In mid-February, a coterie of newspaper higher-ups from around the country gathered at the Omni hotel in downtown Fort Worth for an affair ostentatiously called the Key Executives Mega-Conference. During one presentation, a Chicago-based employment attorney, Michael Rybicki, warned of a rising tide of organized labor in the news business.
“I don’t want to sound like Chicken Little, but I can tell you there has never been the level of union drives in the newspaper industry in my over 40 years than there has been today,” Rybicki said, according to a writeup of his talk by the industry group America’s Newspapers. “The confident prediction that unions are going away was wrong. … So be afraid of union organizing.”
Rybicki’s alarm stemmed from a wave of newsroom organizing that kicked off in 2015 and has spread from all-digital outlets like Gawker to ink-stained stalwarts like the Los Angeles Times. Around the country, corporations and private equity firms have slashed journalists’ pay and benefits and drained the industry of veteran expertise—a trend that intensified as the COVID-19 pandemic vaporized advertising dollars. Nationally, more than 11,000 newsroom jobs vanished in just the first half of this year. Meanwhile, the industry continues to be much whiter than the communities it serves. In response, journalists began demanding a seat at the decision-making table.
In February, the union wave had yet to breach newsrooms in the pro-business Lone Star State. In fact, Texas hadn’t seen a union newspaper since the San Antonio Light shuttered in 1993. For bosses, in other words, the sky showed little sign of falling. But by year’s end two of the state’s major papers would be unionized, including the daily in Cowtown, where Rybicki had issued his admonition. A third paper would be on its way. 2020, it turned out, would be the year newspaper unions roared back to life in Texas.
