Photo: SAG AFTRA Last month, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — the labor union better known by its acronym SAG-AFTRA, though it’s my understanding most people just call it SAG — approved an “ influencer agreement ,” setting up a pathway for the now-ubiquitous creative class to gain membership and access protections typically afforded to more traditional forms of creative work. I learned this, of course, the same way I learn about most other economic developments in the influencer space, which is by reading Taylor Lorenz, who wrote an informative piece on the matter for The New York Times. What happens in influencer-land is increasingly pertinent to what happens here in podcast-land, in part because influencers as a talent ecosystem have flowed quite a bit into the podcast business in recent years, as they have just almost everywhere else as part of their search for greater revenue diversification. It’s also just interesting to see SAG-AFTRA, a staple component of the broader mainstream entertainment ecosystem which formed out of a 2012 merger between two unions that originated in the thirties, open its doors to this thoroughly modern creative class. It’s a move that theoretically creates value going both ways: As much as this story amounts to some mainstream recognition of this new influencer economy, it’s also about SAG-AFTRA working to keep up with the times. “Making it easier to cover this type of work has been a top priority for our organization,” said SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris in the press release about the approval . “As new ways of storytelling emerge, it’s imperative that we embrace and lift up these artists.” That’s all well and good, of course. The question, however, is the extent to which the union will adequately do that embracing and lifting for all other kinds of emergent artists and industries as well. Around the time the influencer agreement was approved, I spotted a … [Read more...] about Can the Screen Actors Guild and Podcasters Get Along?