Staff of Pop-Up Magazine Productions joins Media Guild of the West

San Francisco — The staff of Pop-Up Magazine Productions today announced it has formed a union with Media Guild of the West, a local of The NewsGuild-CWA, which represents nearly 25,000 media professionals at publications including The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and BuzzFeed News.

An overwhelming majority of non-management employees at Pop-Up Magazine and The California Sunday Magazine signed cards authorizing union representation. The editors, producers, designers, and other staffers seek to partner with Pop-Up Magazine Productions’ management to build a sustainable work environment for all. This includes addressing issues around job security, transparency, career growth, and compensation policies.

The organizing drive had been in the works for more than a year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the crisis has deepened, the challenges facing magazine journalism and live events — the pillars of Pop-Up Magazine Productions’ business — have become clearer and more pressing. Staffers at Pop-Up Magazine and California Sunday want to ensure their voices are represented in the important decisions to come.

“Working at Pop-Up has been one of the defining experiences of my life,” said Aaron Edwards, senior producer and co-host of Pop-Up Magazine, and a member of the organizing committee. “I’m so thrilled to stand with my colleagues, who are some of the most talented and insightful people I’ve ever worked with. The time we’re living in by its nature calls for us to think and act as a collective. I’m excited we’re doing that.”

“I’m proud to welcome the staffers of Pop-Up Magazine Productions into our union,” said Anthony Pesce, president of Media Guild of the West. “It’s inspiring to see workers come together, especially during this global crisis, and we look forward to building a productive relationship with Pop-Up management.”

More information can be found at the Pop-Up/California Sunday Guild website, popupguild.com.

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The Pop-Up/California Sunday Guild’s mission statement is below:

Since its founding, Pop-Up Magazine Productions has played a unique and critical role in American journalism. Pop-Up introduced a live magazine, and California Sunday has established itself as a leading national magazine. We, the staff of Pop-Up Magazine Productions, are proud of the deeply reported, beautifully designed stories that Pop-Up and California Sunday produce and of our role in bringing those stories to audiences and readers. 

To protect our rights as workers and sustain Pop-Up Magazine Productions’ voice into the future, we have decided to form a union with the NewsGuild, which represents our peers at The New York Times and the Washington Post and an increasing number of recently unionized outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, New York, BuzzFeed, The Daily Beast, and The New Republic.

Our decision to unionize is the product of more than a year of organizing, discussion, and planning. Although our efforts began long before the COVID-19 crisis, the uncertainty that the pandemic has created for many in our industry speaks even more to the necessity of unionizing and to the need for the ambitious, humane storytelling that characterizes Pop-Up and California Sunday. 

To that end, we seek to work with Pop-Up Magazine Productions’ management to ensure that the values found in our journalism are reflected in our workplace. We want to safeguard job security, bolster transparency, increase diversity, guarantee fair compensation, and create clear pathways for career development. 

Magazines, by their nature, are collective enterprises. The stories that Pop-Up and California Sunday tell would not achieve their full expression without fact-checkers, musicians, editors, administrators, social-media strategists, production managers, tech personnel, salespeople, account managers, community builders, designers, and producers. 

We are appreciative of the continued support of our parent company Emerson Collective, which has long been invested in our success and in the well-being of journalism as a whole. At this important juncture, we believe that the ability to bargain collectively is the best way to secure a more equitable workplace for all of us. We are asking Pop-Up Magazine Productions and Emerson Collective to recognize our union, and we look forward to beginning an amicable collective-bargaining process.