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By Michelle Chen / Truthout
While media executives orchestrate mega-merger deals this winter, media workers are facing a maelstrom of job cuts and anti-union hostility, with old patterns of inequity surfacing in a wave of corporate consolidation and technological disruption.
Those two faces of corporate media were in the spotlight earlier this month, when red-clad members of the New York NewsGuild stood passing out flyers outside the Paris Theater, which was premiering the “New Yorker at 100” — a documentary paean to the magazine’s history of pioneering journalism. The NewsGuild’s flyers informed the audience that the media empire behind the publication was attacking its unionized staff.
In their announcement of the protest, union co-chair and New Yorker editor Daniel Gross, who was featured in the documentary, said, referring to the publication’s parent company, “Condé Nast’s ham-handed union busting is an embarrassment to the celebrated magazines that it owns.”
Last month, four journalists and prominent activists with Condé Nast’s union, Condé United, were abruptly sacked after they protested a spate of layoffs at another celebrated Condé Nast publication, Teen Vogue. A group of roughly 20 editorial staffers from the union gathered by the human resources department at Condé Nast’s 1 World Trade Center offices to confront the company’s Chief People Officer Stan Duncan with pointed questions about the layoffs. They did not get any answers, but within 24 hours, several of the leaders of the action got fired or suspended without pay, according to the Guild. What the union calls the “Fired Four” — Bon Appetit digital producer Alma Avalle; Wired senior White House reporter Jake Lahut; New Yorker senior fact checker Jasper Lo; and Condé Nast Entertainment videographer Ben Dewey — have now launched a campaign of their own.
The Guild has denounced the company’s treatment of the Fired Four as blatant union busting: Avalle is the vice president of the Guild, and Lo and Dewey had both previously served as vice chairs for their units. And the arc of labor conflict over just a few days — from the gutting of the staff at a major youth publication to the canning of other journalists who challenged the management’s decision — suggests a new level of intolerance for media workers who are vigilant about democracy inside and outside Condé Nast headquarters.
Condé Nast has not responded to a request for comment.
On the surface, such layoffs seem like a regular occurrence in corporate media these days, as many news outlets shed workers to cope with financial turmoil. For Condé Nast, which has in recent years undergone a number of strategic consolidations and plowed money into e-commerce and tech rather than journalism, the absorption of Teen Vogue into Vogue.com reflects the latest effort to revamp the publication’s brand as a commercial and social media entity.
Over the past decade, Teen Vogue had become known for its incisive coverage of issues and movements ranging from sexual assault to Black Lives Matter to union organizing. But the shedding of most of its staff in November — including its politics editor and other union members — along with an announcement that its focus would shift to “cultural leadership,” might signal the end of the outlet’s political journalism. The Roosevelt Institute, which had awarded Teen Vogue its 2025 Freedom of Speech medal, criticized the restructuring as “evidence that corporate concentration eliminates innovative ideas and silences voices with less power.”
Avalle was not entirely surprised when she was fired after asking hard questions about the decimation of Teen Vogue’s staff. But the immediate firing of current and former union leaders suggested that the management is trying to warn other union members that there will be consequences for dissent. While conflicts between the union and management had previously played out in the grievance process, Avalle told Truthout, in her recollection, “No one had ever been suspended, no one had been terminated for taking part in a union activity. This feels like a massive, massive escalation in that regard.”
“Labor issues, and particularly the way that media companies interact with their own workers, are often the thing that reveals how big of a lie the concept of the liberal media is,” she said. The company “has been renowned as a part of the liberal-left media …. You look at the way it deals with its unions and that is not what I would call liberal, left behavior. That is not embodying these sorts of progressive values that people on Fox News love to deride. They are behaving like the conservative bosses that they are.”
Around the time that Teen Vogue’s reporting staff was getting slashed, Trey Sherman, an assistant producer with “CBS Evening News Plus” who had also worked as an assistant producer with CBS’s Race and Culture Unit, posted a viral video upon losing his job when his program was slashed. After asking around, he discovered several white coworkers on his small team had, unlike him, been able to get reassigned to other divisions.
While the rationale for who stayed and who was let go was unclear, Sherman told Truthout, the outcome was discriminatory: “Every person on the team who was laid off was a person of color.”
The loss of those staffers came at the same time that the entire Race and Culture Unit was dissolved, which tracked with what Sherman and his coworkers had long perceived as structural inequity pervading the organization. As a former contractor with the division that specifically dealt with issues of racial and cultural diversity, Sherman believes institutional discrimination might deepen as CBS and other media outlets systematically dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies. Layoffs and restructuring at other media companies like NBC have similarly targeted journalists of color and diversity initiatives that, like Race and Culture, had emerged in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
Even though layoffs are happening en masse throughout the company’s ranks, Sherman said, “the result is that these corporations are creating an environment where women and people of color are bearing the brunt of cost-cutting measures harder than anyone else. We are disproportionately impacted.”
The dissolution of the Race and Culture Unit unfolded as CBS — which has not responded to a request for comment — installed right-wing commentator Bari Weiss at its helm. Under CEO and Donald Trump crony Larry Ellison, CBS’s rightward shift — which also includes establishing a “bias monitor” to keep newsroom “wokeness” in check — comes just as CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, aims for a hostile takeover of Warner Bros. The deal would be another megamerger in an increasingly consolidated, financially volatile media landscape. Consolidation is one of the structural factors associated with the homogenization and erosion of the integrity of journalism, at the expense of media diversity — in terms of the stories that get told, who is telling them, and the range of sources delivering news to the public.
The concentration of power in a handful of media corporations leaves underrepresented communities vulnerable, Sherman said: “There really are supposed to be laws that protect all of us, our economy, the society, workers, everyone, from the consolidation of media that we see happening.… The fact that Black and Brown people and women can be pushed out of corporate America and really have no legal recourse sounds to me like maybe the law is wrong. If it’s supposed to protect us from monopolies or duopolies or whatever kind of concentration of power.”
Sherman hopes he can help develop new platforms and alternative institutions for voices like his, which are finding ever-fewer opportunities in the mainstream media for creative expression. With corporate outlets turning away from underrepresented communities, he’s seeking to “create a place for all these people who have been pushed out.”
The challenges besetting media workers like Sherman and the Fired Four go beyond precarity and layoffs. Tech “disruption” in corporate media institutions could lead to the displacement of human reporters by artificial intelligence tools that instantaneously generate professional-looking prose.
The NewsGuild recently organized a nationwide Week of Action under the banner of “News, Not Slop,” demanding that the industry implement ethical principles when adopting AI technologies to ensure that human journalists remain at the helm and that AI innovations are not used to undermine livelihoods, dilute the craft of journalism, or spread misinformation.
ProPublica environment journalist and Guild member Mark Olalde said in a statement, “There is no AI function, no matter how advanced, that can replace a human’s ability, our ability, to fully consider journalism’s ethical implications, to relate with a story’s subjects through lived experience or to approach an investigation with thoughtfulness and integrity.”
But while the limitations of AI can seem clear to principled journalists, profit-minded bosses may not be convinced. The problem comes back to the power gap between the people who control the media outlets versus the people who do the work. After all, management could make the cold calculation that replacing reporters with AI not only saves labor costs but also preempts union trouble from unruly staffers who demand more power, pay, or protections at work.
Within the union, Avalle said, “there are pretty massive discussions about how we as journalists, and how we as a worker organization of journalists, can be pushing for regulation of AI in a way that keeps folks with issues about objectivity comfortable, but at the same time, advocates for our ability to keep doing our jobs as workers, advocates for the rights of our members to continue doing work that is vital for the Republic.”
The scene outside the Paris Theater spoke to that dual role Avalle’s union is playing — pushing for democracy in journalism workplaces and championing free expression through their members’ work. While their boss hosted a swanky celebration of the New Yorker‘s history, outside, rank-and-file Guild workers handed out flyers that spoke to the future of media the old-fashioned way, one printed page at a time.
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Michelle Chen
Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at Dissent Magazine, and a contributing writer at The Nation, In These Times and Truthout. She is also a co-producer of the “Asia Pacific Forum” podcast and Dissent Magazine’s “Belabored” podcast, and teaches history at the City University of New York. Follow her on Twitter: @meeshellchen.