Digital platforms mediating contingent work are continuously expanding in size and encroaching various parts of the labor market. This paper provides a media coverage analysis of this kind of work, also known under several monikers such as the gig economy, the sharing economy, platform economy, collaborative consumption, and ondemand economy. We analyzed 160 news articles from various online and print news media from 2014-2020 to gain insight on the debate around the phenomenon and which issues remain inconspicuous from a safety perspective. The presentation of the empirical results is followed by a discussion of factors that can potentially impact safety and the working conditions of workers in the gig economy.