28 Articles + 30 Videos = 40 days of Payday’s GM Strike Coverage

Michael Gendron talks to Payday on the picket line in Rochester (Zach D. Roberts)

Folks, 

I’m at the airport – getting ready to go back home to Pittsburgh and I just wanted to thank everybody. 

I am so proud of the amount of coverage we were able to crowdfund to do over the past  40 days of GM strike. We published more stories on the GM strike than any other publication on the left.

Together, we published 28 pieces on the GM Strike and over 30 videos (all of which you can watch here in this Youtube playlist). 

Here are just a few highlights of the impact we had: 

The New York Times cited our coverage of the strike

CNN Jake’s Tapper cited our work on kids of UAW workers being denied healthcare; helping to lead to GM reinstating health care for all strikers. 

After we exposed New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s refusal to extend unemployment benefits to striking workers, Cuomo’s senior advisor and spokesman Rich Azzopardi told the Albany Times-Union that Payday Report is “a piece of garbage” that “is not worth the server storage it’s taking up.”

Finally, the Columbia Journalism Review asked us to write for them to call out the failure of the media to cover the GM Strike. 

Quite simply, Payday OWNED the GM Strike. We had a huge impact on the story for a little tiny crowdfunded publication. 

However, this isn’t something I did alone. This is something we did a group crowdfunding a labor publication to tell the stories that the rest of the media was missing. 

Donate today to help us keep going. 

Love and Solidarity, 

Melk 

About the Author

Mike Elk
Mike Elk is an Emmy-nominated labor reporter and alumni of the Guardian. In addition to filing nearly 2,000 stories from 46 states, Elk traveled with Lula from Sáo Bernando do Campos all the way to the Oval Office in the White House. Credited by the Washington Post for being the first reporter to track the strike wave systematically, Elk started Payday Report using his NLRB settlement from being illegally fired for union organizing in 2015. He lives in his hometown of Pittsburgh and works frequently in Rio de Janeiro, where he attended college at PUC-Rio. He speaks both Portuguese and Pittsburghese fluently. His email is [email protected]

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