News, walked out. That was in protest of further cuts to the already-gutted paper, which is a signature of Alden ownership. Now other Alden assets are picking up where the Daily News left off.

Workers at the following places under their ownership are on a one-day strike tomorrow:

• The Chicago Tribune;
• the Orlando Sentinel;
• The Beacon-News (Aurora, IL), The Courier-News (Elgin, IL), The Naperville Sun, and Daily Southtown, all members of the Suburban CT Guild
• The Virginian-Pilot, Daily Press (Hampton Roads, VA), The Virginia Gazette, and Tidewater Review, all members of Tidewater Media Guild
• The Morning Call (Allentown, PA); and
• Tribune Content Agency, a syndication company which Alden owns through Tribune Publishing

(As there's been no unified call for the Alden papers, there is a possibility I have missed a publication in this column which is going on strike. If so I will update this post.)

Usual rules apply: do not cross the picket line and do not click on links from these publications or their social media pages starting at midnight. This has been explicitly called for by the Alden papers.

(📸 bottom photographs taken from a December 12 Onion Union tweet)

The Onion Union, which covers the creative staff The Onion, The A.V. Club, Deadspin, and The Takeout, has officially signed off on a strike action that will begin on January 31 if a deal is not reached with G/O Media.

Members of the unit agreed to the following pledge, which summarizes what they're looking for in collective bargaining:

We, the undersigned members of the Onion Inc. Union, are committed to a collective bargaining agreement that reflects the realities of the economy, our changing industry, and the issues most important to our unit. These include competitive compensation, raises that keep up with cost of living, AI protections, and a slate of benefits that align with G/O Media's stated interest in worker well-being.

Onion Union's bargaining unit has been severely gutted by the past few years by G/O Media—when it originally unionized in 2018, it consisted of over 80 members. A mixture of layoffs and G/O Media's refusal to fill open positions has contributed to that massive attrition, and the union is hoping to prevent further gutting of the unit. The union is also fighting against a number of other management-imposed pressures. Several months back for example this account profiled G/O Media's shuttering of Gizmodo en Español, which it shamelessly "replaced" with machine translation in a pivot to "AI". Earlier last year The Verge also profiled the company's disastrous use of AI generation for stories.

Last week, according to The Verge, the staff of Gizmodo en Español—Gizmodo's Spanish wing, tasked with "original stories and created Spanish-language adaptations of pieces from the English-language Gizmodo" were fired and replaced with machine translation. The move is a part of a broader pivot to "artificial intelligence" by G/O Media, and comes just a few months after their sites began to post AI-generated articles full of factual errors (which have generally been a fiasco in their own right).

Unsurprisingly: the pivot here continues to go poorly. New Gizmodo en Español pieces are effectively being Google Translated—and not particularly well! In one amusing and illustrative example, writer Víctor Millán reported an example of machine translation giving up midway through an article, leaving one half in Spanish and the other half in English. And even G/O Media themselves don't seem especially confident in machine translation—each article now has a disclaimer at the bottom reading “Contents have been automatically translated from the original. Due to the nuances of machine translation, there can be slight differences.” («Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente del material original. Debido a los matices de la traducción automática, pueden existir ligeras diferencias.»). This is in stark contrast to when they were translated by actual people, and did not have this problem.

On the personal side of things, the move seems almost designed to be as callous as possible. AZ Adslzone, a Spanish-language publication, reports that the staff of Gizmodo en Español were fired by video call—and due to their contracts, will not be given severance.