Month: June 2021

“The more signals we have, the more accurate we are, and FLoC IDs will be among signals we use,” said Mathieu Roche, CEO of identity tech firm ID5. 

Google points to FLoC as a beacon of privacy-safe ad targeting because the method does not track people individually. Instead, it uses machine learning to group people based on the web pages they have viewed. Additionally, the FLoC ID assigned to people is updated weekly, which is meant to filter them into gradually evolving collectives and seemingly limit a FLoC ID’s use as a persistent identifier. Furthermore, because the system works automatically inside web browsers like Google’s Chrome, Google does not precisely define how it assembles cohorts, and the company does not supply labels to reveal what their supposedly opaque codes represent. 

Nonetheless, the ad industry — which co-opted foundational internet technologies like the cookie and the IP address into means of identifying people online — sees an opportunity to do the same with FLoC IDs in the hopes of circumventing the impending demise of cookies.

Over time FLoC IDs might work as persistent identifiers in the way IP addresses do, said Nishant Desai, group director of technology and operations at GroupM’s ad tech arm, Xaxis. Like IP addresses, FLoC IDs will not be entirely static. However, it is likely that the same FLoC IDs or range of IDs will be associated with someone.

“If your behavior doesn’t change, the algorithm will keep assigning you in that same cohort, so some users will have a persistent FLoC ID associated with them — or could.” He and other people interviewed for this article stressed that because Google is testing FLoC on a very small portion of web traffic during the trial period, there are limits to how they can use the data today and to the statistical significance of their analysis.

FLoC IDs can lower the barrier to companies gathering information about a person, which is what has alarmed privacy advocates. Whereas until now, someone would have had to visit a website once before the site could drop a cookie on their machine to track their movements across the web, a FLoC ID and the signals it emits will be known from the get-go, according to Bennett Cyphers staff technologist at the digital privacy advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation. He added, “This is kind of unprecedented even in ad tech.”

In a blog post published in March, Cyphers criticized FLoC as “a terrible idea,” in part for exactly the reason that advertising companies are now indicating could come to fruition: exploiting its potential as an identifier. “If a tracker starts with your FLoC cohort, it only has to distinguish your browser from a few thousand others (rather than a few hundred million),” he wrote.

During the current trial period, Google has no rules for how FLoC or the data it generates via its Chrome browser can be used. The company did not provide a comment in time before publication.

Connecting FLoC IDs to profile data 

Advertising companies are already strategically gathering FLoC IDs and linking them to identifiable data or analyzing them in an attempt to uncover information about people that may not have been known before, mimicking how they have parsed what third-party cookies told them about people’s behaviors.

GroupM’s new data division Choreograph is conducting an analysis of how FLoC IDs can be coordinated into its combined identity approach which encompasses its “Mookie” ID and identifiers from GroupM’s Wunderman Thompson division, said Desai. The idea that “FLoC IDs are an additional dimension of how you resolve identity is definitely true,” he said. Desai said he expects identity tech and ad tech providers to incorporate FLoC IDs as another signal they might use to help resolve identity or to inform what companies know about people they already have identifiable profiles on. “As FLoC IDs start to come into the ID graph, you can associate those with those profiles,” he said.

ID5’s probabilistic identity tech uses a variety of signals including IP address, page URL, and a timestamp to detect people’s identity. While the company has yet to incorporate FLoC IDs as a consistent data source, Roche said a FLoC ID could give the company’s system an accuracy boost. Because a FLoC ID represents a relatively small number of people — a thousand or so rather than hundreds of thousands or millions — FLoC IDs would essentially reduce the number of vectors necessary for the firm’s identity method to work because the system could determine that someone had been assigned that particular ID before. If publishers working with ID5 want to pass along FLoC IDs among the data signals the company uses to help them identify people for ad targeting and measurement, Roche said, “We can use that as another signal to create a stable identifier for them.”

Neustar is gathering FLoC data from its own site activity and testing what’s coming in from FLoC trials on website traffic from some clients’ sites, said Devon DeBlasio, product marketing director for the firm, which helps brands manage and use data and offers identity technology. And, it will connect that to existing identifiable data it has about people. “Our advertiser clients will be able to associate a FLoC ID to their first-party identity like an email when a user authenticates on their web properties,” he said.

MightyHive, another data consultancy that helps brands manage and use data, is gathering FLoC IDs for analysis, said Michael Neveu, director of data for the firm. “We’re categorizing users in these buckets,” he said. Advertisers will be able to determine whether people associated with particular FLoC IDs take certain actions more often than others, by buying certain products, for instance. “I should be able to say a user is in cohort 1000; I’d like to reach out to other users in similar cohorts to see if they’re interested as well,” said Neveu. 

Desai and others say demand-side platforms and other ad tech firms are expected to collect the cohort IDs, analyze them, and build out rich taxonomies for ad targeting that detect people’s interests based on patterns indicated by those IDs.

That work has begun. Ad tech firm Criteo told Digiday it is collecting FLoC IDs, though the firm would not elaborate on how they are using the data or plan to. Iponweb’s DSP could use data from FLoC IDs in ad targeting if Google rolls it out beyond the current pilot, according to Michael Beschastnov, product architect for Iponweb’s supply-side tech firm, The MediaGrid. He said the parent company is conducting internal testing on how to use FLoC data which he expects may become “part of the product.”

Reverse-engineering FLoCs

In addition to connecting FLoC IDs with other types of data, Google’s cookieless targeting method can be used on its own to create audience profiles.

Don Marti, vp of ecosystem innovation at ad services firm CafeMedia, started reverse-engineering FLoC IDs in April to back into which topics are associated with specific anonymized groups or cohorts of people. “We can use FLoC data not just for placing ads to the subset of the audience that has FLoC, but also to inform contextual placements for users who don’t have FLoC — whether because their browser doesn’t support it, they have it turned off, or their cohort is blocked,” said Marti. There’s no indication that reverse-engineering FLoC IDs could, without other data, identify someone.

Marti posted about what he learned when analyzing the millions of data points from FLoC-enabled browsers he’d captured, spotting where certain FLoC IDs showed up in relation to content keywords more often than others. In one example, he evaluated FLoC IDs associated with financial and tech content. While a “long valley” of FLoC IDs indicated people who probably weren’t especially interested in investment related content, those in a narrow range in the 14000s were. “So a brokerage firm, like Charles Schwab, wanting to reach likely investors might start by testing advertising success with FLoCs in the 14000 range,” he wrote. 

Not all advertising companies are convinced of FLoC’s identity potential, though. Mediavine, which manages ads for small publishers, has been experimenting with how FLoC IDs can inform content recommendations. But the firm’s co-founder and CEO Eric Hochberger said, “Mediavine has not, and has no plans to, link FLoC to our first-party data.” The company, along with many other ad tech firms that work directly with publishers, has been banking on the potential of identifiable first-party data connections to bring ad and subscription revenue to publishers operating on the open web after the third-party cookie fallout.

“First-party relationships are on the cusp of becoming the most valuable source of data. Ultimately, FLoC cohorts are merely anonymous IDs that are at best 95% as effective in targeting as third-party cookies per Google’s own findings,” said Hochberger. “We don’t see value in attempting to link the less valuable data to our more valuable data.”

‘This little package of information’

However, clearly, other companies do see FLoC IDs as potentially valuable identity data, which is why privacy researchers like Cyphers see them as a not-so-theoretical privacy problem.

Google’s Chrome browser will assign a FLoC ID to every Chrome user who has not opted-out by turning off the browser’s privacy sandbox setting or blocking it with a browser extension. So, even if someone has never visited a site previously, the FLoC ID can reveal information about that person that the site or ad system may not otherwise have. For example, in aggregate, these data signals might, for uncover someone’s gender, if they are likely to be in a higher or lower income bracket or if they live in a certain region. Despite the fact that the process is intended as a privacy-preserving replacement for behavioral tracking enabled by third-party cookies, said Cyphers, “It’s a new ability to make a judgment.”

“Chrome is going to be presenting this FLoC ID to every site that I visit the first time that I visit them,” said Cyphers. “Without doing anything else, the first time you’re seen by [a website or ad system] they’re going to have this little package of information about you.”

“The pandemic created a communication crisis for businesses,” said Nazir Ul-Ghani, head of Workplace from Facebook, for EMEA. “At a time when the world became more isolated and distant almost overnight, companies needed to share important information more urgently and efficiently than ever. The situation was only intensified on the frontline, where the workers most exposed to the virus and in need of updates often didn’t have a way to connect with company HQ.”

For many organizations, that has prompted a total overhaul of their communication strategies. But it has also required a change in leadership style with skills like empathy and transparency taking a much higher seat in the C-suite repertoire than previously expected. 

And to nail empathy, you need to nail tone, a more natural bedfellow for audio, rather than email. “You can’t show empathy over email, it just doesn’t work,” added Ul-Ghani. “In light of growing demand from employees to hear from leaders about their own mental health challenges and views on societal issues, old methods of communication like quarterly newsletters just won’t do. Companies need to invest in communication tools that are instantaneous and feel authentic, not overly corporate or scripted.”

Over the last year employee engagement firm Workvivo launched an internal podcasting feature as part of its core intranet, as demand for the technique started to snowball across all industries, in the months after the pandemic hit.

The company counts A+E Networks, Here Technologies and Arlo among its clients who use this particular feature for internal communications. Uses range from sales leaders swapping weekly Zoom or Teams update meetings for short podcasts, which their team can download and listen to whenever is most convenient at home. They’re also used for onboarding newbies who have never met their colleagues in person. Others invite external guests to provide interesting insights and training, while some CEOs have agreed to be interviewed about their personal lives and experiences, in order to show their human side to employees who often regard them as unapproachable.

A+E Networks records short podcasts internally called “BASEcast” (BASE is the name for its intranet) which covers a mix of current affairs, pop culture, team and social news, all in an informal interview style with different members of management. 

Arlo has a podcast called the The “Virtual Water Cooler,” hosted by its HR team where they speak with various employees on a variety of different topics and themes. Their first guest was Arlo CFO Gordon Mattingly who talked through his career highlights to date and his experience of remote working.

Podcasts are also being used for sharing knowledge, for example tech teams who wouldn’t typically have any connection to on the ground employees, will now talk them through new products and other updates, which they can then pass on to customers. 

Workvivo’s CMO Gidi Pridor believes experimenting with new formats for communicating with workforces internally will be critical in this new era in which hybrid and remote working is commonplace. “Everyone’s either offering free access to [mental helath] apps like Headspace or online cooking classes and it’s all very cute, but these are band aids,” said Pridor.

“The core problem [in remote-working situations], is lack of meaningful connections, meaningful bonds and relationships, the kind that are formed in an office environment, or bumping into the CEO or other senior team members in the parking lot and getting a pat on the back of for a job well done,” Pridor said. The result was that people became zombies watching the screen and doing their work, he added. “And it results in people being unhappy, disconnected and less motivated. The connection to the culture of the workplace and your colleagues is really an all-time low.”

Empathy and authenticity have become prized leadership qualities by employees since COVID-19 struck. In the U.K., 77% of 1,330 U.K. said that these are the foundations of good company culture, and 39% said they want their leaders to explore more personal means of communication, like video, according to a survey commissioned by Workspace by Facebook. Despite increased efforts from leaders, many U.K. employees felt let down by bosses during the pandemic: 32% said communications from their leadership team during this difficult period felt cold and impersonal and 31% felt leadership showed a lack of empathy for people’s personal lives.

Podcasting firm uStudio saw internal podcasts go from being of interest to early adopters, to mass take-up during the pandemic, according to founder Jen Grogono. More than half its clients now produce an average 10 podcast regular shows using its platform. Average minutes of podcast playtime across its customer based were up 349% from the last year and podcast users up 167% from the last year, according to uStudio though it didn’t give baseline figures. 

One major motivation was from business leaders searching for new ways to connect with their employees on the emotional level needed to keep them connected with the business and each other. Another was a desperation to provide alternatives to the Zoom and Teams cultures that sprung up during the last year, but have since caused screen fatigue and in some cases, burnout. 

“It’s very powerful for a leader to be able to get their voice heard by an entire workforce without having to get everyone dial into a conference call,” Grogono said. “It’s how people become connected to a cause or mission.”

She believes this medium has been underused for internal communications. “Couple it with the delivery and you can take advantage of habits people have built up over time. People can download and listen offline, while reviewing their kids’ schoolwork or cooking. It’s the efficiency with which the message can get to the workforce — that’s what we saw through the pandemic. And the way people can be at home and receive work content in a way that integrates into work style.”

What is scope creep? How can it affect your relationship with a client? 

It’s a huge issue for a lot of freelancers. It’s a [bigger issue] if you’re on retainer.  Scope creep is when you agree to doing something and your client asks for something more like, “Oh, can you just throw this in? This will just take five minutes.” Or maybe they’ll say, “This wasn’t what I imagined. Can you do this instead?” The reason you have a scope and a contract is to be able to fall back on those documents. That way you can tell the client that you can certainly do what they ask but it will cost X number of dollars. At the beginning of a relationship, when you’re finding your footing of how you’ll communicate with a client it’s easy to allow some scope creep. But it can easily spin out of control. 

Can you give an example of how that might happen? 

I’m on a retainer for one client. We made a scope. I realized quickly that she has so many other needs outside of the scope of the work. I ended up doing a bunch of stuff that was beyond the scope of what we had agreed upon. I spoke with that client to tell her that I couldn’t manage all of her needs. We did a new, focused scope but again the client still needed all of this other support so that would come through my inbox. I’ve got a flat rate no matter what they send my way. And lately, it’s gotten out of control. 

Can it be solved by being clearer about boundaries? 

Some people are much better [about setting boundaries] than others. Some clients are much better than others with boundaries. In my case, I’m not awesome at it and this client is really bad at understanding it. So it’s been a bit of a struggle. 

Has there been more scope creep over the last year with layoffs due to Covid? Are companies trying to get more out of freelancers with a constrained budget? 

There’s definitely a risk of that. I’ve been a subcontractor on a team with others before where there was a lot of scope creep, especially with the other two [team members]. They’d be like, “Hey, can you just design this thing for us?” or “Can you just create this campaign for us?” The requests were coming from other staff members, not the main point person, so the CEO finally had to specify the scope and tell me not to do the other requests because they were distracting from the plans in place. 

What do you wish clients understood about scope creep? 

The requests that are like, “Oh this is quick and easy,” are super condescending. If it was so quick and easy you could do it yourself. And even if it is quick and easy, that doesn’t mean I’ve budgeted the time and mental bandwidth to do it. If clients could refrain from that type of language that would be helpful.

Anything else? 

The scope is there to protect the client in some ways. If they keep throwing curve balls or adding on things, that detracts from what they’ve hired us to do. If another scope needs to be opened, that’s wonderful. But adding on things without adding on compensation just shows you don’t respect our time and expertise. Even if you do, it doesn’t allow for optimal working conditions. If you really want the most out of your service provider, they should really stick to scopes that are nice and clear. Then strategies can be built around it without throwing things in left and right. 

Can I have your data?

A growing number of publishers are trying to help solve their first-party data problems by literally asking as many questions as possible. 

At any given time, Group Nine Media — the publisher that operates the Dodo, Thrillist and NowThis — is running 10 to 15 brand lift studies, two or three different site-specific single-question surveys at the foot of its articles, as well as a handful of larger research projects that typically run a couple dozen questions. While some of the research is done in partnership with Group Nine’s advertisers, most of it is done so that Group Nine can enrich the picture it has of its audience, both for future ad sales opportunities as well as content development and distribution strategy.  

“We want to be as present as we can in all the touchpoints we have with our audiences,” said Bobby Lacivita, vp of research and measurement at Group Nine. Significant advertiser interest in the data hasn’t hurt, though: “In 2020 there was a sudden new surge of demand [for first-party data],” Lacivita added.

The key hits: 

• Publishers are presenting questions to site visitors to collect more first-party data.
• The prevalence of polls risks becoming another online nuisance.
• But publishers have little choice other than to try to glean more insights into their audiences to appease advertisers.

Different publishers have spent years relying on their readers for consumer insights. Magazine publishers such as Condé Nast have had big panels for decades. But the events of last year ramped many publishers’ research efforts up considerably, both because of the coming cookie changes and because advertisers were suddenly ravenously hungry for consumer insights, as the pandemic, then racial justice protests, then the election scrambled consumer sentiments and behavior. 

“Publishers knew this was a need for years, but they didn’t always have what they needed to act on it,” said Shachar Orren, the chief marketing officer of Ex.co, a vendor that sells several tools that integrate questions and polls into website content. While Ex.co’s tools can be used for lots of different purposes, Orren said that, in the past six months, the number of times publisher clients have mentioned data collection among their needs has shot up by 60%.

What remains to be seen is whether this kind of tool becomes the next auto-playing video, or offer to sign up for push notifications, or content-blocking interstitial — a kind of media-bred curiosity that uglies up the internet while delivering little value to anybody except advertisers.

Publishers have to figure this out, in part, because the other side of the industry is stepping up efforts to solicit information from internet users. Last month, Omnicom Media Group announced the launch of OMG Signal, a consumer panel of nearly 2 million people pre-mapped to audience segments assembled in Omni, the agency’s marketing and data platform.

“The marketplace has sort of realized that there are limits to behavioral data,” said Renee Cassard, Omnicom’s chief research officer. “In the last decade we’ve become quite enamored of the what [of audience targeting], but behavior in 2020 was certainly not predictive of 2021, and behavior today is not necessarily predictive of what behavior will look like in 2022. We haven’t been taking that variability into account.” 

Above and beyond needing to serve marketers, though, publishers will have to work at making their sites more interactive as they focus on deepening relationships with their audiences. 

“The question surrounding everyone’s first-party data is, how do you add more than, ‘Did they read a post?’” said Ken Blom, svp of ad strategy and partnerships at BuzzFeed. 

For years BuzzFeed has compiled data through its quizzes and mini-quizzes created for advertisers. The publisher has also experimented with other ways to get readers to interact with its posts. Most recently, a shopping wishlist feature deployed on its commerce posts has been getting traction, with usage up 66% year over year during last year’s Cyber Week. The publisher did not provide exact figures.

Unlike a poll or a question, the shopping list allows BuzzFeed to understand which users are interested in specific products, a valuable intent signal that can potentially be used to infer many things: A person who saves a tent, a sleeping bag and a backpack could be planning to go on a camping trip soon, for example. 

“It’s less about quizzes and questions, and more about, ‘What does the future of a website look like that’s more dynamic and not static?’” Blom said. “Maybe the cookieless future is what pushes us toward this, which would be really cool.” — Max Willens

What we’ve heard

“Every journalist is biased, and objectivity is fake. We can be fairer and we can be more truthful if we are honest about that.”

— BuzzFeed journalist on the controversy around newsrooms’ social media policies

Cheat Sheet: Apple’s email privacy push

Apple’s digital tracking crackdown has come for publishers’ email businesses. On June 7, the iPhone maker announced two new features that will threaten media companies’ and independent creators’ abilities to gather audience data from email subscribers and to evaluate their email newsletters’ performance.

Mail Privacy Protection
When the next version of Apple’s iOS mobile operating system rolls out — likely in the fall — it will include the option for people to block companies from monitoring whether they opened an email. The feature, called Mail Privacy Protection, will be limited to Apple’s built-in Mail app and be optional.

Hide My Email
The next version of Apple’s desktop, tablet and mobile operating systems will include an option for people to send dummy addresses when providing their email addresses, such as when replying to an email or signing up for a newsletter. The feature, called Hide My Email, will be available to people who use Apple’s iCloud cloud storage service and be optional.

Newsletter publishers need a new stat
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature will cut off a metric that publishers use to sell ads in their email newsletter. “Clients always ask what our open rates are,” said one publishing executive.

This executive sought to take solace in the change being optional and limited to Apple’s Mail app. However, as Nieman Lab pointed out, Apple’s Mail app plays a pretty outsized role in email activity. Nieman Lab cited stats from email marketing firm Litmus showing that in May 2021 61.7% of all emails were opened in Apple Mail, regardless of device, and that 93.5% of emails opened on an iPhone or iPad were opened in Apple Mail.

If Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature significantly impairs email open rate counts — a big if considering the feature will be optional — publishers may be pressed to strike more deals oriented around how many times people click on an ad included in a newsletter. But more likely, they will look to estimate open rates by projecting the figure based on the subscribers they can track, said the publishing executive.

A potential flood of fake emails
Apple’s Hide My Email feature could present a bigger threat to publishers’ businesses. The third-party cookie’s impending demise is pushing publishers to stock up on people’s email addresses as a means of identifying audiences for ad targeting purposes. However, endangering that push is the potential for people to provide dummy emails in place of their actual addresses.

Apple has already posed this threat with the single sign-on feature it introduced in 2019 that gives people the option to provide a random email address and have Apple forward emails to their actual email address.

It’s unclear how widely people have adopted Apple’s or others’ email-disguising tools. The publishing executive said their company does not support Apple’s single sign-on feature and that they had not looked into how many email addresses in their database featured domains associated with temporary email addresses.

Whatever the present number of people disguising their email addresses is, it has the potential to rise. More publishers are asking for people’s email addresses to supply their first-party databases, and people are becoming more aware of how their email addresses are being used to identify them. And more to the point, Apple’s Hide My Email feature will be built directly into its Safari browser and will not require a site to support its single sign-on tool, making it easier for people to provide an alternative address.

“It’s definitely concerning,” said the publishing executive. “But as I say that, it was only a few years ago when Apple was supposed to have killed off advertising [by enabling ad-blocking apps on iOS in 2015], and that didn’t happen.” — Tim Peterson

Numbers to know

$1.3 billion: How much money private equity firm Blackstone will pay to acquire IDG, which owns Macworld and PCWorld.

500,000: Numbers of people who pay for Outside’s digital subscriptions, roughly half the number of the publication’s magazine subscribers.

$20 million: How much money Maven has raised in equity financing.

3 questions with Times Tech Guild’s Kathy Zhang

The New York Times has yet to voluntarily recognize the Times Tech Guild, a union announced on April 13 representing a majority of the company’s tech workers.

The guild — arguably one of the largest ongoing tech unionization efforts, representing software engineers, data analysts, designers and product managers who build and maintain the digital products and systems at the Times — alleges that the Times’ senior leadership has since enacted union-busting tactics and has launched a petition asking New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien to stop the union-busting campaign and to voluntarily recognize the union. By the afternoon of June 9, the petition, which is open for anyone to sign, had led to 765 letters being sent to the Times, just shy of the group’s goal to reach 800.

The guild is affiliated with the NewsGuild of New York, which already represents over 1,300 editorial and business staff at the Times. The NewsGuild announced on Tuesday that it had filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge against the Times with the National Labor Relations Board.

Kathy Zhang, organizing committee member and senior analytics manager at the Times, spoke to Digiday about the guild’s latest efforts and why she thinks they are being met with resistance by senior management. “In one phone call, one snap of her fingers, our CEO could make this process so much better for everyone,” she said.

In response to a request for comment from Digiday, a spokesperson for The New York Times said:

• The guild has not identified the specific departments, teams, job titles or individuals it is seeking to represent, nor the total number of people in that group.
• The guild has also not asked to meet with Times senior leadership and that the NLRB filing was made without raising concerns or sharing a complaint with the company. The spokesperson cited the National Labor Relations Act, and the election process to determine majority status.
• The company asked for a formal vote on unionizing because there were “enough people” who said they wanted more information and the chance to vote.
• The Times will support any outcome of an NLRB-sponsored election.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. — Sara Guaglione

What is the Times Tech Guild working toward, and why do you think these efforts have been met with resistance at the company?

We saw unionizing as an opportunity to build something that would outlast all of us, to improve the company and make things better. We oversee software that needs to be monitored at all times, like the home screen, subscription platform and the website platform. But sometimes we are short-staffed. Some colleagues had to be on call every week for months, working at 2 or 3 in the morning and then just going to work the next day with no extra compensation. We want to make sure people who are in precarious situations are protected, like engineers who work on call get compensated for that time, or workers on visa and non-residency status get support through the difficult immigration process, and flexibility when returning to the office.

The company voluntarily recognized Wirecutter’s union the same day they went public with it. Why Wirecutter and not the tech union? They say it’s because [Wirecutters’ union is] a group of editorial employees, which is different from tech. But nurses, teachers, actors, construction workers, service workers — they all have unions. My belief is the only reason that leadership has refused to recognize our campaign is because they have to know we have a solid majority; it’s been in all of our communication. There’s been a lot of hiring on the tech side in the last couple of years. There’s nearly 700 of us. That’s a lot of people, and that’s a lot of power they would lose.

What do you want from Times management?

Senior leadership has not made any effort to reach out to the organizers of this effort or try to come to any kind of understanding. All we are asking for is for the senior leadership at The New York Times to count the cards that we have already and then acknowledge that we have a solid majority and that we’re correct in having a solid majority. There’s still time for The New York Times to change their mind on voluntary recognition. Anything short of allowing us to come to the bargaining table is not neutrality, not fairness. We’d rather be spending all this time on improving working conditions for our colleagues, rather than going back and forth on whether or not we have the support we do.

Do you have hope that this will happen?

I’m not setting expectations for what senior leadership is going to be doing. They are holding what are basically anti-union misinformation campaigns in different departments. It’s really wild coming from The New York Times. They are saying things like “unions aren’t good for tech people” and assertions like “once we unionize, then no one can get promotions anymore.”

But there’s a lot of power in our workforce right now. I have every bit of faith that we will come out in the end with a really strong union. There will be ripple effects not just in the media industry but also the tech industry in labor organizing.

What we’ve covered

Publishers add more online education programs following interest spurred by the pandemic:

• Publishers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Penske Media’s Rolling Stone and WWD, are adding more programs to their digital education portfolios.
• The New York Times’ Learning Network added around 20 webinars, two live events and a one-year professional development program for teachers.

Read more about publisher educational programs here.

Vox Media’s Marty Moe and Preet Bharara are building a business that extends beyond podcasting:

• In April Vox Media picked up Cafe Studios to round out its podcast network, but for both companies, the motivation behind the deal extends beyond the world of audio.
• Cafe Studios, which sells subscriptions through its Cafe Insider program, will introduce Vox Media into the world of subscription-based podcasting.

Learn more about Vox Media’s vision for its podcast network here.

Thrillist’s new LGBTQ+ travel channel aims to extend Pride Month ad budgets throughout the year:

• Thrillist found an opportunity to monetize a niche audience with a new LGBTQ+ travel channel, called We’re Out Here, that is sponsored with a long-term ad deal.
• Orbitz, a travel company, signed on as the launch partner for We’re Out Here in a mid-six-figure deal that extends through the end of the year.

Read more about Thrillist’s new LGBTQ+ travel vertical here.

Pinterest edges closer to social commerce with new Shopping List feature:

• Pinterest is looking to help its users get one step closer to purchasing with a new feature that automatically saves shoppable product pins and even notifies users of price changes.
• The new feature will roll out this month to all users in the U.S. and the U.K. Shopping Lists will be available later this year in Australia, Canada, France, and Germany.

Learn more about Pinterest’s new commerce strategy here.

Digiday Research: Instagram is more important for driving revenue for the smallest publishers:

• Instagram is more important to small publishers than it is to the publisher ecosystem as a whole, new Digiday Research reveals.
• Throughout its history, publishers have treated Instagram, which has traditionally been inhospitable to their traffic-driving efforts, as a tool for brand-building and engagement.

Read more about publishers’ attitudes toward social media platforms here.

What we’re reading

Trans writers and journalists are struggling to correct bylines with their deadnames:
Writers who have transitioned are working to gain the ability to change past bylines at the publications they’ve previously worked for and contributed to. While some major academic publishers have enacted policies allowing anyone to quietly and retroactively change the name on their work, such rules regarding deadnames remain rare at major news outlets and newspapers, according to CNN. Management at The New York Times recently argued against such a proposal from its union.

Reuters’ executive editor Gina Chua opens up about transitioning during the pandemic:
Gina Chua is now perhaps the most senior transgender journalist in the country after being promoted last month to the newly created position of executive editor at Reuters, reports The New York Times. In an interview, Chua said she wanted to speak publicly about her experience because, “it’s good to just have people be able to say, ‘Here is an example of somebody who can transition and not get fired.’”

Top reporters at the New York Times are pushing back against the paper’s union:
The NewsGuild of New York, the media union that represents staffers at the Times, announced plans to hold an election to raise member dues from 1.3846% to 1.75%. The election would also determine whether or not to end the cap on dues for those making more than $140,000 per year, The Daily Beast reported. Dozens of top members from the Times and some guild members from Reuters have begun talking to labor attorney Arthur Schwartz to explore options opposing this increase.

Twitter personality Yashar Ali has a unique position of power but has a past shrouded in mystery:
Though he is a contributor to New York Magazine and HuffPost, Yashar Ali’s byline shows up infrequently and his biggest stories are shared on Twitter and in his Substack newsletter, according to a profile by Los Angeles Magazine. He has nonetheless won the admiration of the biggest stars in the media business. Ali rarely consents to interviews and there are very few photos of him on the internet, but after months of asking, he sat down for this interview with the magazine’s Peter Kiefer.