After years in which writers at many news websites were by many accounts grossly underpaid, while the owners of some digital media outlets grew rich, journos at some sites are starting to unionize.

Employees at Gawker Media, which runs websites like Gawker, Gizmodo and Lifehacker, voted recently to join the join the Writers Guild of America.

And another group of reporters are planning to hold a confab in Louisville in October to discuss how to unionize other digital media outlets.


About time, I say.

For too long, many journalists faced the choice of being laid off or taking a pay cut as newspapers were hit by declines in both circulation and ad revenue.

Then, when the digital media revolution came along, many news websites, uncertain about the prospects for profitability, were loathe to pay writers well. Some, like Arianna Huffington, founder of Huffington Post, even had bloggers write for free.

But in an era when some big-name news sites are finally making money, things have changed.

"So many reporters have been told that you can't make money online," read a statement issued by the National Convergence to Organize Digital Media, the Louisville group. "But now that digital media companies have figured out how to be profitable, digital media reporters are saying no to endless deadlines, 60-70 hour work weeks, low pay, and newsrooms where you feel like you can never question your editor. Reporters around the country are saying enough is enough, its time to unionize!"

In the digital media world, the unionization of Gawker shows we've come a long way from the days of "information wants to be free." Viewed optimistically, it means some sites are beginning to realize that, unless they are simply aggregating (read stealing) content, information isn't simply plucked from the ether, but must be found, curated and polished by talented reporters and editors.

It also, hopefully, signals a recognition that quality and profitability are linked, and that there's a reason, for instance, the paywall of the The New York Times website has been successful: readers are willing to pay for the kind of journalism that comes from having a large staff of journalists producing topnotch work day in, day out.

Then again, I may be getting a little too cheery about the prospect of digital-age journalists being paid a decent wage. As media analyst Ken Doctor points out in the Times, unionizing Gawker was easy, given that founder Nick Denton was open to the idea from the start.

Denton's entrepreneurial peers, however, "act more like traditional bosses," Doctor writes. "They prefer to keep the workplace prerogatives start-ups enjoy, with no labor negotiation necessary on pay, hours and work flexibility. At these places, organization toward a vote can take years, rather than months."

Still, there are other signs of restlessness among rank-and-file scribes, and not just among those lucky enough to land full-time staff jobs. Journalist Scott Carney recently used a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for WordRates, a site where freelance writers can dish about how much various publications pay, and rate the news outlets and editors they’ve dealt with.

What Carney has found so far is no shock; freelancers generally make peanuts. But in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, he makes a larger point about fairness.

"I think that writers should be able to make a middle-class living, and by and large, we don’t," he says. "You can work your ass off your whole life doing stories at $100 each, and maybe you’ll be able to make rent, but you’ll not actually grow."

And that, ultimately, may prove to be the more important point. Journalists and writers have seldom gotten rich doing what they do. But there's a growing awareness among writers, the grunts in the trenches of the brave new digital world, that at the very least, they should be paid fairly for their work.

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