Interview by Jason Farbman

Gawker Media, Inc. was not the first online outlet to unionize, but it was certainly the most public. When employees first very visibly announced their union drive, they made clear that they wanted to inspire others, in online media and beyond, to organize, too.

In the year since employees unionized, Gawker Media — which included its flagship site Gawker; Gizmodo, Deadspin, Jezebel, Kotaku, Lifehacker, and Jalopnik — was very publicly bankrupted by a lawsuit financed by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The company was put up for auction, and after media giant Univision bought it, many assumed Gawker was dead.

“The bankruptcy and the lawsuit were the end of Gawker as we knew it,” predicted one observer. “When you get into bigger and bigger companies, they impose more rules. They have to. They’re held more accountable for their actions.”

Those predictions may have proven true. Immediately after the purchase, Univision dropped the Gawker name and website, and changed the umbrella group’s name to Gizmodo Media. News reports indicated early clashes between new management and workers over liability protection for authors and for Univision’s decision to delete half a dozen posts deemed too controversial, but which the staff considered well-reported and accurate. The union criticized the deletions “in the strongest possible terms.”

Over that same period, several other media companies also unionized, including Univision-owned Fusion.net which, despite management’s anti-union campaign management, saw over 90 percent of Fusion’s seventy-member bargaining unit vote to unionize. (This week, however, management announced layoffs.) At TheRoot.com, another site owned by Univision, 100 percent of the editorial staff recently signed union cards; legal news site Law360 also recently unionized.

To discuss how their union is helping to shape life after the Univision buyout, Jacobin’s Jason Farbman spoke with Hamilton Nolan, senior writer at Deadspin, and Megan McRobert, an organizer at the Writers Guild of America.