An example newsroom: The 19th

By Made­line Pap­cun | UConn Jour­nal­ism
April 2024

Solu­tions to jour­nal­is­m’s care­giv­er issues can depend on the type of news­room. Flex­i­bil­i­ty in fam­i­ly leave poli­cies can depend on the newsroom’s con­tent type (such as the demand­ing nature of break­ing news ver­sus the flex­i­bil­i­ty enter­prise report­ing can give), size, finan­cial mod­el (for prof­it or non­prof­it), and man­age­ment team or style. It can also depend on the val­ues of the out­let. 

Seem­ing­ly, all of these fac­tors can come togeth­er to cre­ate work­places with rea­son­able ben­e­fits for their jour­nal­ists. For exam­ple, The 19th* is an “inde­pen­dent, non­prof­it news­room report­ing on gen­der, pol­i­tics and pol­i­cy,” accord­ing to their mis­sion state­ment. Their aim is “to empow­er women and LGBTQ+ peo­ple — par­tic­u­lar­ly those from under­rep­re­sent­ed com­mu­ni­ties — with the infor­ma­tion, resources and tools they need to be equal par­tic­i­pants in our democ­ra­cy.”

All of their con­tent is free to con­sume and free to repub­lish, and they tend to focus on “deep dive” (a.k.a. enter­prise) report­ing. More­over, they are ded­i­cat­ed to main­tain­ing a “news­room that reflects the racial, ide­o­log­i­cal, socioe­co­nom­ic and gen­der diver­si­ty of Amer­i­can vot­ers, and is devot­ed to cov­er­ing every­one with empa­thy.”

As for the ben­e­fits The 19th* offers their work­ers, what’s list­ed in their job list­ings is exten­sive, includ­ing 20 days of vaca­tion time, 6 per­son­al days and 10 sick days per year, in addi­tion to paid hol­i­days, of which there were 19 days in 2023. Fur­ther­more, The 19th* offers 100% paid fam­i­ly leave up to 6 months and 100% paid care­giv­er leave up to 4 months, in addi­tion to a health sav­ings account and Health, vision, and den­tal insur­ance (100% for employ­ees / 60% for depen­dents).

Even fur­ther, they offer well­ness & work from home reim­burse­ment ben­e­fits, long term and short term dis­abil­i­ty insur­ance, and life insur­ance, in addi­tion to a 401(k) Plan (up to 3.5% match­ing on 6% con­tri­bu­tion), flex­i­ble spend­ing plan (for qual­i­fy­ing med­ical or child care expens­es), and pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment stipends.

With­out work­ing in a spe­cif­ic news­room myself, it’s impos­si­ble to say if one mod­el is per­fect or not — but it’s easy to see how a mod­el with such high lev­els of ben­e­fits for employ­ees would make reach­ing a work-life bal­ance eas­i­er, thus less­en­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties care­givers face work­ing in jour­nal­ism.