When Maya Schenwar and her colleagues at Truthout began to talk about unionizing, the global economy had just imploded. It was 2008, and most people still thought of digital news outlets — particularly progressive or left-leaning ones like Truthout — as “blogs.”
“At the time, a lot of people saw online writing as something that you did for free,” Schenwar told me in July 2025. Unionizing allowed them to change that narrative, to insist in public that what they did was work, “not just someone’s LiveJournal.”
Legacy media, like the New York Times, had unions, and to most journalists, those were the dream jobs. But as the global economic crisis spread, the Truthout staff — around 20 people at the time — began to talk about their own precarity as well as the precarity they were covering, and to discuss what it might mean to make their own jobs into good jobs, jobs worth hanging on to.
They signed that first union contract in 2010, the first all-digital news site to unionize. Their union drive had contained a lot of “firsts.” They had to figure out how to build trust virtually — they all worked from home and Truthout had no central office — and even had the country’s first virtual card check to verify employees’ signed union cards. In doing so, they laid out a path that workers at dozens of media outlets have followed. Transforming their own working conditions helped change the reputation and power of digital publications, and to shape a generation’s thinking about labor unions.
