Vox Media Union Reaches Agreement on Three-Year Contract

Vox Media‘s union employees will not hit the picket line for now: On Friday morning, the union said it had reached a tentative three-year agreement with the digital media company after an overnight bargaining session.

The Vox Media Union covers editorial staff at Vox.com, The Verge, Eater, SB Nation, Pop Sugar, Thrillist, Vox Media Podcast Network and The Dodo.

An overwhelming 90% of the members of Vox Media Union had voted Thursday to authorize a strike if a deal was not reached by the time their current contract expired at 11:59 p.m. ET, on June 12. “As a deal has now been reached, there will not be any pickets outside Vox Media’s office in New York,” the union said Friday.

The tentative deal covers about 250 writers and other editorial workers represented by the Writers Guild of America East. Union members and the WGAE Council’s Online Media sector representatives will vote to ratify the contract in the coming days. The union said full details of the agreement will be released upon ratification.

Union leadership said the top concerns for a new deal included proposals on pay, AI protections, benefits, and assurances for severance and layoff procedures. Vox Media, like many other media companies, has implemented multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years, most recently with a third wave of job cuts in January within a brief succession of weeks.

Vox Media at one point had about 2,000 employees but that number has shrunk with the job cuts. In 2019 the company acquired New York Media, publisher of New York Magazine, in an all-stock deal designed to gain synergies of scale. Two years later, Vox Media merged with Group Nine Media, a digital media roll-up venture whose backers had included Discovery.

Disclosure: Variety parent company Penske Media Corp. is a shareholder in Vox Media.