Journalism coops seem utopian. What’s it like working in one?

Defector 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, “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 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 worker-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. 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.

To some of those tired, overworked journalists, coops may look almost utopian — promising the agency and creative freedom you get from a personal newsletter, but with added structure and, in some cases, editors, salaries, and health insurance. And they give journalists a say in the future of their company.

But how does the promise play out in practice? What is the everyday experience of working at a journalism coop like — and how does that change depending on size, scope, and location?

To find out, I talked to worker-owners at six coops across the country. In the same way that it isn’t fair to compare the experience of working for The New York Times to the experience of working at a small local newspaper, Defector is unusual in its size, reach, and financial stability. What worked there would not necessarily work at other places, as they readily admitted in their fifth annual report (“Starting any new venture is difficult, but the conditions that Defector launched under were practically Easy Mode compared to today’s media environment.”)

“Being worker-owned and -operated is not a silver bullet for saving journalism or righting the wrongs of American capitalism,” Wang wrote on the site’s fifth anniversary, “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.”

Riley MacLeod, 44, a worker-owner at gaming site Aftermath, told me that he and his four colleagues, all of whom worked together at Kotaku (another former G/O Media brand) have more freedom as a coop. “I think our journalism is more honest,” he told me. “We’re more able to say what we want to say.”

At the same time, he said, the day-to-day isn’t always as rosy as one might envision.

“One of the challenges of this space is that you have this vision of your perfect job: Finally, you’re out of the thumb of the traffic-obsessed boss, and you can do your big investigations,” MacLeod said. “But the reality is that now you have all these other jobs that [other] people used to do, and now you have to do them too.”

Decisions, decisions

Before Hell Gate, the worker-owned news outlet about New York City, launched in 2022, its five founding members were “some combination of freshly unemployed and chronically underemployed,” said Nick Pinto, 47, one of those founding members and a current reporter and co-owner at the publication. He had been a staff writer at The Village Voice, which was bought and shuttered three years later by the billionaire Peter Barbey, and many of his colleagues had worked at publications like Gothamist, the nonprofit local news site that had been acquired by WNYC in 2018.

“A recurring theme in our conversations throughout that period was, ‘How fucking hard can it be to just make the news?’” he told me. “We had seen the ugly side of billionaire ownership, and of six layers of nonprofit management sitting on top of the newsroom.”

But that doesn’t mean they can just blow up all of the traditional structures of a media company. “The speed of action required by a newsroom does not favor an extremely horizontal decision-making process,” Pinto said. Partly on the advice of Defector’s Wang and editor-in-chief Tom Ley, Hell Gate decided to retain some of the usual newsroom structures, particularly the split between editors and reporters. It designated two of its seven editorial staffers as editors who direct traffic and have the sort of authority that an editor in a conventional newsroom would have (they also make more money).

Defector, with its 27-person staff, breaks its editors and writers into pods of three or four, and the pods each have pitch and edit processes (as do Defector’s podcasts). Staff are paid a base salary of $70,000 annually, with higher target salaries paid out quarterly from profits. Those target salaries are shifting; while there was originally a salary gap between writers and editors, the Defector staff voted to equalize target salaries over time so that writers didn’t have to become editors in order to get a raise. (Wang and Ley, given their leadership positions, will continue to be paid a higher salary, and podcast hosts benefit from a profit-sharing agreement on their shows’ ad sales.)

None of the four worker-owners at Sequencer, a science publication, work there full-time; they either have day jobs or primarily freelance. “If you think of us as four Venn diagrams,” said Maddie Bender, one of the cofounders, “Sequencer is that overlap right in the middle where we can get back to our roots and do stuff that don’t fit with our day jobs.” They take turns writing and editing each other’s work for both the website and the weekly newsletter — something they used to do for each other at the now-shuttered digital publication Massive Science, where they met. Aftermath also has no dedicated editors, though MacLeod, who was the managing editor at Kotaku, said he’s somewhat accidentally fallen into a similar role at Aftermath. (He described this as “a little bit of a bummer.”)

In addition to the day-to-day editorial work, everyone working at a coop plays some part in deciding the future of their publication. When Coyote, a local news coop in San Francisco, launched last fall, “I didn’t take seriously enough the task of deciding how to decide,” said founding member Soleil Ho, 39. The Coyote team decided any decision that impacts every team member’s work will require a supermajority to agree to it. Other decisions may be decided by a simple majority.

Range, a coop in Spokane, Washington, is part of a parent cooperative called the Spokane Workers Coop, which also includes a bakery and a branding and design studio — each of which are cooperatives themselves. Day-to-day editorial decisions remain in the hands of Range’s five-person team, but an oversight board is responsible for decisions that would affect every business in the parent coop, such as acquiring another business or applying for large loans.

“We want to devolve power to the people who are closest to the problem and its potential solution,” said Luke Baumgarten, 45, founder and publisher of Range and one of the members of the Spokane Workers Coop’s oversight board. “We try to do our best to treat the folks on those teams as experts and let them cook.”

At Defector, every staff member serves on a committee — dedicated to company culture, revenue, or events, for example — that meets regularly. (The managerial board has two permanent seats for Ley and Wang, while three rotating seats are filled by election.) Especially big decisions, like firing a staff member or the company taking on a loan greater than $50,000, are subject to an all-staff vote that requires a two-thirds majority to pass.

This does, however, mean that an already-busy journalist might end up having a lot more meetings on their calendar if they work at a coop. “Running an organization is a lot of work, especially if you have any level of commitment to horizontal governance,” Pinto said. “All of the clichés about movement organizing are true. What does it mean to herd a bunch of cats into all running the same direction? There are only so many models of that. And they all involve a lot of meetings. We spend a lot of time doing that stuff, and that’s time that we could be spending doing journalism. So that is one of the tradeoffs of worker ownership.”

Giving workers decision-making power changes the kinds of pressure bearing down on an editor-in-chief, Ley said. At publications like Deadspin, Ley got pressure from all kinds of people outside the editorial department — ad executives, sales departments, CEOs, board members — whose primary motivation was, in essence, to make traffic numbers go up. Ley would then have to translate those demands to his staff, even if he didn’t agree with them.

“The application of pressure is somewhat reversed now,” Ley, 37, told me. “Here, I’m only responsible to the staff. I don’t worry about what someone above me thinks about my job performance; I only worry about what everyone around me thinks. What I’m communicating to them [about editorial priorities] is just a reaction to the things I’m hearing from them, which is nice because it maintains that coop spirit. They know it’s not bullshit that I’m trying to repackage.”

If Ley’s colleagues think he’s doing a really terrible job, they can call a vote to replace him or Wang. The flip side of that kind of agency and lack of management pressure, Ley pointed out, is that it means the team as a whole has to be more self-motivated for the business to succeed.

“It’s not for everyone,” Rachelle Hampton, 29, the current host of Defector’s Normal Gossip, told me. “I’m a process-ass bitch. I love structure. If I was less self-directed, I’d probably be freaking out.”

Humans and their relations

Even if you’re not freaking out, there are a lot of feelings involved. “This is the most fun I’ve had in a newsroom,” Jessy Edwards, 36, a worker-owner at Hell Gate, told me. But she was also, she told me from a couch where two cats snuggled against her, “fucking tired” after having stayed up late the night before we talked to report on a community meeting, waking up early to write about the meeting for Hell Gate’s morning newsletter, and then reporting another story before logging onto our call. “Running your own news company while also being a reporter for it is no joke. It’s a bit like being in a band; there are all these personalities, and because we’re so small and we all have a vote, it’s important that we get along for the health of the company.”

Coyote’s Ho made a similar point: “Very few of us have worked together before, and we’re all remote, so there’s so much potential for misinterpretation and conflict.” Coyote has looked to sites like Rad HR, an online compendium of HR policies targeted for socially-aware businesses and cooperatives — like a guide on how to create a system for keeping track of how work is going. They also talked to the Rainbow Grocery Cooperative, which helped Ho and their colleagues come up with a process for big project proposals: “get the easy stuff out of the way first so folks can have a win to celebrate, then move onto the stuff where consensus might be tougher to reach.”

“I am constantly trying to minimize the aggregate amount of disgruntledness at the company,” Wang told me. “Being a worker cooperative does not remove the daily mundanities and annoyances of having to work and know other people. As with any workplace or family or other common grouping of people, you’re just trying to keep the collective annoyance at a manageable level.”

Defector has had very little turnover; just two people have left, for jobs at ESPN and the Washington Post, and all the members of the founding team still work there. The company is large enough that it has an external HR partner on retainer to help navigate particularly thorny issues. If an issue cannot be resolved quickly and easily, staff members who are trained as mediators are brought in to facilitate conversations between the affected parties. The hope is that this type of mediated conversation will lead to a solution that works for everyone, without any lingering feelings of hurt or resentment. New trainings are offered every year or two, so more and more staff members are being equipped with tools to help their peers resolve disagreements.

Historically, a major source of consternation at Defector has been that its worker-owners are anxious for feedback, in part because some worry about whether they’re pulling their weight. “In my first year, I had a lot of anxiety because I felt like I wasn’t producing enough and wasn’t being a good co-owner,” said Sabrina Imbler, 31, a science writer who came to Defector in 2022 after a fellowship on The New York Times’ science desk. (Disclosure: I’m friends with Imbler.) Imbler wasn’t the only one: Many of the former Deadspin staffers had been subjected to punishing quotas at that publication, and while none of them missed the quotas they still found themselves looking for a healthy system of accountability.

So last year, Defector started experimenting with “feedback champions” — people who talk to each member of an editorial pod to collect feedback and then present it to each team member in a one-on-one meeting. The system was Wang’s suggestion, and the idea came not from the world of coops but from Bain & Company, where he previously worked. Imbler, who is on Defector’s culture committee, says being a feedback champion is now the biggest part of their committee responsibilities, “because it is functionally like being HR.”

Even if some days are tiring, Edwards told me, she doesn’t feel the sort of existential tiredness she felt when working at traditional news outlets, where she constantly feared that an edict from the top could kill a story she had worked on for months. “I may not agree with everyone on every decision,” she said, “but I do trust them to do the right thing. I trust their moral compasses.”

Money talks

A couple of years ago, the staff of Range received $5 in the mail, slipped into an envelope without a note. Soon, it happened again.

Valerie Osier, Range’s managing editor, dug around and found that the money had come from a Range reader who had previously been unhoused but found a place to live after reading a Range guide to state resources. She couldn’t afford a monthly or yearly contribution, she said, but she could throw money in an envelope when she had a little extra.

“It kind of knocked me flat when we found out,” Baumgarten told me. “It was a really emotional moment.”

Range is a nonprofit with a voluntary contribution model, and it has encountered bumps. Last summer, Baumgarten wrote on LinkedIn about having to lay himself off, though that move was temporary — a grant Range secured late in 2025 enabled him to come back full time. The grant will also allow Range to hire a Spanish-language reporter and a person dedicated to business operations.

There are a few other bumps in the road ahead. Range, and the Spokane Workers Coop more broadly, had to cut traditional health insurance last year, opting instead for a healthcare cooperative that provides good coverage for preventive care. “I actually think it’s going to be a lot better for us than the traditional health plan would be, but that’s all vibes right now,” Baumgarten said. “Ask me again next year.”

Defector has been profitable from its earliest days; it made $3.2 million in its first year of existence, which equated to $200,000 in profit, and $4.2 million/$100,000 profit in its fifth (that difference in profit margins is mostly explained by a larger staff with longer tenures and higher salaries, according to Wang’s note accompanying the fifth annual report; he told me that the site’s profit margins are “ultimately just what cash we decide to leave in the company, rather than a reflection of the business’s performance.”). The vast majority — $3.8 million in 2024-25 — of that revenue comes from subscriptions, with the rest coming from a combination of podcast advertising, events, sales of merch and raffles, site sponsorships, and streaming. Defector is also beginning to experiment with ads, which are now being shown to non-subscribers who come to the site, and Wang expects ad revenue to grow more meaningfully than subscriptions in the next year.

Pinto acknowledged that while the vision at Hell Gate has always been to be primarily, if not exclusively, subscriber-funded — in part because of a “profound mistrust of the consistency of philanthropic interest” — the company has received support from a number of [philanthropic] donors that has helped them reach “something closer to a break-even point.”

While Hell Gate’s 2025 annual report doesn’t provide the same sort of detailed breakdown as Defector’s, it brought in “nearly $70,000” in monthly recurring revenue as of September, while it cost an average of $81,000 per month to run the newsroom (monthly recurring revenue fluctuates with subscriber numbers, and Hell Gate made less than $70,000 some months). The Hell Gate staff is mostly full-time, and Hell Gate fully funds their health insurance premiums; those costs, along with staff salaries makes up the majority of their expenses. Pinto told me that the outlet was profitable in 2025.

Hell Gate also sold about $20,000 in ads in the last year, mostly for local businesses like a cleaning service where workers are compensated fairly and an off-Broadway play. “The big-dollar ‘Uber is good, actually’ advertising campaigns are not knocking on our door,” the staff wrote in the report, “and, being principled business idiots, we’d probably turn them down if they were.”

“It’s different from operating in an office where the ad sales team is off at the other end of the building doing ad sales,” Pinto told me. “We have to get together before we sell an ad and ask how we feel about selling that ad; are they aligned with what we’re doing? Everything takes up a little bit of bandwidth.”

While the staff at Defector, Hell Gate, and Range are employed full-time, that still remains somewhat rare in the coop world. A couple of years in, most of the worker-owners at Aftermath have side gigs that help make ends meet; in November, Aftermath hit 4,900 subscribers, allowing them to bring on a new regular contributor, but they remain 100 subscribers away from the 5,000 subscriber goal that, according to their publicly listed subscriber goals, would allow “most” of the staff to go full-time, “with the caveat that budgets and business structures are complicated, and we’re still figuring out all the costs that go into receiving livable pay from a business.”

“It’s really hard, but I try to remind myself that people start small businesses every day. So it’s not something we can’t figure out how to do,” MacLeod said. To teach himself business skills like bookkeeping, he’s turned to resources like New York State’s Small Business Development Center. (“I’m really getting to see my tax dollars at work,” he said. “That place rules.”)

Sequencer uses its revenue from subscriptions to pay its writers and freelancers for any stories they write and to fund a mentorship program for budding science writers. But more than a year in, the primary thing it provides its staff with is an outlet that allows for complete creative freedom. (The writing that comes out of that freedom has been recognized, as well: an essay about training color vision written by Sequencer co-founder Max Levy was included in the 2025 edition of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. He had originally pitched that story elsewhere, but the pitch was rejected.)

“To talk about only the finances completely discounts the satisfaction that I get from working with my three cofounders,” Sequencer’s Bender told me. “We’re doing this not to make money, necessarily. There are times when I really struggle in my day job, or while seeing what’s happening to science at large, and the Sequencer team are the people that I come back to…I do think there’s a case to be made for reassessing what a dream job in science journalism looks like.” Science reporting positions have been disappearing at publications big and small, and the ones that are left might not be the most creatively fulfilling. Instead, Bender said, while a day job could provide stability, “maybe [something like Sequencer] is how you can harness your joy.”

The coop structure allows worker-owners to “manage your money with your values,” MacLeod told me. The Aftermath team once received an email from a college student asking them not to publish anything “weird or horny” until a certain time or date, so that the student could prove to their professor that it was a reputable publication. The team complied; MacLeod even followed up with the student to make sure that everything went smoothly (it did).

“People are really enthusiastic about this project in a way they weren’t about my previous work,” said Coyote’s Ho, who used to work at the San Francisco Chronicle. “I think I have a much less pained relationship with my readers now.”

The reader relationship changes in other ways, too. “I feel like I’m learning a lot about parasocial relationships,” said Edwards, who joined Hell Gate in March 2025. “I get recognized because of the [Hell Gate] podcast, and people really feel like they know us…I actually think it’s our weirdness, and our individual quirks, that actually make this thing work as well as it does.”

Co-op audiences tend to be both enthusiastic and forgiving; it’s as if the journalists and readers are part of the same large circle of friends and acquaintances rather than people engaged in what is, at the end of the day, a financial transaction.

The flip side, however, is that the publications are more attuned to audience opinions. “Hell Gate sort of started as a vessel for the interests of its founding members,” Pinto said. “So every time we contemplate any kind of editorial expansion” — like the podcast or a livestream, like the ones the staff did for New York’s mayoral primary and election on the urging of writer Max Rivlin-Nadler — “we go ‘we’re an ice cream stand. We’ve always sold ice cream. Do our readers even want anything else?’”

Imbler had a similar concern when they joined Defector. Most of Defector’s paying audience used to read Deadspin, and their primary interests were sports and politics. Imbler, however, covers science, and particularly animals. “It was kind of a learning curve to suddenly be writing for people who didn’t opt in, like, how about this story on frogs?”

When Hampton took over as the host of Normal Gossip, both she and McKinney were nervous about how the audience would react — especially because Hampton was the first Black woman to join Defector’s staff. But, Hampton said, they embraced her. “I try not to check Reddit for my mental health,” she said, “but even the Reddit girlies were really sweet.”

What comes next

In July, Defector announced that it had won a grant from Press Forward, the national funding coalition that my colleague Sophie Culpepper has written a bunch about. In coordination with Start.coop, a nonprofit coop accelerator, they’ll use that grant to build shared services — everything from self-service resources to bookkeepers whose time is split among multiple publications — for independent newsrooms. Wang, who spearheaded the grant application, also hopes to create a purchasing coop to negotiate reduced prices on goods and services — anything from website and platform fees to healthcare and office spaces.

“It feels like a good time to do something like that,” Ho said. “A lot of folks have really struggled to get us all collectively to this point…I am hoping this gets easier and more replicable and helps upend the corporate takeover of journalism in this country.”

In the early days of Defector, Hampton said, “I think some of the resistance to structure was because of how over-corporatized Deadspin got towards the end. And so for the first few years, they were like, ‘fuck that, we are gonna make this successful company, and we’re not gonna have any of those rules.’ They stuck it to the man, but that man is no longer here. Now that we’re in a different space, how do we not only sustain this but make it grow?”

“Gawker Media had its issues,” Ley said, “but I guess my dream would be something recreating that sort of spirit. If I woke up tomorrow and the Defector subscriber base had doubled, I would be like, ‘Oh, this is awesome. Should we start another website under the Defector Media umbrella?”

For now, however, the Defector team is mostly focused on doing what it knows. They launched two new podcasts, Try Hard and Only If You Get Caught, last fall, and acquired a third, Nothing But Respect, last summer. Imbler says they are also working on writing more “growth blogs” — the kinds of things that might draw in readers who don’t otherwise read Defector on the regular.

Range, which has seen some success with TikTok and Instagram Reels, plans to lean into those platforms, as well as putting on more in-person events — which Defector and Hell Gate also plan to do. Coyote, meanwhile, is planning to launch a classified section called Meet Cute Market later this year. Hell Gate in particular has a big year ahead: a grant from longtime media donor Ruth Ann Harnisch will cover two years of rent for a podcast studio and office space, which they intend to use for more livestreams and podcasts, and they also plan to expand their team.

In the end, what the media cooperatives are building may not look — to the average reader, at least — very different from all the publications that came before, and in many ways that is the entire point. The difference is in what practically every worker I spoke to mentioned: a workplace that puts its workers over profits. At the end of January, for example, Ley wrote a short obituary for his colleague Dan McQuade, who had been diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2024. For the rest of the week, the home page was filled primarily with McQuade’s writing, some of which had been written years before. It was the kind of editorial decision that probably wouldn’t have flown at a more traditional outlet, which would otherwise have been subjected to the pressures of the news cycle. But that was what the workers at Defector wanted to do with their website, and so that was what they did.

“Hell Gate was born of a reaction to institutions that did not serve us or, we believed, our readers,” Pinto said. “To the extent that we are anti-institutional, we are trying to build an institution that can house that feeling in a lasting way. And that’s just a different kind of work.”

“The idea,” he continued, “is that this lives forever. As long as people want to work at Hell Gate, we want there to be a Hell Gate for them to work at.”

This article has been updated to correct details about roles and finances at Hell Gate.