On Tuesday, November 7, a handful of former staffers from the gaming culture site Kotaku announced that they were forming a similarly themed, worker-owned website called Aftermath. A few days later, G/O Media announced that it was shuttering Kotaku’s sister site, Jezebel, the trailblazing feminist blog that has been around since 2007, an eternity in internet years.
Sadly, this counts as a normal week for digital media these days—although the problems and solutions are seldom illustrated with such on-the-nose proximity.
Sunnier news arrived this past week when worker-owned sports-and-all website Defector released its third annual financial report. For the uninitiated, Defector is the brightly plumed phoenix that rose from the ashes of Deadspin in 2020, following a cinematic mass resignation protesting the mandate from its corporate overlords—also G/O—to “stick to sports.” This most recent report further cements Defector’s status as the gleaming gold standard of worker-owned media, with annual revenue rising from $3.8 million last year to $4.5 million in 2023.
It’s a big flex in a year that has seen displays of worker power across all industries, and it’s proof that sustained success is possible for newcomers like Aftermath.
While not every media collective may be destined to thrive using Defector’s subscription-based model, it’s become an increasingly attractive option for fed-up writers and editors.
For Joseph Cox, formerly of Vice’s tech vertical Motherboard, the breaking point came over the summer, when Vice was acquired out of bankruptcy. As he found himself unable to access U.S. court system database PACER because Vice had fallen behind on its bills, Cox discovered in public bankruptcy records that the company’s execs had recently received lavish bonuses. It was a typical result of a media landscape where legacy sites like BuzzFeed News disappear entirely, once-flush empires like Vice go bust, and seemingly every outlet announces layoffs—with the executives in charge of big-picture decisions facing scant financial consequences.
“That was the crystallizing moment for me,” Cox says. “I was astounded and angry and rather than tweeting any more about it, I pivoted that emotion into creating a new media company.”
Alongside fellow Motherboard reporters Samantha Cole and Emanuel Maiberg, and editor-in-chief Jason Koebler, Cox launched 404 Media in August. The new website offers the same first-in-class reporting on AI, hacking, digital privacy, and right-to-repair—only without being at the mercy of private equity, VC growth imperatives, or even executives.
Instead, the 404 crew bootstrapped a spartan setup consisting of a Stripe account and the Ghost web-hosting platform, and otherwise followed the Defector template of subsisting mostly on subscriptions. (404 offers two paid tiers, from $100 annually to $1,000 a year for superfans.)
Just two and a half months in, Cox is already confident about the future. “We are at the point of sustainability now,” he says. “This website is not turning off tomorrow. We can absolutely keep this going, and it grows every day, and we want it to grow responsibly.”
404 Media and even newer sites like Aftermath join a growing number of thriving cooperative shops across the U.S. Beyond Defector, there’s the Colorado Sun, which emerged in 2018 from the remains of a downsized Denver Post; Discourse, the Substack-hosted blog built in 2020 by the progressive pot-stirrers of the defunct Splinter; Twin Cities-centric The Racket, forged in 2021 by former editors of Minnesota’s much-mourned alt-metro CityPages; and the New York investigators at Hell Gate, which launched in 2022 without the built-in audience of a prior brand, and has been growing by an average of 10% month over month ever since.
As more subscription-based cooperatives find their footing, the question is no longer whether this model can work, but at which scale. Beyond the more prominent publications, and amid ongoing turmoil within the industry, even-scrappier upstarts are giving it a shot.
“We’ve lived through enough rounds of layoffs, billionaires, and union-busting that we know the answer isn’t someone else owning it,” says Tim Donnelly, who soft-launched the service-y, local-focused New York Groove with a few friends this summer. “It has to be us owning it.”
Not long ago, getting laid off from a digital media job was essentially a rite of passage. The newly unemployed journalist simply refreshed their LinkedIn page, calculated how much boxed mac-and-cheese their severance could cover, spent several months networking and freelancing, and eventually wound up in one of the many available newsrooms quietly hiring.
Getting laid off from digital media in late 2023, however, is a career-existential predicament. The decline of once-prosperous, investor-backed giants, alongside a throttled economy in general, has diminished any guarantee that another media job lies somewhere beyond the horizon. Options for laid-off journalists are now mostly limited to lighting a prayer candle, exploring grad schools, and launching a newsletter. (But only if they’ve already built up a loyal following or have a uniquely brilliant idea, and even then: best of luck!)
In many ways, the situation is reflective of a broader set of poor working conditions and instability across the economy, extending even to such sectors as tech, which were long thought to be downturn-proof.
“The American people are sick and tired of corporate greed, of record-breaking profits, outrageous compensation packages for CEOs while workers in many cases are earning starvation wages,” Senator Bernie Sanders said during a hearing on union labor on November 14. “That dynamic has got to change, and I think we’ve seen real, real progress in the last year.”
Although Sanders is, of course, referring to recent major union wins at monolithic companies like Amazon and Starbucks, along with striking auto and airline workers, he is also referring to the Writers and Screen Actors guilds, which both won highly publicized labor battles this year. Until recently, writers and actors fighting for fair pay and better working conditions might have been dismissed by some observers as the epitome of first-world problems. After the Summer of Strikes, however, in which every level of labor struggle increased in visibility and explication, it’s gotten easier to see how each of these jobs factors holistically into the bigger labor picture.
“When you see unions and organizing in general talked about by people who don’t like that it’s happening, they try to find ways to slice as narrowly as possible the idea of who should have a union or what type of work benefits from having a union,” says David Roth, a writer and co-owner of Defector. “But it’s never the job that you have and it’s always, like, ‘If you wear a hard hat at work or work on an assembly line,’ when the idea clearly works in any workplace.”
Now that about one in six U.S. journalists at news outlets are part of a union, and many of them still have to worry about potentially being replaced by AI or getting laid off on a whim, the subscriber model is beginning to seem like the next evolution of worker power in media.
The most obvious benefit for worker-owners—beyond doing away with the growth-at-all-costs mentality of VC-funded companies—is total freedom to operate in any way the team sees fit.
“We can just experiment all the time,” says Cox about 404 Media. “If we want to shake up the formula of the podcast, we can just do that. If we want to try a new format in an article or add behind-the-scenes content, we can. If Emanuel [Maiberg] says he needs to focus on an investigation about Labcorp for two months, we can make a decision as owners and journalists to balance out both of those interests.”
Going the subscriber-based route, for 404 Media, was not just a monetary decision, but one made in the interest of editorial freedom. If the site were to use programmatic advertising, which relies on algorithmic tools for media buys, they might be unable to run ads on features about explicit subject matter like deepfake porn and AI. Although Cox and his cohort are in discussions with a select set of potential advertisers, they plan on keeping subscriptions as their primary revenue stream, with ads and intellectual property sales in a more supplemental role.
Meanwhile, the ad-free Defector—like 404, it has subscription tiers, of $79, $119, and $1,000 a year—has stretched the boundaries of editorial freedom and what it means to not stick to sports. Beyond its incisive political coverage and cultural commentary, the breadth of its sprawling scope recalls the gonzo spirit of the Blog Era, when sites like The Awl delivered well-edited weirdness and silly detours every day, alongside the more expected content. Between the obvious joy that Defector’s writers take in their lack of limitations and their drive to satisfy voluminous subscriber demand, each day brings forth a frothy mix of game recaps, topical posts, and a bugnuts grab bag of whatever. It’s as though several tonally complementary superstar Substackers banded together to reinvent the magazine.
But editorial freedom doesn’t just mean writers writing whatever they want; it also means writers writing whatever powerful people don’t want them to write.
At a VC-funded or wholly ad-supported news startup, writers might find their values at odds with lucrative sponsorships. They might also find themselves beholden by the need to preserve access or stay inside an extremely wealthy person’s good graces.
Roth claims he experienced some of this censoriousness in his time at Vice, where he helped unionize its editorial staff, although in a lower-stakes way.
“You could be sarcastic about a lot of stuff as a writer at Vice, but if you said something about one of [cofounder and CEO] Shane Smith’s friends, your boss was gonna get a call,” he says. “In some ways, the fatuity of that made it easier to read—that this is just a bunch of guys looking out for each other and making sure nobody gets embarrassed. But when you start doing that at a higher level and it’s British Petroleum that you can’t say anything bad about it, and it’s that boss calling your boss, it sort of lowers the ceiling on what you can do.”
This institutional influence is why author Patrick Lawrence considers independent journalism the only true journalism. In his new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, he describes how mainstream reporters become creatures of the publications they write for. Over time, whatever these writers really think about most topics, Lawrence claims, is susceptible to being repressed by convention or social and professional intimidation.
Meanwhile, the writers at shops like Defector, 404, and Aftermath are repressed by nothing.
Editorial freedom costs a lot more time and effort than most readers might suspect.
The radical transparency of Defector’s annual financial report offers both a blueprint for aspiring worker-owned media companies, and a frank warning about how much toil and business savvy are required to execute successfully. If the former writers of Jezebel were to launch a cooperative called Succubus next month, they could read the report and learn how to monetize a Twitch channel, use a win-back campaign to combat churn, and mount a sold-out, eight-city tour of their hypothetical runaway-hit podcast. As the report makes unmistakably clear, though, nothing about launching and maintaining an apex media cooperative is as easy as Defector makes it look.
“The hardest part is the strictly worker-owned aspect of it—how to be a website in every other way beyond getting posts up,” Roth says.
“If any journalist is going to do this, they have to be prepared to do it properly,” says Cox. “It’s a lot of backend problems, figuring out tax stuff, and also things like trying to get on Google News, which is this black-box algorithm that’s really hard to crack.”
The question remains, however, whether the worker-owners who manage to get past the initial hurdles will be able to run the Defector playbook into long-term self-sufficiency.
For some of them, the answer may be irrelevant.
“I would rather be struggling doing this than working for anyone else,” says Donnelly.
As more writers and editors either branch off from brand-name publications or start from scratch, the more the actual best practices of this process will become apparent, beyond whatever sorcery is working for Defector. This year’s financial report mentions that the publication will keep putting out annual reports “until the structures and dynamics of a business like ours (i.e., a subscription-first, worker-owned and operated media company) feel so conventional as to be boring to our subscribers, interested media parties, and ourselves.”
From the looks of it, they might not have to wait much longer.
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