Former Writers Guild of America East president Michael Winship has been re-elected to the guild’s governing council as a freelance rep along with four other incumbents: Monica Lee Bellais, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, Kaitlin Fontana and A.M. Homes.
Gina Gionfriddo and Eric Saleh were also elected to open freelance seats. Jason Kim and Benjamin Rosenblum were also seeking freelance seats. Incumbents Gail Lee, Ashley Feinberg and Kelly Stout were re-elected to staff seats of the council.
The seats are for two-year terms. Freelance members work in screen, television and new media, and staff members work in television, radio/audio and digital news shops under the guild’s jurisdiction. New York-based digital news shops have boosted the membership of the WGA East significantly by more than 2,000 with unionization victories in recent years with Vox Media, Onion Inc., HuffPost, Vice, the Intercept, ThinkProgress, MTV News, Salon and Slate.
Votes were cast by 12.09% of the 6,208 eligible voters. The WGA East does not release numerical voting results. The ballot count was supervised by Votenet Solutions.
Winship was elected president of the WGA East’s governing council in 2007, less than two months before a 100-day strike that began on Nov. 5, 2007. After serving five consecutive terms — making him the second-longest tenured president in WGA East history behind Herb Sargent — Winship decided not to seek a sixth term in 2017 and Beau Willimon became president after running for the office unopposed. Willimon was re-elected without opposition last year to a second two-year term.
Winship spent most of his presidency working as a senior writer for the Bill Moyers-hosted public TV series “Moyers & Company” and for its website, BillMoyers.com.