Mike Elk Tried to Unionize Politico’s Staff — and Now Has Apparently Been Fired. What Happened?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/mike-elk-on-trying-to-unionize-politico.html

By Marin Cogan

From the beginning, Mike Elk was a curious choice for Politico. For all of its new-media velocity, the Beltway Bible is still very much a classic newsroom culture, where reporters and editors practice the old journalistic convention of not expressing opinions about the topics they cover. Elk, who was previously a labor reporter for the progressive mag In These Times and was hired to help launch Politico's labor coverage, was different: a union man who made no bones about the fact that he wanted the newsroom to organize. As other media outlets — Salon, Gawker, The Guardian, and Vice — voted to unionize in recent months, Elk sent emails to colleagues trying to rally the newsroom around the cause. Last month, he went to a Bernie Sanders campaign event and asked the presidential candidate if he supported the organizing efforts at Politico. This was after someone leaked his internal emails to the conservative Washington Free Beacon, which speculated about Elk's newsroom absences and the fact that only a handful of his stories ran over the course of the year he'd been at Politico. (Elk wrote a piece about his struggles with PTSD after the suicide of a source in a piece for the Huffington Post earlier this week.)

Now, as the Huffington Post and other outlets have reported, Elk appears to have been fired — his work email bounces back, and his bio page appears to have been deleted. When I caught up with him, Elk wouldn’t confirm that he was fired, alluding to a “process” he is going through with the company and the help of a union rep. I asked him about the effort to organize at Politico and what comes next.

So, what’s going on with you and Politico? Do you no longer work there?
Marty Kady, the editor of Politico Pro, called me while I was on vacation and started to have a phone conversation with me that appeared adversarial. I informed Marty that under federal labor law that I had Weingarten rights and the right to have my union rep present if I felt the conversation could result in discipline or termination. I'm on vacation — the union is handling all further stuff on this, as I am just trying to relax. As a PTSD survivor, I have the right to medical privacy, and I'm not going to comment on it at this time as we go through this process. I'm really glad to be a member of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild to handle these kinds of stressful situations. I feel really strongly that the story really isn't about me, the story is about why digital-media workers are trying to organize across the industry.

Do you think Politico will ever unionize? What’s your meter-reading of the newsroom?
Oh yeah, no doubt about it. Give it a year or two, and it will unionize. A few other places, like BuzzFeed or HuffPost, will have to go union first, but I imagine once that's happening, reporters at Politico will get the job done. This is gonna be a multiyear effort, and many different people in the newsroom are gonna have to step up and take leadership positions.


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