RELEASE: STUDY HALL CALLS FOR MORE TRANSPARENCY IN THE PRECARIOUS MEDIA INDUSTRY

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On Thursday, November 29th, Mic laid off its entire unionized editorial team ahead of its acquisition by Bustle Digital Group, which plans to relaunch the site in 2019.

In 2017, Elite Daily also laid off its staff ahead of its sale to Bustle. Earlier this year, The Outline, Vox Media, and Refinery29 were among many digital news outlets to announce layoffs of staff writers and editors, reflecting a growing and troubling trend among media companies: cutting down staff positions, often unionized, by depending more on freelance and contract writers to fill the gap in content.

Beyond undermining the effort and dedication it takes to unionize a newsroom, these layoffs illustrate the way media companies increase the precarity in an already precarious industry. As a collective of media workers, Study Hall is against this representation-less instability. Publications are bought and sold weekly; media founders continue to receive infusions of venture capital; and yet staff and freelancers alike continue to shoulder the burden. We never know who will be next.

Bustle’s acquisition of Mic in particular highlights another sad fact: In an already exploitative industry, the labor and voice of women, especially millennial women — the target audience for publications like Bustle, Teen Vogue, HelloGiggles, and Refinery29 — is routinely and systematically undervalued and under compensated.

In a recent survey of Study Hall members who work for or have worked for Bustle Digital Group (Bustle, Romper, Elite Daily, and The Zoe Report), we found that:

— Reported hourly rates for part-time staff writers or hourly freelance writers varied between $10 and $23 per hour and writers were expected to produce 4-5 stories per shift.

— Reported flat rates per piece largely range from $30 to $150 per piece, with one high-end feature paid $1,000. (Note these rates do not necessarily reflect current or average rates for all contributors.)

— We see these rates as substandard, especially given that BDG has raised over $50 million in venture capital to date and is making massive media acquisitions.

— 67% of participants reported having been paid on average less by Bustle Digital Group than by other publications they were working with at the time.

— 85% of participants say they would not choose to work for BDG again given the same amount of work and compensation.

— Nearly all respondents said that BDG’s acquisition of Mic without its employees or union made them see the company in a worse light and decreased their likelihood of working for them: “I had previously returned to Bustle as a steady gig to supplement freelance work, but now I refuse to work with them following their continued lack of regard for their writers and the industry as a whole,” one journalist wrote. “I now view them as a content mill that takes advantage of those seeking to do creative labor,” another wrote.

One Study Hall member who previously worked at Elite Daily (post-BDG acquisition) as a remote, hourly newswriter says that when they first started at Elite Daily they were expected to turn over one 300-word story each hour. Yet within a few weeks, the publication had upped the mandatory word count for every story to 600 words and the writer was given just under two hours to file each post.

The member, who asked to remain anonymous, added that if something was deemed a "breaking story," writers were timed 120 seconds to turn over a lede, headline, and photo for the story. “If you didn't make it in 120 seconds you got a stern note from your editor,” said the Study Hall member. (Note this is for a contract position, not staff.)

We believe that these rates and the working conditions that writers are subjected to are in part a result of media companies pushing ever greater profit margins at the expense of workers. We realize that many media companies offer such low rates and fail to provide for their staff and contractors, however, Bustle’s preexisting reputation and its absorption of Mic without its workers or union, as well as its looming relaunch of Gawker, leads us to direct this action at the company.

By sharing the experiences of former and current BDG workers, we hope to push the company toward better behavior as well as show workers that there are better alternatives for their labor, whether freelance or staff. The lack of transparency from media companies and the cynical practice of firing staffers to ease mergers and acquisitions only serve to further exploit an already hyper-exploited workforce. That is why Study Hall is releasing this statement today:

Writers want to write. We want to produce important and compelling stories that readers care about. But we refuse to do it in ever more exploitative ways that make it impossible for us to earn a living from our hard work. We demand fair rates or wages, timely payments, reasonable workloads for those of us working in an hourly capacity, and more transparency from the media companies we work for.

Publications cannot exist without our labor, yet media companies continue to drive the value of that labor down, pitting us against each other for available work in a race to the bottom and then tossing us aside when investors apply pressure or a bargain-basement sale is made.

We call on the broad community of media workers and writers to continue working together to build our collective voice; we call on Bustle to heed these concerns as they work to relaunch Mic in the new year; and we call on all media companies to practice fair compensation, fair working conditions, and #MediaTransparency.

— Study Hall

JOIN OUR EFFORTS:

On Wednesday, December 19th, Study Hall will launch a Twitter campaign to raise awareness of the dire state of media work today and call for more transparency that will serve to empower us in our labor. More importantly, it will allow us to continue to build and ultimately harness our collective power to hold media companies accountable for egregious behavior as well as push for fair practices and compensation across the industry.

If you are a media worker in any capacity please consider adding your voice to this Twitter campaign by tweeting about your experience as a media worker beginning Wednesday, December 19th, 10am EST and, if comfortable, sharing your most recent pay — hourly, annually, or for a single piece — using the hashtag #MediaTransparency. (Study Hall members, prompted by Rahel Aima, have recently been tweeting out their freelance rates as end-of-year recaps.)

We will also continue to gather data from current and former Bustle Digital Group writers (freelance or staff) to help contextualize the demands we make of BDG as it incorporates and relaunches Mic in 2019. If you or anyone you know writes for any BDG-owned sites or has written for them in the past, please consider answering this short, anonymous questionnaire, linked below. We will release the data after analyzing it.

BDG Questionnaire: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MFhB-K3wuKMyKV9qkhvV86Tw6zHy40xdbLK12qAXu28/edit

Study Hall is a collective of media freelancers founded in 2015. Its organizing efforts are member-driven and currently being led by community organizer, Stella Becerril (stella@studyhall.xyz). For more information visit us at studyhall.xyz and consider subscribing to support our ongoing work in the media industry.