Event Details
Wednesday
June 11, 2025 6:00 pm
Watch the stream below
Presented by the Writers Guild of America East, Democracy at Work Institute, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, and the Consortium for Worker Education / Astoria Worker Project.
Hear from media cooperative worker-owners, organizers, educators and advocates about how you can build a more sustainable and just media industry.
The media industry has never been the most stable place to work; its history has been characterized by booms and busts, and the current landscape is no different. But there are signs that we need a structural reset, as we experience mass layoffs; corporate consolidation; and hedge funds, private equity, and billionaires coming in and cutting newsroom budgets of our longstanding media institutions.
How can worker-owned cooperatives stop this race to the bottom and empower media workers to build a resilient, revitalized, justice-oriented industry? Where do unions fit in? What can our longstanding cooperative media organizations teach us?
In the last few years alone, the shuttering and reorganization of media companies has led to a variety of new models of media ownership that center workers and communities. Some of these include Defector, Hell Gate, the 51st, Hearing Things, New York Groove, and many more.
Join us on June 11 from 6pm-8pm ET for a webinar with worker-owners from some of these cooperatives, as well as organizers, educators, and advocates from the Democracy at Work Institute, Writers Guild of America East, and the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies to discuss the challenges and possibilities of these worker-directed models and envision a sustainable and just future for the media industry together.
Panelists
- Moderator Matt Pearce, Rebuild Local News
- Jasper Wang, Defector
- Angad Singh Bhalla, Time of Day Media
- Pablo Correa, La Coperacha
- Bikram Chatterji, Maximum Fun
- Max Rivlin-Nadler, Hell Gate
- and others to be announced!
