Social media, comment threads, and other means of online communication are important to journalists’ work processes, but expand their workload and pose challenges to their professional identity. The concept of ‘engagement’ is used by news workers in New Zealand to describe the role of digitally mediated communication in their work. Engagement deserves scholarly treatment akin to concepts such as ‘participatory journalism’ because it is employed by journalists to place professional and practical limits on online interaction. Their decisions about engagement are based on professional commitments, past experiences, and the allocation of time and resources. Journalists in newsrooms that are already understaffed and under-resourced are expected to take on new tasks; like other digital laborers, journalists experience the interpenetration of work and leisure and the incorporation of affective and unpaid work. News workers have an opportunity to develop best practices for engagement and determine how and when they should engage online.

A developing research agenda in digital labour studies draws on aspects of information society theory and Marxist autonomism to understand examples of unionisation in digital workplaces and among digital labourers. In this article, I trace core concepts of information society theory and autonomism to demonstrate how unions have been framed by prominent figures in the field. I argue that both approaches tend to relegate unions to industrial capitalism and its historically-specific set of class relations. Information society theorists argue that capitalist class conflict has been transcended, perceiving unions as an obstacle to flexibility and entrepreneurship. Autonomists maintain a focus on class conflict, yet, based on their analysis of contemporary class composition, tend to prioritise other forms of organisation over unions. Digital labour studies research has developed, in part, as a critique of information society theory and draws on aspects of autonomism, including the concepts of precarity and immaterial labour. Authors studying empirical examples of unionisation among digital labourers identify different challenges and opportunities for unionisation among digital labours, and demonstrate the utility of unions for improving the conditions of digital labourers and promoting new working-class subjectivities.

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