USA Today Site Editors Misclassified as Independent Contractors, Denied Proper Wages, Lawsuit Claims

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USA Today Sports Media Group and parent company Gannett Co. have been hit with a proposed collective action filed by a former site editor who claims he was misclassified as an independent contractor and denied proper minimum and overtime wages.

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The 15-page case alleges that USA Today and Gannett “knowingly” misclassified the plaintiff and other site editors as independent contractors, rather than bona fide employees, despite maintaining a significant level of control over their jobs. By doing so, the media companies have unlawfully skirted their obligations under state and federal law to pay employees at least minimum wage for every hour worked and time-and-a-half wages for every hour worked in excess of 40 each week, the complaint alleges.

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiff was hired by the defendants in January 2017 to help run their NFL team site for the Baltimore Ravens, RavensWire.USAToday.com. Throughout the plaintiff’s employment, which continued until August 2021, he published about 40 sports articles per week, managed other writers, edited and approved writers’ articles, monitored search engine optimization data and ran Ravens Wire’s social media accounts, the case says.

The filing argues that USA Today and Gannett engaged in a clear employer-employee relationship with its site editors, given that the companies oversaw what content they were to cover and how they could cover it, as well as their rate and method of pay. The defendants also retained the right to edit site editors’ work, fired those who failed to follow their policies and procedures or meet their performance metrics and prohibited the workers from receiving advertising revenue from their team sites, the complaint notes.

The plaintiff claims that as a site editor, he regularly put in about 70 hours per week but never received proper overtime compensation as required under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act (PMWA).

Instead, the plaintiff received flat monthly payments of approximately $2,250, plus modest bonuses if certain production metrics were met, the case says.

“[The plaintiff’s] pay was thus approximately $7.47 to $11.63 per hour (without any overtime premium), or $6.16 to $9.58 per hour (accounting for overtime hours as being 1.5x regular time hours),” the suit states. “This is less than the federal and Pennsylvania minimum wage required by the PMWA.”

The case further alleges that in 2021, the senior editor of the defendants’ NFL sites, Neal Coolong, informed the plaintiff that his superiors at USA Today and Gannett “knew the company was going to be sued eventually” over its alleged misclassification of site editors based on “very similar lawsuits” filed against Vox and FanSided in 2017 and 2020, respectively.

Per the suit, this admission demonstrates that the defendants “knew it was illegal to classify Site Editors as independent contractors” but “willfully” continued to deprive employees of proper compensation.

The lawsuit looks to represent all current and former site editors who performed work in the United States for USA Today Sports Media Group within the past three years and were classified as independent contractors.

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