Help Payday Finish Our New Website

A sneak preview of Payday's new website built with the Ghost platform

By: March 6, 2024

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Nearly eight years ago, Payday Report was founded with a simplistic WordPress design. A friend who helped me win a good severance package designed it for me for free. 

Since then, we have published over 1,000 articles on the site and tracked over 3,000 strikes. Over the years, I added some plugins, but the site remained in the original design. 

In 2020, we upgraded the site to build a Strike Tracker that tracked 3,000 strikes in nearly four years. However, last year, the site began crashing constantly due to our massive database of strikes. Thanks to reader donations, we were able to engineer a stopgap solution that prevented the site from crashing. 

However, after eight years, it’s time for us to have a more professional site. For the past six months, we have been brainstorming, plotting, and designing a new look for Payday using the Ghost platform. 

Ghost is an open-source, non-profit platform designed by MIT graduate students and members of the United Electrical Workers (UE). It will help us look more professional and integrate our email more smoothly, making the design slicker and easier to read. 

Ghost is helping small publishers like ours grow, and we want to work more closely with them to grow our audience. 

The platform will also allow us to integrate multimedia better. Recently, Payday launched a podcast and is producing more videos (Check out our video on the violence facing Carnaval’s street vendors in Rio de Janeiro).

The new website site will enable us to showcase our multimedia content better so that readers can understand social movements more deeply both in the US and overseas.  After six months of planning, brainstorming, and transferring a massive amount of data, we have a sneak peek of the new Payday Report site. 

Check out an image of it on the new site here.

However, we need another $1,000 to fine tune and take Payday to the next level of Payday 2.0. 

A new look combined with our Illumine Service Foundation funding and multimedia content will help Payday grow and attract more followers. For the past eight years, we have been the little engine that could on the labor beat; now it’s time for a new train. 

Please look at our sneak peek of the new site and donate to help us grow. 

Donate to help us finish the website for Payday 2.0 and grow as a publication. Please, if you can, sign up as one of our 774 recurring donors today. 

Thanks again for all the support. 

Love & 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]