Labor coverage is coming back in a big way

Ben Smith of the New York Times writes about the return of labor coverage at many publications.

Smith writes, “Steven Greenhouse, a former labor reporter for The New York Times, told me that for a time in the 2000s, he was the ‘the only full-time daily labor reporter.’ Now, there are at least a dozen at legacy outlets and digital ones like Vice and HuffPost.

“The change is also evident in how some of the biggest economic stories are covered. Reports on companies ranging from Amazon to Uber are not as likely to fall under the boosterish genre of gee-whiz technology stories these days. And the tales of heroic entrepreneurs have given way to coverage focused on their employees — stories documenting the complex and sometimes damaging effects of the digital transformation on warehouse workers, taxi drivers, delivery workers and white-collar employees.

“The shift was spurred, many journalists believe, by the growing labor movement inside American newsrooms, which has made reporters ‘more knowledgeable and sympathetic to labor issues,’ said Kim Kelly, a freelance labor journalist who has written a column for Teen Vogue since 2018. ‘An entire generation of journalists has been turned into labor activists.'”

Read more here.