So Close, Yet So Far

Late last month, we had our most important bargaining session yet. We presented our wages proposal — the final piece of our economic package — which we believe will fix some big problems in the current system and result in a stronger, more equitable newsroom. But we also received some troubling counters from management on some of the other issues we’re still bargaining over — especially in response to our proposals on increasing newsroom diversity through hiring.

Here’s the latest.

WAGES

BuzzFeed’s current pay structure — known as the leveling system — makes no sense. We gave a presentation that outlined the problems with the system, including the lack of transparency, massive pay gaps between desks, different pay depending on your location, and pay ceilings that make it hard to retain veteran employees.

During bargaining, several unit members testified about the challenges the system has presented for them. One member spoke about how tying pay to location is counterproductive to our newsroom’s goal of producing great journalism, another spoke about the irony of seeing his pay ceiling plummet after moving from the investigations to the inequality desk; others spoke about the troubling disparities between desks.

Our proposal would simplify the system from 112(!) possible pay bands to 7 minimum salary levels (starting at $75,000) to reduce confusion and disparity, eliminate location-based pay, and guarantee annual raises for everyone in our unit.

DERIVATIVE WORKS/IP RIGHTS

While the work we publish remains the intellectual property of BuzzFeed, we’ve proposed that the company must communicate clearly with employees about any production agreements they enter into regarding someone’s work, that the author of anything that gets adapted should receive credit in the final product, and that if a work is autobiographical (a personal essay, etc.) that the employee would retain the derivative rights.

We also proposed that the employee would receive 100% of any initial option payment and 50% of other compensation the company receives for a production deal based on their work (a huge improvement on the current policy, which is that employee are not entitled to any payment, and only receive small bonuses at the company’s discretion). We believe a clear system that incentivizes employees to help pitch and develop projects is in everyone’s best interests.  

For book deals, we’ve proposed that employees should be granted a license to write books based on their work for BuzzFeed News and that they own all rights to and retain all revenue from that book.

HIRING

For nearly a year and a half, we have been pushing BuzzFeed to turn its lip service about diversity into something tangible and actionable. One important step toward that goal: interviewing candidates from underrepresented groups for open positions.

We originally proposed that management commit to interviewing a set percentage of candidates from such backgrounds (i.e. at least 50% of people for all jobs annually). Management pushed back on a percentage, so we proposed a tiered system to ensure that a significant number of diverse candidates make it past the initial HR phone screening stage: at least 4 out of 9 candidates, 5 out of 11, 7 out of 15, and so on. 

They came back with…. 3.  3 people from traditionally underrepresented groups in the hiring manager screening interview stage, regardless of how big that pool is. (Company-provided data, while incomplete, suggests that the average size of such a pool is historically about 24.)

We are not proposing a hiring quota; what we are proposing is a long-term goal that will encourage the company to do better in recruiting and interviewing a wide range of candidates for every job. And yet our managers are unwilling to commit to even that. 

It’s extremely disappointing that while plenty of other media companies — like NBC, Time, Reuters, and Conde Nast — have agreed to 50% interview goals, BuzzFeed is digging in on such a misguided position, despite long promoting itself as a diverse organization. Especially now, when racial justice movements, from Black Lives Matter to #StopAsianHate, are dominating the news, it is in this newsroom’s best interest to ensure its staff can speak to the moment.

TRAINING AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT

We’ve proposed that annual reviews and performance evaluations *should not* be used for disciplinary purposes, and that employees should have clear opportunities every year to discuss their career path with a manager so that everyone understands what it takes to be promoted and how they can advance within the newsroom. 

Our committee clashed with management at the table over the question of traffic and performance at the bargaining table.We believe that while traffic data is an important tool to analyze the reach of specific stories and inform editorial strategy, managers should not use traffic as a metric to evaluate individual employee performance. Because, as we all know, traffic often does not accurately reflect the quality or impact of our work. A post that took 30 minutes to put together can go viral for reasons outside a reporter’s control, while an investigation that took six months to complete and changed laws when it was published may have a much smaller readership.  Even though one editorial manager confirmed during the session that traffic is not generally used as a performance metric, management suggested our proposal was outlandish.

OUTSIDE WORK

Management continued to stand firm in their belief that any outside work —  paid or unpaid, or even unrelated to your job — should be approved by our managers. At one point, a company lawyer said: “Your creative and journalistic focus has to be for us.” They seem fundamentally confused about the fact that many members of our newsrooms have personal creative projects unrelated to their jobs, and all of us have lives outside of work — and that’s not something any employer should have control over.

We understand — and have proposed that — approval would be necessary before writing a paid article for a competitive media outlet, or something else that BuzzFeed News could potentially publish, but it’s absurd that a personal blog would have to be approved by management. In the words of one unit member, “BuzzFeed seems to want ownership of everything that we do.”