Reflections On Five Years In Worker-Owned Media

As I finally got to work on writing Defector’s fifth Annual Report, I found myself noodling on some broader thoughts about the worker-owned media landscape. Tom said some sections would work as a standalone blog, and who am I to disagree with Defector’s Editor-in-Chief? You can find the full version of the Year 5 Annual Report here, but below are my reflections on starting a worker-owned media company in 2020 vs. 2025, how Defector is hoping to help, and the limitations and opportunities of the model.

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 scale². 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-style⁴. 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 recording⁵. 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 expectations⁶. Unless somebody wants to give me another grant to build and pay for Teach for America for Media Operators⁷, 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.

Footnotes