When staff at the Long Beach Post and Long Beach Business Journal decided to unionize in March, they were almost immediately hit with layoffs.
The paper’s parent company, a nonprofit called the Long Beach Journalism Initiative, laid off nine of the 14 staff involved with the union drive just four days after their unionization attempt. Undeterred, those nine workers — along with three others who had gone on strike in protest — decided to start their own publication: a worker-owned cooperative called the Long Beach Watchdog.
“We wanted to build this as a place that respected workers, respected the labor that they do, and allowed everyone a seat at the table and a voice in how the business is run,” said Dennis Dean, the Watchdog’s elected CEO and one of its founding members. “I think a big part of the (Long Beach Journalism Initiative’s) downfall was the consolidation of power that took place. … We wanted an organization that was run democratically by the people who were doing the work.”
Similar scenes have played out across the country in recent years as financially beleaguered media companies shed staff and workers chafe under controversial management decisions. Fed up with this instability, some journalists are starting their own outlets, ones in which they are in charge and can reach readers directly.
Defector, a sports and culture site founded in 2020 by former Deadspin employees, is perhaps the most well-known, but many others have followed in its wake. At least six worker-centered outlets launched in 2024 alone.
Employee ownership is not a new concept in journalism. In the 20th century, a number of newspapers including The Hartford Courant, The Cincinnati Enquirer and the Chicago Tribune were fully or partially employee-owned, according to Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. By the digital age, however, most of those outlets were sold and landed under a different form of ownership or shut down as the news industry grappled with challenges brought about by the rise of the internet.
Schneider said the current wave of interest in worker ownership is likely driven by a desire to connect with news consumers. Worker-owned outlets can pitch themselves to their audiences as an organization that cares about giving them quality journalism, not extracting profits.
“News is an industry that really depends on being mission-driven and being centered on employees or on communities, and anyway you can find to ground news institutions in those communities is appealing for people in that industry,” Schneider said.
Many of the new worker-led outlets have business models that hinge on reader subscriptions for revenue. In their messaging, they talk about delivering quality content to readers, cutting through a media environment dictated by tech algorithms and rife with artificial intelligence-generated content. Feminist outlet The Flytrap, for example, launched on Election Day with the promise to go “against the algorithm.” The team at pop culture site Pop Heist, which launched in December, promises “authenticity over algorithms, quirks over clicks.”
“Right now, I’m very adamant against on-site advertising,” said Pop Heist founder Brett White, explaining why his business plan centers on subscriptions. “Just as much as corporate interests and the Google-algorithm-notification-of-everything has ruined pop culture journalism, I think ads have as well.”
The worker-owned outlets of today differ from those of the past in that focus much more on worker governance, Schneider said.
At Hearing Things — which was founded by five former Pitchfork journalists after the outlet underwent layoffs in 2024 — each journalist owns 10% of the company. (The outlet’s backer, Vaughn Millette, owns the other 50%.) Those journalists have complete editorial control, and if the company becomes profitable, they can share in those profits and decide where the money goes to grow the company, said Ryan Dombal, one of the founders.
It is a level of control Dombal never had at Pitchfork, which is owned by global media company Condé Nast.
“Not having to deal with a lot of the bureaucracy that comes along with any big company is a big deal,” Dombal said. “If we decide to do something editorially, it’s just decided amongst us, and if we decide to not do something, it’s decided amongst us.”
For journalists who have spent their entire careers focused on editorial matters, switching to a worker-owned model can mean devoting extra time to learning about the business and completing administrative tasks. Those additional responsibilities require more effort, said Defector editor-in-chief Tom Ley, but they also offer a greater awareness of the company’s status and financial position.
“Here, we all have a really deep understanding of the business and what our plans are and what we’re doing and what’s on the horizon,” Ley said. “It gives me a much greater peace of mind because I know what’s happening with the company, and that’s not something I’ve ever really felt before.”
The major downside of worker-owned models is the lack of access to startup capital. Workers at these outlets aren’t beholden to a rich owner or investor, but they also don’t have the money that comes from such sponsorship.
As a result, most worker-owned outlets start small, unable to sustain full-time salaries for their employees. Defector, which reported a profit of $100,000 on revenues of $4.6 million during its most recent fiscal year, is an outlier among worker-owned outlets.
“Nobody’s gonna get rich,” said Maria Bustillos, the lead editor of Flaming Hydra, a collective of 60 writers that launched January 2024. Each writer contributes at least once a month in exchange for an equal share of subscription revenue. Subscriptions are $3 a month, and Bustillos hopes to soon hit 10,000 subscribers. “If you want to keep it (an outlet) absolute 100% bulletproof, you’re not going to have enough to pay a bunch of salaries at the outset.”
The difficulty of raising money means that anyone interested in starting a worker-owned outlet should try to bring in people with prebuilt audiences, Bustillos advised. At the Hydra, that meant assembling a team of writers who each have significant byline recognition.
Recognizing the challenges that come with fundraising, the founders of The 51st, a local news site in Washington, D.C., opted for a different approach. Instead of creating a worker-owned cooperative, they established a worker self-directed nonprofit. Workers make up the board of the organization, and its nonprofit status allows it to raise money more easily since donations are tax deductible.
“It was an elegant solution to the struggles of fundraising while still really retaining the control over the organization that is really attractive about being a worker-owned publication,” said cofounder Abigail Higgins.
Some of the staff members at The 51st, a worker-led, local news outlet in Washington, D.C. (Courtesy of The 51st)
Like the Long Beach Watchdog, The 51st has union roots. Its founders previously worked for the DCist, a union newsroom that belonged to NPR affiliate WAMU. In February, WAMU shut down the DCist and laid off reporters.
In some ways, the growing interest in worker-led newsrooms can be seen as the next evolution of the labor movement in journalism. Early in the pandemic, newsrooms across the country unionized in droves. Many of them were reacting to the layoffs that hit the industry in the late 2010s and continued into the pandemic.
But even though many workers successfully joined unions and secured contracts, layoffs persisted. More than 90 outlets cut staff last year, and hundreds of union journalists have lost their jobs.
Beyond layoffs, this past year has highlighted the risks of having so much of the media concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy individuals. The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times made headlines during the election season when their billionaire owners, Jeff Bezos and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, respectively, pulled presidential endorsements.
“Journalists have also seen the limits of workers’ rights even in a unionized newsroom when corporate executives still hold as much control as they do,” said Higgins, who also serves as the first vice president of the National Writers Union. “I think that’s why you see a real interest in and passion about finding new models that can really rebalance the power dynamics in journalism by giving workers more control.”
Some worker-owned outlets have already found success. In addition to Defector, 404 Media — founded in 2023 by four former Motherboard writers after parent company Vice filed for bankruptcy — has reached profitability. Hell Gate, a local outlet that launched in New York City in 2022, announced in its most recent financial report that it had more than doubled its monthly recurring revenue during its second year.
Still, the ownership model is not a cure-all, and these outlets face the same challenges as others in the media industry. Ley said that Defector has started to see subscriptions plateau, and finding new subscribers while retaining existing ones is one of its biggest challenges.
Worker-owned outlets must still run a good business and serve their readers, said Schneider, who advises founders to “put the co-op on the bottom of your about page, not the front of your home page.”
“Whatever your ownership structure is, you still have to delight people with what you do if you want them to invest in you and believe in you and support you.”
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