The media industry has been in freefall for longer than most of us can remember, but the devastation of late has been happening at warp speed. Workers at newspapers, magazines, and websites across the US are playing a game of musical chairs that is devastating to both their personal livelihoods and the preservation of democracy.
In the last few weeks alone, Vice announced the dissolution of its website and layoffs of hundreds of staff, the Wall Street Journal gutted a raft of positions, the Los Angeles Times slashed more than 100 jobs, Condé Nast laid off employees at Pitchfork, and Sports Illustrated announced it was eliminating nearly all of the positions across its brand.
One Tuesday in late January, as workers at a dozen Condé Nast titles protested against proposed layoffs in a picket line outside the company’s New York headquarters, Maria Bustillos was seated behind her desk in Glasgow, in considerably higher spirits. She was polishing off an email intended for some of the 60 writers who belong to Flaming Hydra, the new media collective she is organizing. Its inaugural issue was a mere week away, and Bustillos had some last-minute housekeeping details – as well as good news to share. Nearly 2,000 individuals had already purchased a subscription for $3 a month or $36 a year.
Whether it’s city politics and video gaming culture you like to read about, or your interests run to music criticism and sports – there’s probably a journalist collective out there seeking your support. Meet the new model on the rise: the publication owned and operated by its worker-members, liberated from the ever contracting and ever soul-crushing world of legacy media. These publications offer contributors a chance to keep doing what they love without the specter of anxiety over sudden layoffs that imbues today’s newsrooms – and to do so with the camaraderie and collaboration of fellow journalists.
The website for Flaming Hydra – “a collective of 60 writers, on fire and hard to kill”, per the tagline – does not feature a masthead in the traditional sense. There is no editor-in-chief or associate publisher, no head of events or vice-president of revenue sales, nor cultural attaché.
Instead, there are dozens of bylines, mostly names that will be familiar to readers of traditional media. There’s the New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake, the international reporter Jonathan Katz, and the former Gawker heavyweight – and current Guardian contributor – Hamilton Nolan, whose ex-employer filed for bankruptcy in 2016 following its legal battle against Hulk Hogan (whose legal fees were covered by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel).
Flaming Hydra exists primarily as an email newsletter. There are two stories a day, and so long as the pieces are 600 words or longer, writers are free to write about pretty much anything that plays to their interests. The investigative journalist David Moore took on the dangers that the electoral college presents to democracy. A recent dispatch from Laurie Woolever, the food writer and former assistant to Anthony Bourdain, covered her Thanksgiving supper of potato chips scavenged from a hotel minibar in Madrid. The Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi came in with a contribution putatively about “stupid things I did in my 30s” that reads like a meditation on the precarity of media. “Christ does it seem like an idiotic thing to do now,” she writes in her post about quitting her advertising job when she was 32. “Not just because of the constant hustle to make ends meet, but because the media industry is becoming an increasingly unsavoury place to be.”
Thanks, in large part, to a gloomy advertising market and the avarice of CEOs and public equity firms, news outlets are struggling to stay in business. Broadcast, print and digital outlets cut 2,681 journalism jobs in 2023, up 48% from 2022, according to a report from the employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. A 2022 study by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism predicted that a third of American newspapers that existed around two decades ago will be out of business by 2025.
“The newspaper industry is collapsing and we’re at a point of no return – and magazines are even worse off,” said Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “The only investors who can see any profit-making potential in the legacy print industry are the hedge funds who want to come in as vulture capitalists and dismantle what’s left and sell off what they can. No one else sees the advantage.”
The billionaires who were buying up media properties in the last decade, such as Jeff Bezos, who has owned the Washington Post since 2013, and Marc Benioff, who bought Time magazine with his wife in 2018, “are starting to feel the sticker shock”, said Pickard.
While the wheels are flying off the old-school industry, Flaming Hydra is just one example of recent experiments to cleave to the co-op model, where creators put their heads and talents together to make a product that puts their expertise to vigorous use, relying largely on subscriptions from loyal readers – not on big-ticket advertising partnerships.
Entering a co-op frees journalists up to follow their passions and publish material that might not be catnip to advertisers. But these experiments are more creatively satisfying than lucrative. “It’s not anyone’s permanent livelihood, though I hope it can be one day,” said Bustillos. “For now it’s an interesting and valuable supplement to other kinds of paying work for these writers, and we’re having a lot of fun with it.”
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Nick Pinto spent the first chapter of his career working at local newspapers in the Boston area. The 45-year-old eventually landed at an alt weekly in Minneapolis, before finding work at New York City’s Village Voice, where he covered topics including policing, courts, immigration and the Occupy Wall Street movement. After two years, Pinto left to explore freelancing opportunities, and he was eventually lured back when a new owner took over: the billionaire media mogul Peter Barbey. “It turned out that the billionaire was not as interested in keeping this thing alive in any sort of meaningful way,” he said. “And so I quit.”
Within weeks, scads of his former colleagues were out of work. A number of Pinto’s friends who were at the Voice as well as Gothamist, a local news site that had recently been acquired by WNYC, began comparing notes. “There was sort of a refrain in our conversations of like, how hard is it just to run a newsroom? We felt like we knew how to run the newsroom, and that we could do it better than these guys who kept fumbling at our expense.”
Eventually they decided to launch Hell Gate, a site focusing on the inner workings of New York City, in 2022. Other co-founders were Chris Robbins, who had been at Gothamist and the Voice; Esther Wang, formerly of Jezebel; and Max Rivlin-Nadler, a fellow Voice alum. “As reporters, we wanted a newsroom where we called the shots,” said Pinto. “We know what we think is newsworthy; we don’t need multiple layers of people second-guessing that.”
The venture started with a staff of five people that has grown to seven. All of Hell Gate’s employees make $60,000 a year – a decent salary by some standards, but hardly enough to live comfortably in New York. “In a more enlightened society we would publicly support some of these cooperatives so they can focus on producing good journalism while also having a sense of wellbeing that comes from a meaningful livelihood,” said Pickard, the journalism professor. “Then they could support a family or take a few weeks off for vacation.”
Hell Gate offers three tiers of monthly subscriptions: friend ($6.99), supporter ($9.99), and believer ($19.99). The site makes about half of its money from donations and the other half from subscriptions.
Hell Gate publishes an average of three stories a day. You’ll find a piece on the Flatbush spot where you’ll find the best curried goat, or an exploration of how Airbnb laws will affect New York City rents. Limited capital and manpower means that the site isn’t covering the basics of the old-school local paper – Hell Gate isn’t going to tell you which subways are out of service – but the publication has plenty else on offer, such as a post on the tiny stretch of Manhattan that abounds with hospitals or its bang-up multimedia package on the vast number of people rubbing elbows with Mayor Eric Adams. “We have to let plenty of things we’d like to write about go, whether it’s turning down a freelancer pitch because we don’t have the editorial bandwidth or budget to manage it, or missing an event or storyline because we don’t have a staff writer available to get to it,” said Pinto.
But the new model doesn’t always mean diminished resources. “For the most part, most of us are making more than we did at Deadspin,” said Tom Ley, part of a cluster of journalists who constituted the exodus of Deadspin – a sport site formerly owned by Gawker Media – with 19 people leaving over clashes with management. “The owners fired one of us and the rest of us quit,” says Ley, who started a subscription-based magazine in 2020 called Defector that covers sports, politics, and pop culture.
Defector now has a staff of 25, and an annual revenue of $4.5m. Employees make a base salary of $70,000. A recent opening for a staff writer position received 700 applications. Eighty-five per cent of Defector’s revenue comes from subscriptions. The bulk of the remaining 15% comes from advertising from its podcast, Normal Gossip.
Defector’s success was recently cited as inspiration by Jason Koebler, who co-founded 404 Media with three other alumnae from Motherboard, Vice’s tech vertical. Six months after launching, 404 media is profitable, he told NiemanLab last month.
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Not all worker-owned collectives are born of crisis. During the recent podcast boom, when audio behemoths were purchasing production companies for hundreds of millions of dollars, Jesse and Theresa Thorn were hesitant to go the same route. So last year the couple decided to sell Maximum Fun, their podcast network, to the workers (employees did not have to dig into their wallets; their costs were covered by a loan).
“It was a way of keeping our values solid and intact,” said Thorn. “I mean, would I like to have a ton of money rather than more money than I ever expected? Yes, but like, it’s not the key thing.” In the new framework, workers elect members of the cooperative to a board and collaborate on investment decisions – so if they’re grumbling about management, they’re grumbling about themselves.
There is little doubt in the CEO and co-owner Bikram Chatterji’s mind as to what would have happened had the Thorns decided to sell to a corporate overlord. “We have a staff of 24. And maybe three or four of those people would have lost their jobs at first, and as we saw with what happened when Spotify bought [the podcasting company] Gimlet, everybody would have lost their jobs eventually,” Chatterji said. “Jesse understands this to be his legacy, and it wouldn’t have survived.”
The shift to a collective model tends to leave journalists wearing more hats than they may be accustomed to. The staff of five at Aftermath, a video game site co-owned by five former Gawker media staffers, look after everything from marketing and payroll to taxes and membership efforts. “We’re still writers, but we’re taking on all this small business apparatus, which is sometimes interesting, and sometimes deeply annoying,” said the site’s co-founder Luke Plunkett, who was at Gawker’s video game website Kotaku for 17 years before quitting over concerns about new ownership.
But Plunkett stresses the enormous upside of the new paradigm. One hundred per cent of Aftermath’s revenue comes from reader subscriptions. When you’re working in traditional media, “you would always be fearing that phone call [with news of layoffs] because that’s something that’s happening entirely outside your control”, he said. “Maybe they didn’t sell enough ads. Maybe they paid someone too much. Maybe there’s a terrible strategy. You can be doing really good work and still get laid off because somebody’s an idiot upstairs. If this goes badly, we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves.”
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These experiments might be turninglemons into lemonade, but will they ever generate enough money to justify all the elbow grease?
Scott Reinardy, a professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, said he has trouble believing a co-op subscriber model will vault revenues to the levels necessary to support journalists. Publishers have relied on the advertiser model since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who even wrote some of the ad copy featured in his publications.
“Autonomy is a huge part of job satisfaction, but autonomy when you don’t have a financial model in place is concerning,” Reinardy said. And he has doubts that the next generation will get on board. “I don’t think my journalism students will adopt this model. They won’t work 60 hours and be paid for 40 … They have a stronger sense of a work-life balance.”
One of Flaming Hydra’s co-owners and contributors, Harry Siegel, concedes that the money from Flaming Hydra is nothing to write home about. Siegel is a lifelong New York City journalist whose career has come to resemble a juggling act of side gigs that will be familiar to many trying to hold on in the industry. He is a senior editor at the non-profit news platform the City, writes a column for the Daily News, co-hosts the podcast FAQ NYC, and contributes to Flaming Hydra. The pay from Flaming Hydra, he says, isn’t the point.
“It’s a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day,” he said. “In the long run we’re all dead, but in the short term we can go out swinging and do some really good work.”
