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)

By: Mike Elk October 26, 2019

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 who covered everything from Lula & the Brazilian labor movement to major league baseball. He spent years covering union organizing in the South for The Guardian and was labeled by the New York Times as an "abrasive gadfly" for exposing within the labor movement. Raised in a UE union family in Pittsburgh, Elk was illegally for union organizing at Politico in 2015 and used his NLRB settlement to start the crowd-funded Payday Report. He lives in his hometown of Pittsburgh and is fluent in both Pittsburghese and Portuguese, which he learned when attending journalism school at PUC-Rio de Janerio. Email: [email protected]

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