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.
Read MoreDoes new law protect us from police abuse when we’re covering stories? We’ll have to wait and see. Photo by David Bacon
Read MoreBay News Rising interns focused on labor and social justice, digging deep to uncover important local stories.
Read MoreYou'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.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreGetting 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!
Read MoreThe Guild's Bay New Rising making waves in the industry. The next generation of journalists are here.
Read MoreWe 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.
Read More“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.
Read MoreThousands 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.
Read MoreThe expulsion of 48 Hills reporter Sana Saleem from a San Francisco Police Department press conference on Jan. 18 has prompted Guild Freelancers co-chair David Bacon to send a protest letter reminding Police Chief William Scott and Mayor Ed Lee that field officers and office staff must respect the constitutional rights of all journalists including freelancers such as Saleem.
Read MoreIt seems like every journalist has kicked around great ideas for doing nonfiction books.
But starting from scratch on the path to publication can be a daunting prospect, from getting organized for an intensive project to dealing with the challenges of agents and publishers.
Read MoreI am a photographer. Or, at least on the good days I feel confident saying that. I delight in documenting the raw energy and hope of the social movements of our times. When I don’t have a camera in hand, I still dream in light, shadow, color, lines, angles, and faces. And, just to complicate things, photography is also one of the several ways I pay the bills.
Read MoreFreelancing is a business, and you’ve got the goods — but are you setting yourself up for success?
Read MoreYou wouldn’t dream of not invoicing — maybe it’s time to start negiotiating contracts, too
Read MoreAs freelancers, we know we do the work. And while the way we work is what defines us, it's also the root of many of our problems.
Read MoreBy Rebecca Rosen Lum
He's been savaged by the best of them: Trevor Noah, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert.
But after perusing his quotes, veteran journalist and Guild Freelancers member Carol Pogash discovered there may be no richer source of belly laughs about Donald Trump than Donald Trump himself. And so springs Quotations from Chairman Trump, an illustrated compendium of the real estate magnate's words of wisdom – an e-book in its first incarnation, soon to emerge in a hardcover edition.
Read MoreBy Patrick Cochran
A revolution is taking place in digital media. Workers at the companies that produce the material you read during work, share on Facebook, and comment about on Twitter are unionizing, and changing the Internet landscape.
It all started in the spring. For years there had been some chatter about unionizing at popular websites like Vice, Gawker, and Buzzfeed. Online writers like Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan championed the cause in their writing, but it wasn’t until April that the issue came to the forefront.
“There were a lot of reasons to join a union,” Nolan said. “Even though we have a high level of job satisfaction here, there were still issues with things like salary structure, and having a formal system for raises instead of it being ad hoc. Some of us have been through layoffs before, and after the recession we went through them here, so it is important to have a union to protect the workers.”
On April 14, Gawker’s front page ran a Nolan-written declaration, “Why We’ve Decided to Organize,” telling readers that the Gawker staff was in the beginning stages of going union. Because of Gawker’s self-described “radical transparency ethos” they decided to post all the company’s internal discussions about the process.
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.
Read MoreA labor union for freelance journalists and other freelance media workers. We represent freelancers in the marketplace, the Legislature, and the public mind. We work to provide benefits, services, and educational programs for freelancing media workers.
A growing part of the Pacific Media Workers Guild and The Newspaper Guild, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, CLC. We represent freelance journalists and freelance workers in all types of media. We advocate vigorously on freelancers' behalf in the marketplace, the Legislature, and the public mind. We work to provide benefits, services, and educational programs for all our members as the publishing industry evolves.
