Defector Annual Report, September 2024 – August 2025

Published on November 19, 2025

Purpose of this report

Defector celebrated our fifth birthday in September 2025. It is a great honor, and something of a burden, to be publishing a fifth Annual Report. The year-to-year story of our business is one of general stability—an incredible luxury in digital media—with incremental and hard-won improvements. But we can only write “we got slightly better at sending emails” so many times.

One major development over the past year is that we won a grant, with our partners at Start.coop, from the Press Forward coalition of foundations to build shared services and operational infrastructure for emerging independent media companies. We’ve had to think harder about what elements of Defector’s operations are actually replicable and useful as templates for other emerging worker-owned publications. With that lens, we will jump around a bit between specific operational details and more macro reflections of stewarding the business for half a decade through an ever-evolving media environment. 

Given the greater volume of musing and editorializing than usual, at various points in this report we will convert to writing in first-person pronouns to express my (Jasper Wang’s) thoughts. If you find those musings too ponderous, negative, or jargony, blame the MBA on staff for getting too big-brained this year. And let me apologize in the first-person for this report being several weeks later than usual. I alone procrastinated the hell out of this one.

For additional insights about the operations at Defector, go ahead and refer to our annual reports from Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, and Year 4.

Financial summary*

Some thoughts on Year 5 revenues

Our core business of subscription revenue held steady from Year 4 to Year 5. There were plenty of puts and takes over the course of the year, but they all boil down to one thing: It remains tough sledding to convince new people to buy a subscription. Our retention generally held strong (though in the first quarter of 2025 especially, we had to process free subscriptions to many longtime subscribers in government or academic work who lost their jobs or funding), but new subscriber acquisition underperformed relative to projections most months. Thankfully our annual end-of-summer sale did brisk business, with nearly 3,000 people taking us up on a "$5 for your first 3 months" promotion. This was the first time we’ve run a sale with a 90-day trial period rather than a 30-day one (every other annual sale we’ve run was effectively $1 for your first month), so we won’t know the true success of the promotional offering until this cohort of trialers transitions to full-price subscriptions around Thanksgiving. The cancellation rate for that group is at 25 percent right now, and if 75 percent of them do stick around, this promotion will go down as the most successful one in Defector history so far.

Podcast ad revenue continued to grow, both from improved ad sell-through on Normal Gossip as well as monetizing our new podcasts. We had effectively zero revenue from live events in Year 5, as the 2025 Normal Gossip Live tour dates landed in September, and as such the touring revenue will show up on the Year 6 P&L (the 2023 and 2024 tours showed up on the Year 3 and Year 4 P&Ls, respectively). We opened several new revenue streams, with on-site display ads for non-subscribers, consulting projects for other publications, and Apple News+ payments all contributing meaningfully to our revenue base.

We’ve filled the site’s limited ad slots for non-paying readers with a higher percentage of backfilled programmatic ads than we’d ideally have, as direct ad buys have been slow coming. Our ongoing direct sales relationship is no longer exclusive, and we welcome other direct ad sellers into the mix.

The main question for any digital publication’s on-site revenue, whether subscription or advertising, continues to be: Where do you go for distribution? We ruminated at length on this question in last year’s Annual Report, and it remains a difficult one with no silver bullet. Our plan continues to be to try a bunch of stuff on the margins, e.g., sending more targeted emails highlighting blogs of note, spinning up a dedicated newsletter for our non-sports audience, being more active on Bluesky and Flipboard. 

To call out one particular area of interest for us, we are expecting to invest more effort this coming year in a proper Reddit strategy. But given the explicit or implicit rules against self-promotion in many subreddits, we would very much appreciate it if Defector readers active on Reddit might consider sharing a given blog into their preferred subreddits where the topic or headline might connect with the audience. Here’s one example of a post showing up in an unexpected subreddit, given the subject matter:

Some thoughts on Year 5 costs and internal operations

Defector switched our professional employer organization (PEO) to Justworks, and primary health insurer to UHC, in May 2024, which represented a meaningful monthly cost savings over the previous arrangements. A full year on Justworks and an uneventful plan renewal with UHC means we saw decreased year-over-year spend on health insurance and payroll fees for the first time in Defector’s history. Even with the recent YoY dip, our Year 1 to Year 5 per-person health insurance cost still experienced a compound annual growth rate of over 10%.

We have continued to increase our freelance budget and extend the network of people we commission work from. This past year we worked with approximately 150 writers, editors, illustrators, podcast production folks, and crossword constructors, which easily represents a new high-water mark for Defector. Note that while our editors commission all of Hamilton Nolan’s blogs about politics and boxing, over the last five years we have never commissioned (or paid for) any of the blogs in Hamilton’s beloved and befuddling Jaguars Junction series. Barry Petchesky simply wakes up a few Monday mornings a year with a Jaguars Junction submission in his inbox, to do with as he chooses.

Thanks as always to all of our freelance contributors. Below are 10 particularly excellent freelance blogs that generated an outsized number of pageviews or new registrations in the past year:

• Seven Days at the Bin Store by Jen Kinney
• If You Ever Stacked Cups In Gym Class, Blame My Dad by Kit Fox
• Selling Zohran by Corey Atad
• The Tragedy of “Stomp Clap Hey” by Mitch Therieau
• Why Your Team Sucks 2025: Chicago Bears by Mike Tanier
• Why Did National Geographic Disappear Its Own Documentary About A Queer Climate Scientist? By Eva Holland
• Salesforce Is Using A Hallucination To Sell AI by Alan Kluegel
• A Tale Of Two Gooners by Ashwin Rodrigues
• Close Reading Is For Everyone by Dan Sinykin
• Nobody Wants To Talk About John Fetterman And Buzz Bissinger’s Pricey Memoir Project by Alex Shultz

One new organizational initiative implemented in the last year that’s worth highlighting is our Feedback Champions program. In late 2023, our Culture Committee identified an issue via our annual culture survey: The proportion of staffers who agreed with the statement I am comfortable giving constructive feedback to my colleagues was among the lowest of any survey question. One might imagine that a company with limited hierarchy theoretically allows for freer-flowing feedback; in practice, you still need to have processes and structures in place to facilitate that feedback, especially in a fully remote company where DMing “Hey can I call you real quick” to someone you’re not actively working on a project with can feel awkward, if not altogether ominous.

The development and implementation of a new system took time. In the first half of 2024, our Culture Committee worked with our HR partners at Your Other Half to create a training program that everyone went through at our next company-wide meetings. For many people, this represented the first time in their careers that they were asked to practice giving and receiving feedback in a structured way. The Committee then put together the Feedback Champions process. Basically, every editorial pod (the regular groupings of editors and staff writers that work together) is assigned a Feedback Champion, who is charged with collecting, synthesizing, and delivering peer feedback for every member of that pod. The Google Form for providing written (not anonymous) feedback for any staffer is always open, but the formal process happens twice a year, during which the Feedback Champions are expected to interview each person for feedback for their pod-mates, integrate that input with the accumulated written feedback from elsewhere in the organization, and provide a synthesized report back to each person with actionable items to work on over the next six months.

We have been through two Feedback Champion cycles, in late 2024 and mid-2025, and the quality and quantity of feedback, in aggregate, appeared to improve meaningfully from one cycle to the next. There is still a wide range in how much feedback people are providing, and to what extent people are progressing against that feedback, and that’s to be expected. Giving and receiving feedback are individual and organizational muscles that have to be strengthened over time, and we will stay diligent on going to the feedback gym.

The major blessings and minor curses of near-zero employee turnover across five years

Defector had 19 original co-founders, whose names are on the various founding documents. All 19 people continue to work at Defector.

As we’ve grown our staff to 27 people now, this type of organizational stability is a real strength and a source of great pride for the company. We’re all immensely proud that our owner-employees largely find Defector to be an excellent place to work and want to stay here. The job is still a job, with the attendant mundanities and minor frictions, but our staffers feel ownership and literally have ownership in the company, and as such are committed to helping make it better. And one could reasonably argue that there’s not a more stable job in digital media today, which is certainly a market-driven incentive to stay.

Any business with low employee turnover has real advantages over one that does not. Constant recruiting, onboarding, and offboarding of employees requires significant investments of money, time, and effort. Frequently having to navigate new working relationships can be a drag on productivity and leave gaps in institutional knowledge, while working together over many years strengthens relationships and allows for the sense of safety and collaboration that can lead to efficient, creative work. The hard-fought trust and assumed good-faith intentions among longtime colleagues provides a rock-solid foundation to have the challenging conversations that might cause a less stable organization to falter. 

But low turnover, at such an extreme rate, can be a double-edged sword. In a vacuum, our owner-employees would near-unanimously have grander ambitions for Defector: invest in deepening certain coverage areas, diversify the staff to reach a broader and younger audience, bring on full-time design or video staffers. At a different company, you’d have regular opportunities to change the composition and skillsets of the overall employee base as people leave the organization, and you’d be able to make strategic choices in backfilling those roles, or eliminating old roles and opening new ones. 

Meanwhile at Defector, not a single full-time person has left in the last 30 months. As a result, we can change the composition of the staff only through incremental new headcount, which— given that we’ve never taken outside money—fits into the budget only when we believe there’s predictable upcoming revenue growth to pay for it. And each year that passes brings our staff’s collective average age up another year. When we started the company, a big chunk of our staffers were in their 20s, bestowing large portions of our editorial output with the imprimatur of youth, but it turns out that every 28-year-old becomes 33 five years later, like clockwork. While we’ve frequently hired early-career writers in their twenties, our overall average age continues to inch upward, as everyone progresses interminably towards unc status. I also worry that suboptimal processes and bad habits can become more and more entrenched as the exact same working relationships calcify further, though the aforementioned Feedback Champion process is meant as a bulwark against this tendency.

To be clear: This is an incredibly good problem to have. If you had told me in the summer of 2020 that I’d still be working with each of my co-founders 5+ years later, I would’ve cried tears of joy. If you could tell me that I’ll still be working with all of these people in 2030, I’d be thrilled. But such low levels of turnover does constrain how quickly our organization can evolve, for better or for worse, and as a roughly middle-aged executive leading a roughly middle-aged company, I think it’s useful to be clear-eyed and explicitly acknowledge the parameters we’re working within.

Reflections on Defector’s origin story, the ambitions of our shared services project, and the state of worker-owned independent media

Groups of journalists frequently approach Defector for advice on launching their own independent publications, often with a focus on the nuts and bolts of the actual public launch plan. We’re always happy to share the process and components that went into our public announcement, but anytime I recount the details, I always remind them that the business and media environment was very different in 2020. I never want to minimize the courage it took for my co-founders to all quit their jobs at Deadspin together, or the anxiety they had to sit with during the period of uncertainty between quitting their jobs in November 2019 and launching Defector in 2020. But the truth is we had launched under very favorable circumstances:

1. Their mass resignations from Deadspin were a high-visibility national labor story that major newspapers covered, with two U.S. Senators posting statements of support. The broader story was notable and still fresh enough that The New York Times wrote an exclusive piece about Defector’s launch in July 2020 and sent a push notification in their app to it.
2. The CARES Act, passed in March 2020, established the primary pandemic unemployment benefit programs, enhancing my co-founders’ unemployment checks and providing at least some measure of economic relief while we continued figuring out what Defector would look like and who was ultimately willing to take the leap.
3. Americans were broadly at home, with extra discretionary dollars in their bank accounts, spending most of their time online looking for fun things to do and read and, most critically, buy.
4. Patreon and Substack had been around for long enough that many consumers were growing more and more comfortable with directly supporting their preferred media creators through subscription dollars, but we were still some time away from the constant sense of “subscription fatigue.”
5. Implicit in Point 1 but worth calling out separately: My co-founders had all worked at notable websites, at Deadspin and other publications prior, that reached millions of people each month. They wrote and edited dozens of blogs a month, which honed their voices and their craft and allowed them to build their followings, and those followings served as the starting point for the audience for our new website.

No collection of journalists trying to start a new publication today could replicate the above conditions. (How many high-visibility blogging jobs are there left to even quit from?) Starting any new venture is difficult, but the conditions that Defector launched under were practically Easy Mode compared to today’s media environment.

There is one win condition of the Defector story that could be replicated through individual choices: A commitment to acting in the interest of the collective, especially by those writers with a relatively larger following. From the very beginning, we were aligned that each owner-employee would be expected to dedicate at least 75 percent of their professional efforts to Defector. We had set the expectation that nobody should expect a paycheck for at least the first six months (though we did end up paying ourselves much sooner than that), so it seemed unfair to ask people to turn down paid freelance work, but our company would only succeed if readers understood that the bulk of any given writer’s work would appear on Defector.com. In early 2020, Drew Magary and David Roth were offered a meaningful amount of money to start a new podcast for Stitcher; they waited until Defector was off the ground before assigning the contract to the company and starting to record episodes. Kelsey McKinney first articulated the idea of Normal Gossip in a viral tweet in October 2020, and within 24 hours a podcast agent from one of the big talent agencies reached out to offer their services in shopping the concept; Kelsey instead brought Normal Gossip through the internal podcast pilot process at Defector, where it continues to be a critical source of income for the company.

For many years now, star journalists have left their legacy publication jobs to start their own ventures, often as effectively solo projects that can net hundreds of thousands, even up to millions of dollars a year. I am not here to cast negative judgment on such decisions—it’s likely that they were underappreciated and underpaid by their bosses, perhaps they were constrained by the house voice and editorial direction, some of them were forced out, certainly it always takes real courage to start your own thing—but the reality is that only so many writers have the name brand to do so. When a star writer leaves, it weakens the ship they’re abandoning, and we don’t have to sympathize with shareholders and executives to acknowledge that such a departure might weaken the overall endeavor and put the remaining rank-and-file editorial jobs at some greater risk of loss. 

At Defector, I wholeheartedly believe that our overall business could survive if any one of our writers decided tomorrow that they were leaving Defector and going solo. But I am also grateful that no one has done so, that they’ve continued contributing their labor to our shared endeavor each workday, and that they’ve stayed committed to the idealistic principles and unglamorous editorial, operational, and emotional work of making a worker-owned and -operated business function. If one of our staffers does make that choice some day in the future, I will not vilify them. I will know that the average private-sector employee stays in the same job for 3.5 years, that there are natural endpoints for working at any job or with any coworker, that operating within a cooperative structure has unique freedoms and constraints that on balance may not work for someone at every stage of their life or career. And I will marvel that they were able to keep a collectivist mindset for so many years, and hope that their example will inspire other people who might be able to strike out on their own to think of their jobs and projects less as “one for me, and one for them,” and more as “one for me, and one for us.”

How we go about making more for everyone is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about. What infrastructure could be offered to help successful solo newsletter operators transition to operating in a more collectivist way, to make more room on their lifeboats as they leave sinking ships, to create net-positive journalism jobs in the long run? I am not just talking about the 50 people making more than $1 million a year on Substack. I am aware that there are plenty of solo newsletter operators who are just scraping by, who would love to find a way to join forces, share the burden of administrative and marketing pressures, and create something greater than the sum of its parts. What shared services and operating models might allow these solo-preneurs to, I don’t know, access group health insurance, bundle their products, or just feel comfortable enough to go on vacation every once in a while?

Defector’s work with Start.coop, funded by the three-year grant we received from Press Forward a few months ago, will seek to answer some of these questions by developing systems to support emerging independent media companies. We are hoping to build a suite of shared services for cooperatively owned media companies¹, especially local news publications. The services will be provided across three models: self-serve resources (e.g., legal templates, how-to guides), purchasing cooperative (i.e., here are a set of pre-vetted vendors offering preferred rates), and “true” shared services (i.e., come receive the solution from us directly). We are very much in the primary research phase of the work, conducting deep-dive interviews with publications to understand their most pressing needs, connecting with potential service vendors, and interacting with other organizations to make sure we’re partnering effectively and not creating redundancies. Some existing solutions within the worker ownership space can be tweaked to apply to worker-owned journalism; some existing solutions within the journalism support space can be tweaked to apply to journalism that is worker-owned. No need to reinvent any wheels.

This work serves as a natural extension and formalization of the ad hoc advisory and consulting that many of us at Defector have engaged in, as other publications have gotten off the ground. We’re excited and grateful for the opportunity to take on the project and build some operational infrastructure that helps existing worker cooperative newsrooms, and hopefully encourages even more to launch.

With all that said, we don’t want to get too high on our own supply here. Shared ownership is not any manner of magic elixir for rebuilding the journalism industry in the U.S. The industry shed something like 2,700 jobs in 2023; it would take roughly a hundred Defector-sized publications to offset that level of job loss, or roughly a thousand organizations that meet one common definition of a worker cooperative (at least three people being paid by a revenue-generating endeavor, organized with democratic governance). And that would only be to offset the loss of existing jobs, without addressing how these small collectives might be able to hire and train the next generation of young journalists at any level of real scale.² Ultimately, worker ownership is an operating and governance model, not a funding or revenue model.

When Defector staffers speak to journalists interested in starting their own publications, with some frequency we sense that they are naively imagining worker ownership as a panacea to the ills of their previous workplaces, and treating meaningful subscription revenue as a foregone conclusion. But the truth is that launching your own business is hard, and much harder today than it was five years ago.

The fundamental problem with the evolution of journalism’s business model is well-understood, that tech companies have siphoned off and monopolized advertising revenue while finding new and more audacious ways to repurpose journalists’ work. For the segments of the population that understand journalism to be a public good, it’s an unimpeachable truth that we need more outside funding in journalism, whether from the government or foundations or wealthy donors. Hamilton Nolan³ articulated the need for public funding of journalism in this blog last year; while it’s so hard to imagine funding at the federal level, New York and California have made progress on this front, though not without serious and immediate pullback.

I’m grateful to the Press Forward coalition for funding what will hopefully serve as an initial pilot program for broad-based, sustainable shared services for worker-owned media, and doing so with a clear and relatively quick grant application and capital deployment process. But for several years before this joint project received funding, I met with various foundations and other potential funders with deep pockets and a stated desire to foster innovation in their areas of investment. Generally I walked away with the sense that they behaved with too much risk aversion given the portfolio strategy they hoped to execute. An early-stage investment portfolio that isn’t making losing bets with some frequency is not taking enough risk. If you actually hope to deliver innovation, you have to have a real tolerance for failure.

To any independently wealthy people reading this, you might consider putting money into journalism and the arts yourself, not as an investor but as a patron, Medici-style.⁴ I want to give a shout-out to Ruth Ann Harnisch, who I often describe as the fairy godmother of the independent blog scene. Ruth Ann has helped fund a number of special projects in the NYC independent media world, including as the primary patron of the Hell Gate weekly podcast. “Thank you, Ruth Ann” were among the first words out of the new mayor’s mouth at the recent Hell Gate Live recording.⁵ Perhaps you, my wealthy reader, can also check in with your favorite indie journalists and see what interesting projects they’d take on with some extra funding.

A lesser-known problem that nonetheless comes up frequently in my corner of the worker-owned independent media world: We need more operators, people with actual business backgrounds who are excited to enable and support the production of journalism. I’ve long tried to encourage journalists by saying that an effective editor or writer already has a lot of the skills needed to become a good small business owner. I still (mostly) believe that’s true, and some journalists really take to (at least parts of) the business side with gusto. But many others do not take to it naturally, and more to the point, the more time they spend on operations, the less time they spend on reporting, editing, and writing, which is what they’re actually good at and what actually generates the business’ monetizable product.

The specific operators we need are ones who can set aside their impulses towards maximizing salaries and exit values. Every once in a while, someone will reach out to me via email or LinkedIn (easily our most perverted social media app) to ask for a coffee chat. They are uniformly young, smart, well-educated and well-credentialed—consulting analysts, private equity or big law associates, MBA students—looking for advice on, essentially, how to find a job they don’t hate. My first answer, "Get comfortable making a lot less money," never goes over particularly well, even as they describe to me their fear of golden handcuffs. I know this condition of doing the most lucrative available career until I figure out what else I’m going to do is not uncommon—as I looked to hire a Chief of Staff for the shared services project, I reached out to friends working at corporations or professional services firms in New York City and asked, “Do you have any talented analysts who are a little too vocally anticapitalist given the size of the paycheck you’re sending them, who might want to come work with my socialist journalism commune?” To which I received responses ranging from “That’s a lot of them” to “The Mamdani-fication of New York has fully reached [my firm’s] shores.”

So, on one side of the labor market we have a desperate demand for business acumen, and on the other side we have an excess supply of business acumen looking to be applied elsewhere, and the only thing keeping the two sides from meeting is an absolute gaping chasm of salary expectations.⁶ Unless somebody wants to give me another grant to build and pay for Teach for America for Media Operators,⁷ I don’t really have any suggestions on structural solutions. But there are plenty of existing business and operations jobs in journalism that need to be filled, and for the purposes of our shared services project, I expect we will be looking to get significant fractional resources—fractional CFOs⁸, HR directors, bookkeepers, salespeople, and so on—under contract. If you’re a person with relevant business skills and have an existing consulting business, or are looking for a change of pace, or are underemployed for whatever reason and could regularly spare a couple hours, we’d love to have your contact information. You can fill out this form or just email me.

As more worker-owned media collectives emerge, more of them will fail. I state that fact plainly not to discourage journalists from trying, but actually for the opposite reason: to remind all the potential participants in the ecosystem—journalists, prospective funders, potential operators— not to grow discouraged. Pick your favorite hokey aphorism: You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take; It’s better to love and lose than never to love at all; Failure is the mother of success; Fall down seven times, get up eight. Being worker-owned and -operated is not a silver bullet for saving journalism or righting the wrongs of American capitalism, but it is one of many pathways that could use real funding, so we can see how big a part of the solution it could potentially be.

Additional odds and ends, some very serious and most very stupid

• One thing I’ve found to be true as the company has grown is that, past a certain organizational size, there is always someone going through a major life event, joyful or horrible or something in between. We’ve had people get married, have children, battle cancer, end up in the hospital, lose loved ones, and have the roof of their home cave in. There is almost always someone going through something in their life that pulls them away from their professional responsibilities, and an important feature of a worker cooperative—or, at least, our worker cooperative—is the capacity to treat each other as real humans first, rather than cogs to be governed by the immutable law of HR policy (though it’s also critical to have comprehensive HR policies, so you know exactly where you’re making exceptions).
• Speaking of life events that are horrible AND joyful: We’ve got so many people working on books. Two staffers had books published in 2025, and we have many others working on them. We hope you’ll check out as many of these books as you can. (Accomplice-level subscribers, as always, will be sent free early copies.)
• We’re immensely proud that we’ve been able to keep subscription prices steady for going on six years now, even as we’ve considered raising prices at least twice over the years. It’s too early to say if we will raise prices for the first time in 2026, but in any case we take that decision very seriously and understand you should pull that lever seldom and carefully. More revenue but with an inevitably smaller reach is not a tradeoff to be taken lightly.
• I have previously mentioned a guy (sorry to assume gender, but, c’mon) who goes into WNBA blogs not about Caitlin Clark, angrily comments about why the blog doesn’t mention Caitlin Clark, gets banned, and then buys a new subscription. As of this writing, he has spent at least $168 across at least seven distinct, permanently banned subscriptions. (When a commenter gets banned, their comment history disappears, so you won’t find his past comments.) Thanks to this guy for supporting independent media.

• Media reporters who might be reading this: Could you do me two favors? First, when someone makes a claim about how many subscribers they have, please have them clarify if it’s paid subscribers or free email subscribers. Second, stop letting B2C publications assert that their subscription churn rates are close to zero percent. Just credit card failures due to expired cards, insufficient funds, etc., should account for a meaningful amount of involuntary churn (during Defector’s latest annual subscriber cliff in September 2025, we saw an initial credit card failure rate of 4-5%, down from closer to 10% in past years). If someone quotes you a ludicrously low churn rate, they’re either using a denominator that extends far beyond the relevant transaction volume (e.g., calculating based on their total subscriber count rather than the number of subscribers with a renewal decision within that timeframe), or they don’t know how to read their Stripe data. On this topic: Shout out to the New Yorker fact-checker who once doggedly went through our R code to confirm an audience behavior metric I shared, which I regretted sharing once I realized I had to show them how to read R code. (To be clear, the metric was calculated correctly; it’s just difficult to teach someone to read R code, by email.)
• If you run a small business in the greater Northeast corridor and are looking for a cheap place to have a company retreat, might we suggest Atlantic City in the late fall or early winter? It’s reachable by public transit from the Philadelphia train station, and you can get like $59/night hotel rooms on the boardwalk. And with the way global warming is going, there’s a decent enough chance you can still walk on the beach and jump in the water. We also recommend catering lunch from the very affordable White House Subs, where a “half” order could probably feed two people. Dave McKenna took the leftovers back to his room and slowly ate them over the rest of the week, though that’s less an endorsement of the sub shop and more an illuminating fact about Dave.
• On the other hand, an August retreat in Ocean City, Maryland is extremely fun but significantly more expensive and should be saved for big anniversary years. I was not expecting a crab dinner to blow such a hole in the retreat budget. Thanks and apologies to our three co-owners who don’t eat shellfish for tolerating such profligate expenditure.
• Unnamedtemporarysportsblog.com, the temporary website where my co-founders occasionally blogged before Defector, is still up and running, because Tom Ley still manages it. The hosting costs are not a big deal, but Tom has to keep the website’s SSL certificate up to date, and that process nearly drives him insane every year.
• Relatedly, at one point we joked that the permanent website should just be called unnamedpermanentsportsblog.com, so I bought the URL. Eventually we went with the name Defector, and I just redirected unnamedpermanentsportsblog.com to defector.com, and I kept paying for it in case anyone ever discovered the easter egg. But why would anyone discover it? This is like a hundred times more inscrutable than the Arkham Asylum easter egg that nobody ever found.

• The special guest for the Season 9 premiere of Normal Gossip was Malala Yousafzai. We were thrilled to hear from her PR people that she was a fan of the show and wanted to be a guest, but we were surprised to find out that Malala’s team did not yet possess a professional-caliber podcast microphone. After an internal back-and-forth on whether we should mail them the Defector podcasting travel kit with a self-addressed box back to us, we decided to just buy her some new gear. In the future, when you see Malala do a BBC interview with a Shure MV7+ mic just out of frame, remember that Defector underwrote that equipment.

Wrapping up

For several years in a row I’ve said, “I don’t know what to write about in the Annual Report,” and for several years in a row it still ends up being too long. I promise to try to keep future versions under 2,500 words, at least until Defector reaches Year 10. Thanks as always for taking the time to read our Annual Report. If you have useful thoughts for Defector, whether for our ongoing business or the new shared services project, you know how to get in touch with us.

Thank you for your continued support of Defector. See you tomorrow.

Footnotes