Does new law protect us from police abuse when we’re covering stories? We’ll have to wait and see. Photo by David Bacon
Bay News Rising interns focused on labor and social justice, digging deep to uncover important local stories.
You're a freelancer, but that does not mean you should work for free or not be paid a fair rate. With attacks on freelance workers in the media industry ever growing, we need to band together, unionize, and defend our self worth.
I felt compelled to document as much of the Northern California wildfires as I could, staying on the scenes and fire lines as much as I could, rather than rushing to get some photos to the news agencies.
Getting updated on recent/past organizing and advocacy, from the effort to organize the Los Angeles Times, organizing committee update, presenting the press pass, Bay News Rising, Minimum rate campaign, and unit leadership nominations!
The Guild's Bay New Rising making waves in the industry. The next generation of journalists are here.
We Love Our Work: At a time when labor and the left are on the defensive, Steve Early’s “Refinery Town” is an inspiring tale of successful community organizing in Richmond, Calif.
“Shame. Shame. Shame,” protesters chanted after the Berkeley City Council on June 21 voted to continue police department participation in the federal Urban Shield program, the East Bay Times reported.
As photojournalist Brooke Anderson raised her camera to photograph the protest, “they (police) pushed my camera in my face and struck my camera and my arm with batons,” said Anderson, a member of Guild Freelancers, a unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild CWA Local 39521.
Thousands of AT&T workers are back at work following a one-day strike last week, but contract negotiations are still in progress for California and Nevada employees in the CWA District 9 region.
Free online training for Guild Freelancers – sign up now at Lynda.com
By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Perhaps more than other journalists, freelancers require and benefit from a wide and ever-expanding range of skills. A freelancer’s schedule might encompass producing materials for a nonprofit organization, launching a blog and reporting a deep-dive story with graphic and video components.
One of the many benefits of membership in the Guild Freelancers, a unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, is access to training.
Whether you’d like to learn Final Cut Pro or Podcasting, InDesign or conversational Japanese, you are eligible to take these and many more courses through Lynda.com, an online company offering thousands of video courses in software, Web design, photography, business skills and many more subjects.
Our parent union, the Communications Workers of America, pays for its members to upgrade their skills on Lynda.com.
Lynda.com is a bit complicated to navigate. But the wide variety of courses presented by experts more than makes up for the difficulty.
Access to Lynda.com happens in two-week cycles. Register first, and when your training dates come up, a CWA staff person will send you an email containing your access code. After you’ve completed your course, you can repeat this process as many times as you like, planning two weeks in advance. Lynda.com’s offerings are deep as well as broad. Under photography, for instance, you’ll find 574 courses and 26,308 video tutorials.
The model contracts we developed in 2018 are still our best advice on the core issues that freelancer agreements should cover (click here). However, since AB5 and its revisions passed, protecting our rights has become more complicated.