"The pandemic changed Defector's course. New York shut down, the economy ground to a halt, and the offers of capital dried up. So the group decided to launch a new website on their own dime, this time structured as a worker-owned cooperative in which the journalists, rather than media executives, made all the decisions. The site became the kind of success that's rare in digital media nowadays, bringing in $3.2 million in revenue from over 40,000 paying subscribers in its first year alone."
"It struck gold a second time in 2022 with the podcast Normal Gossip, which hit 100,000 downloads per episode just six months in and now averages about half a million downloads per episode. And it inspired a wave of worked-owned outlets across the country, covering science and gaming and local news from coast to coast. Worker-owned media cooperatives (which I'm just going to call "coops" for the rest of this story) have existed for a long time; some, like Mexican daily newspaper La Jornada, are decades old."
Nineteen former Deadspin staff explored venture-capital funding but lost offers when the pandemic hit. The group self-funded a new site, organized as a worker-owned cooperative with journalist-led decision making. Defector earned about $3.2 million from over 40,000 paying subscribers in its first year and found additional success with the Normal Gossip podcast, which reached hundreds of thousands of downloads per episode. The Defector model helped inspire at least 18 new digital journalist-owned cooperatives in recent years. The surge of coops responds to shrinking legacy outlets, private-equity disruption, and unstable billionaire ownership, prompting journalists to build independent outlets.
Read at Nieman Lab
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