Harris versus Trump doesn’t matter. This is something that could really move the needle on election night, or not.
Because of a staff dispute, New York Times readers may not have the famous Election Needle to rely on.
Dozens of the Times’ Technology Guild — its union that represents software engineers, data scientists and project managers — picketed the Times’ offices in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday to protest its more than two-year-old request for a union contract.
The threat the Times faces is real: If the union chooses to strike at the Election Day deadline, when more than 600 of its members voted overwhelmingly for a mandate last month, it risks upending the Times’s election coverage, potentially taking Gray Lady off the Internet. completely.
“The threat of a strike at this time seems unnecessary and inconsistent with our mission,” a newspaper spokesperson told The Daily Beast.
“It’s really a company that positions its products [and] “Our reputation and the company’s reputation is putting The New York Times’ brand at risk,” said Cathy Chang, a senior director on the Times’s audience team and president of the Tech Guild.
The scene outside the Times Building mirrors the one-day strike organized by the editorial union in 2022, in which red-shirted employees berated the company for protracted negotiations. Some employees carried satirical variations of communications classes and wore variations of the Times’ headlines on their shirts, while others blasted into loudspeakers and dared the company to risk incurring the wrath of the union.
“This stress test!” The workers shouted as they picketed, referring to the simulations the company ran to prepare its systems for the election movement.
The union consists of about 600 employees on the business side of The Times, representing those who work on the back-end systems that support how people access the newspaper. While this includes making sure their in-house feature writing software Scoop (as seen in 2022’s She Saad) is working and that readers get their push alerts, some members are also responsible for making sure the newspaper’s various games (hello, word, Communications), applications, and website functionality. This includes the famous Election Needle, a model introduced in 2016 that predicts which candidate will win the election.
New York Times employees demonstrate outside the newspaper’s offices, October 30, 2024. Corbin Boles/The Daily Beast
The unit was formed in 2022 and has been trying to secure a contract since July of that year, fighting management over everything from return-to-office policies; Just cause protection, which ensures that employees must go through a process before being fired and cannot be made redundant without cause; And an overall pay rise of 1 percent, which the unit says is too low.
The process has not been smooth, and the unit has filed multiple claims with the National Labor Relations Board, including last week accusing the Times of questioning members about how they felt about the strike, according to Axios. (The Times denied these allegations.)
It had support from the Times’s editorial union, which signed a deal with the paper after more than two years of negotiations and a one-day strike, and from its Wirecutter union, which went on a four-day strike during the 2021 Black Friday season. Before getting the contract Next month.
“We’re very aware of the constant work they have to do to tweak things and tweak things and fix things,” Stacey Crowley, a business reporter at The Times, told The Daily Beast on the sidelines of Wednesday’s rally. “I’ve talked to some reporters covering Election Day who are working on Project Needle and other tech-heavy projects, and they don’t think things will go well without the tech union on the job.”
Several union members said that if the unit goes on strike, the risk to the Times’ platforms could become apparent if a technological problem arises with no one to fix it. Sarah Duncan, a software engineer at the Times, said outdated news could appear on the Times website, giving readers the false impression of a close election that could change the course of the country.
“In every election, something goes wrong,” Duncan said. “It’s tech workers staying up until 2 a.m. — overtime, unpaid hours — to fix it. That’s what we depend on. That’s what we’ve relied on for years, and all these past elections, is those fixes that happen.”
New York Times staff protesters outside the newspaper’s office, October 30, 2024. Corbin Boles/The Daily Beast
There is precedent for The Times’ election platforms failing at key moments in elections. The needle was removed for about an hour at 8 p.m. during the 2022 midterm elections due to a coding error that labeled Louisiana as Democratic, senior political analyst Nate Cohen wrote on Twitter at the time. The needle was back again by 9:30 p.m., according to The Hill.
But if something else goes wrong if the unit goes on strike, project manager Michelle Esposito told The Daily Beast, it won’t be so easy to fix.
“If there’s no one there to step in and fix it, it’s still going to be broken,” Esposito said. “And that’s what we warned them about — give us a fair deal so we can step in and correct things as needed.”
Zhang, the unit president, said the company had come to the negotiating table more since the strike vote in September, but only because the company recognized the risk of election night failure. If a strike does happen — the metaphor for whether it might happen is unclear — it would be the Times’ fault for any hit to its brand, she said.
“We really question whether The New York Times as an institution values democracy the way it says it does,” Chang said.
“We look forward to continuing to work with the Tech Guild to reach a fair contract that takes into account that they are already among the company’s highest-paid individual contributors and that journalism is our highest priority,” a New York Times Company spokesperson told The Daily Beast. priority.
“We are in one of the most critical periods of coverage for our readers. No outlet provides the depth of reporting and analysis that The Times provides — which will be more important to our readers and the country if, as happened in 2020, the election fails to produce a clear outcome until days or weeks after Election day.
We have robust plans to ensure we can accomplish our mission and serve our readers.
“The timing of the election deadline is arbitrary and was a decision made unilaterally by Tech Guild leadership. While we respect the union’s right to engage in protected actions, threatening a strike, at this time, appears unnecessary and inconsistent with our mission.”
