Under Trump, media companies are emboldened against employee unionizing

IN THE PAST DECADE, digital media has experienced a boom-and-bust cycle. Sites that were buoyed in the early 2010s by digital-advertising dollars watched their traffic plummet in subsequent years as readers shifted to consuming content on social media. The next step for many publishers like Vice and G/O Media has been to lean into private equity ownership to keep afloat. With that strategy have come cost-cutting measures—namely, staff layoffs. It is against this ominous backdrop that over the past few years employees at Vice, G/O Media, the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed,...