Context
Beat: Massachusetts Statehouse, energy/labor/regulatory policy
Reporting approach: solo-sourced explanatory piece, built from interviews across every stakeholder group rather than a single vantage point
This story taught me how to report on a fight playing out in three venues at once — the ballot box, the Legislature, and the courts — without losing the reader in procedure. The hardest part wasn't gathering the interviews; it was deciding what to cut. Companies, unions, and lawmakers all had their own framing of the "real" issue, and simplifying that into one coherent narrative meant constantly checking my own summary against what each source actually said, rather than settling for the most quotable version of events.
Tags: Statehouse • Explainer • Labor market • Regulatory policy • Local Election
Massachusetts voters kept hearing about app-based drivers — a ballot question, a competing lawsuit, a bill on Beacon Hill — but almost no one explained how the pieces fit together, or what any of it would actually mean for the roughly 200,000 people driving for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart in the state.
I set out to untangle it. I interviewed the companies pushing the ballot measure, the labor unions fighting it, state legislators weighing a competing bill, and the attorneys arguing the underlying lawsuits, to figure out what each side actually wanted and where their interests collided. Then I stripped away the legal and legislative jargon — "related subjects requirement," portable benefit accounts, misclassification claims — and rebuilt the story from the ground up: what's on the ballot, what's stalled in committee, what's already in court, and why none of those tracks agree on whether drivers should be employees or independent contractors.