It is up to us to reach out
The fastest growing industrial sector of the NUJ is new media. This is hardly surprising given the rapid changes in the industry, but what is surprising is the huge range of different occupations our new media members undertake.
In one year of my job organising in the sector I have found myself representing individual new media members at premiership football clubs, online gossip sites, charities, trade unions, research and marketing companies, large news agencies and even workers’ collectives with “horizontal management structures”.
Are all of our members journalists in the traditional NCTJ-trained sense? No. Online marketing executives, interactive content developers, bloggers and web designers need not have had strict journalistic training to be professionals in their own spheres.
Producing quality content for websites requires just as much skill and discipline as writing a balanced and factually accurate article for a newspaper. Making a living from a blog requires as much dedication and time as being a successful freelance.
Many of our members are working in “chapels of one” within larger organisations — generally being responsible for the web content. This is all well and good and they each deserve the same level of service as members in other sectors. But much more is to be done if we are truly to become the union for online editorial workers.
Attempts to link up with other unions to organise larger companies such as Amazon have largely failed thanks to the egos, political bankruptcy and isolationism of senior officials within them. Little is being done seriously on a joined-up national scale to organise new media organisations, despite the very best efforts of some forward-thinking individuals within the movement.
So it is up to us to reach out. The NUJ must open its doors to those we may not always consider to be traditional journalists. We’re not talking about recruiting secretaries and sales staff. But we have to get used to the idea that if a worker is producing content that is visible online, in whatever capacity, then they are ripe to be recruited to our union.
As no other union is really bothering, then this is where we must focus our efforts to continue to grow and be representative of the whole media spectrum. To fail to do so on the grounds of retaining some kind of romantic craft-based identity would guarantee the NUJ’s rapid demise as the landscape shifts so dramatically.