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Defector, a worker-owned journalism co-op, almost didn’t exist.
When 19 former Deadspin staffers — who’d resigned in November 2019 after parent company G/O Media told them to “stick to sports” — decided to launch a new website for a worker-owned journalism co-op, “we looked at more traditional forms of funding,” Jasper Wang, 38, vice president of revenue and operations, told me. “We talked to all the venture capitalists in New York media, and we had some offers.”
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 worker-owned journalism co-op 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 worker-owned outlets across the country, covering science and gaming and local news from coast to coast.
Worker-owned journalism co-ops (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. But the surge of digital coops in the United States in recent years — I counted at least 18 that have launched in the last five years — is a sign of the media times: as legacy and early-digital outlets shrink, shutter, get stripped for parts by private equity companies, or are transformed by the whims of billionaire owners, more journalists, tired of trying to find a port in the storm that may only provide a year or two of shelter, are building their own ships.
Read the full article about worker-owned journalism co-ops by Neel Dhanesha at NiemanLab.