Yves here. While much of the news is bleak, one bright spot is the rise of small, feisty worker-owned publications. Without the skim of non-employee owners (and no doubt overpaid administrators), these new players can have viable economics.
By Damon Orion, a writer, journalist, musician, artist, and teacher whose work has appeared in Revolver, Guitar World, Spirituality + Health, Classic Rock, and other publications. Read more of his work at DamonOrion.com. Produced by Local Peace Economy
The arrival of COVID-19 in the United States kicked off an ongoing period of job insecurity within the media industry. In April 2020, the New York Times reported that about 37,000 news company employees had been laid off, furloughed, or had their salaries reduced since March of that year.
This instability was still evident in 2024, with media outlets like the Los Angeles Times, the Messenger, and HuffPost undergoing major layoffs and closures.
An October 2024 report from the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, Inc. found that 13,279 media jobs had been cut that year. This included 3,520 cuts in the broadcast, digital, and print news industry—the most since 2020. Companies cited cost-cutting, business closures, and poor market and economic conditions as the main reasons for this downsizing.
According to Andy Challenger, a senior vice president at Challenger, Gray and Christmas. “[T]he news business… [has] changed with ad revenue being captured by Google and Facebook at such a high percentage. Now, artificial intelligence could potentially affect jobs in the news industry as well, particularly for reporting that is based on data, like sports reporting or certain financial reporting,” states a 2024 Columbia Journalism Review article.
Job insecurity has helped spur the rise of worker-owned journalism cooperatives like Flaming Hydra, Aftermath, Racket, and RANGE. Accordingto the Poynter Institute, “[a]t least six worker-centered [news] outlets launched in 2024 alone.”
Emanuel Maiberg is a worker-owner at 404 Media, a “journalist-founded digital media company exploring the ways technology is shaping—and is shaped by—our world.” Before co-founding the company, he was the executive editor at VICE Magazine’s technoscience publication, Motherboard. He and three other former Motherboard employees launched404 Media in August of 2023—three months after VICE filed for bankruptcy.
“We didn’t like how the company was operating at that point, and we decided to make a go of it on our own,” Maiberg says. “Given our experience at VICE and constantly having to advocate for our journalism to businesspeople and advertising people, we wanted a company owned by journalists.”
This journalist-owned business model frees cooperatives like 404 from many restrictions that non-worker-owned media outlets face. For instance, in 2023, a cyberattack shut down several of MGM Resorts International’s services in Las Vegas and other locales. The “unauthorized third party” accessed the personal information of some of the company’s customers.
“What you want to do at that moment is get someone on the ground who can report what is happening from where it is happening,” Maiberg says. “When you’re [working for] a big company like VICE and you want to do something like that, you have to go through several levels of approval [such as] your manager, your manager’s manager, and people in charge of budget, HR, and travel. That slows you down, and a lot of people want to say no because they have different priorities for what the money should be spent on. When you work at a small, worker-owned company, if the story can be better if we send someone there, we can just do it. When [the MGM hack] happened, my colleague Jason got on the plane that day and went to Las Vegas.”
Like 404 Media, Defector is a worker-owned journalism cooperative founded by former staff members of a large media outlet. “Many of us used to work at Deadspin, the sports website at G/O Media (formerly Gizmodo Media Group, and before that Gawker Media),” Defector’s website explains. “In October of 2019, new private equity ownership took over and tried to make us ‘stick to sports’—despite that violating the very spirit of Deadspin—and fired deputy editor Barry Petchesky on the spot. In response, the rest of the editorial staff quit in solidarity.”
When Defector launched in 2020, Editor-in-Chief Tom Ley wrote, “Who ultimately wins when publications start acting less like purpose-driven institutions and more like profit drivers, primarily tasked with achieving exponential scale at any cost? What material good is produced when private equity goons go on cashing their checks while simultaneously slashing payroll throughout their newsrooms? Things have gotten so bad that even publications that get away with defining themselves as anti-establishment are in fact servile to authority in all forms and exist for the sole purpose of turning their readers into a captive source of profit extraction.”
The 2021 paper “Impact of Media Ownership on News Coverage” highlighted how corporate ownership can compromise journalistic integrity, noting that “media conglomerates may place greater emphasis on profits, with media coverage reflecting the financial interests of its owners.” Similarly, a 2025 study published in the International Journal of Communication found “overwhelming evidence that ownership influences journalistic content.”
In January 2025, ScienceBlog.com presented an example of the journalistic bias and homogenization that can occur within non-employee-owned media outlets. A study of almost 290,000 articles about earnings announcements showed that news sources owned by the same companies “often present similar coverage of financial events.” Flora Sun, assistant professor of accounting at Binghamton University’s School of Management, explained, “You might be subscribing to 10 newspapers or online news websites, but the information you’re getting might be pretty similar, and all those sources happen to be owned by a common media company.”
This situation has been exacerbated by the fact that only six corporations control almost all of the media in the United States, according to a 2024 article by Motley Fool.
Rather than relying on corporate funding, outlets like 404 Media and Defector earn revenue from paid reader subscriptions. Many employee-owned media companies also take little or no money from advertisers. For instance, in 2023, Morning Brew reported that Defector got 95 percent of its revenue from subscribers during its first year [2020], and “outside of a few small, DTC brands, the company was focusing on other areas of the business rather than advertising; a year later, Defector said it had ‘largely stopped’ running ads on its site and in its newsletters.”
In 2025, Brett White, the editor-in-chief of the employee-owned entertainment news outlet Pop Heist, told Poynter he was “very adamant against on-site advertising.” He added, “Just as much as corporate interests and the Google algorithm notification of everything has ruined pop culture journalism, I think ads have as well.”
Besides helping journalists avoid pressure from advertisers and corporate overseers, employee ownership can boost job security. According to a 2022 study published by IZA World of Labor, worker-owned companies “have more stability, higher survival rates, and fewer layoffs in recessions.”
This business model has brought financial success for Defector, whose annual report for September 2023 to August 2024 showed a total revenue of $4,600,000. Meanwhile, the Nieman Journalism Lab reported in 2024 that Hell Gate “doubled its subscription revenue in its second year as a worker-owned news outlet.” Hell Gate, which launched in 2022, attributes this “growth to its hard paywall and a website redesign that made subscribing easier.”
Maiberg explains that each member of 404 Media owns an equal percentage of the company. “[When we founded this group,] our theory was that if journalists own the company, journalism leads the business, and we publish good articles, people will want to pay us for them. So far, it’s working.”
As co-owners of the business, 404 Media’s members make all their decisions by consensus. “It’s not like if it’s three against one, we go with the three,” Maiberg notes.
He adds that all the company’s members were active in VICE’s editorial union before starting 404. Rather than taking votes, the union’s 12-person bargaining committee “talked about issues until we arrived at a decision we were all comfortable with.” 404 continues to use that model. “Even if it takes time, I think it’s better to [find] something that everyone feels good about than have one person be sour about a decision they were voted down on.”
This is a fascinating development this and it is sorely needed. The main stream media has discredited themselves so badly over the years that more and more people want places reporting actual news. Not self-appointed gate-keepers who decide among themselves what people can and can’t be allowed to see and are actually proud of this development. We saw how that worked with the Hunter Biden laptop story. Of course the main stream media will not take this lying down and will try to get officials to crack down on them as being a source of unreliable information or some such.
Of course the problem is that the general public have abandoned the big newspapers, not for the internet, but for television and we see this even in our current president who seems to get all of his information from Fox News. It could even be a decline in literacy itself since video explanations of everything are now ubiquitous and alt sites have had to jump on the bandwagon with youtube and rumble.
On the other hand those who care to know what is really going on have never had so many resources for information and we are grateful for sites like this one. But ferreting out the truth of the power centers is now more difficult without a functioning Big Media opposition. An example would be how hard it is to know what is really going on with Trump with alt bloggers offering competing explanations. Alt media are a good thing, but the smoke and mirrors are alive and well.
@Carolinian: I would say the big newspapers abandoned the public first, with consolidation into giant media corps (monopolization) and by deserting any pretense of local news reporting. Another big blow was the almost total loss of classified ad revenue due to Craig’s List in a very short period of time.
I once worked–long ago–for a small alt news weekly that lived off political connections and legal ads. The joke around the small office was “just tell me where I need to go to sell out” and several did eventually find jobs with traditional news.
There is of course original reporting on Substack etc with Hersh allegedly giving us the inisde dope from spook world and Taibbi doing important work on censorship. But I suspect Taibbi gets far more attention from his video talks with Kirn than his Twitter investigation. The Kirn talks are often reporting on reporting and that goes for a lot of Substack such as former NYT guy Berenson.
At any rate the premise of my comment agrees with you. The big newspapers were already in decline before the internet showed up and TV had a lot to do with it.
What you are saying is partially correct and partially otherwise. The correct part is that “ferreting out the truth of the power centers is now more difficult without a functioning Big Media opposition.” That is correct because there is so little of “big media” that’s not owned by the people and institutions they should be investigating. However, “how hard it is to know what is really going on with Trump with alt bloggers offering competing explanations.” is off the mark. “alt bloggers”, especially when they produce source documents, are fracturing all the mirrors so that we can see what’s outside. And as a bonus, paying attention to The Duran, NC, Ethical Skeptic, Dr. Philip McMillan, Greenwald, Covert Action Mag. etc…. give the curious reader something to go on besides the propaganda of the mirror makers. The curious and skeptic reader needs to eschew convenience and read between the lines (of profit driven propaganda).
Well I have been hanging around here for awhile so clearly I agree with you too. But true investigative reporting takes lots of time and resources. I’d say we get more insight from the web on things the MSM now ignore–i.e. foreign reporting.
The difference in scale is mind-boggling. The majors lay off tens of thousands of people and it hardly seems to make a difference in the flow of formulaic “content.” These little outfits employ a few dozen and their output gets your attention.
Conflicts of interest and interests of conflict get sunlight and airing out when biases are acknowledged and even revealed. Worker-owned, citizen and related journalism models would do the world a favor by adopting some kind of ethical policy about disclosures. Call it some variant on the Hippocratic Oath, somehow doing no harm to the reader while telling the whole truth. Beyond my pay grade to figure out the rest.
Yes, I have switched to this model. I support around 30 journalists or journalist owned media with a monthly payment. I’m very happy with this as I trust all these sources. Some might say this silos my info but I haven’t found that to be the case.
Thank you, a silver lining to storm clouds. I was not aware of 404, or Defector, I will visit these now and check them out.
Consortium News (founded by the late Robert Parry) which probably is the largest independent, reader-funded site for serious journalism. https://consortiumnews.com/
Max Blumenthal’s Gray Zone, https://thegrayzone.com/
Ben Norton’s Geopolitical Economy,
and Mint Press News are also great sources. Mint Press is not worker owned and not totally reader-funded though, but they apparently don’t take corporate funding and remain independent. https://www.mintpressnews.com/
When Julian Assange was being persecuted for journalism and publishing embarrassing primary documents (Wikileaks) Consortium was very vocal about supporting him and many worked very hard to expose how he was being abused (some say tortured) at HMP Belmarsh. Contrast that with The Guardian, for example, who published stories based on Wikileaks material, then stabbed Assange in the back and threw him under the bus. That really illustrated the state of affairs in journalism. One of Consorium’s board members, Chris Hedges, likened corporate journalists as “sycophant-stenographers”, a term I have heard Ray McGovern and others use as well.
These outlets (like NC) have been attacked by the corporate/tech monopolies, so they must be doing something to “piss off” the oligarchy eh.
So we can “take the piss” out of the mass media monopolies
Amen to JJ. FWIW I worked during a couple of decades for an employee-owned defense contractor. Looking back I am amazed at how the founders were willing to share to corporate wealth, even as they grew wealthy themselves. (Like a ponzi scheme??)
I’m a subscriber to 404. As a tech guy, I find it informative and an alternative to the fluff and propaganda that is most tech reporting.
Don’t know if Lever news fits this category, but have found it does good reporting too.
I cannot overstate how important these news sites, who actually do real information gathering are. For them to compete in scale to the size and the access these legacy media types had/have, is an amazing achievement. After all, breaking the wall of propaganda as was the case when the grayzone blew the lid off the israeli lies of mass rapes, and other outright lies the israeli’s were telling the world, is a feat.
But I want to stress what I consider a loss for mankind, in the loss of wikileaks, as the technological tool it was to disseminate to the masses just what was going on behind the scenes…. in all these dirty little corners or business and politics.
The tool for there to be a way for whistleblowers get information to the world, that the world needs to see. This is a tool mankind needs. This allowed the scaling of source information from the widest possible base. After all, there ain’t that many billionaires…. but a lot of pissed off employee’s who can show the world how the sausage is made.
There is the difference of finding of facts as opposed to talking about what it may mean.
we need a wikileaks
and a truth and reconciliation commission.
And If I win the lottery, all you people on the right side of history in the news business, would have some financial help. Too bad, those of us in the masses…. are mostly just too poor to really support that which is needed.
But instead we watch the ignorant world make him a public enemy, without even knowing why. And we see how the machine breaks down those who oppose it.
Independent media is vital– without it, we may as well actually be living 1984.
I’m glad to see this piece posted, and to have a few more sites to bookmark.
We need *much* more than a few minor player, privately funded worker owned media companies in the public discourse space. (No meaningful ‘informed’ democracy can exist otherwise, as history has proven time & again.
Not difficult to implement –
There should be only two models for mass media – either private/commercial control or direct citizens’ control (see below).
Eg., BBC Depts. should choose one or the other. No more Gov appointee run fake ‘public’ interest media.
The public discourse of mass media needs to change, or no ‘democracy’ can be said to exist, since by rich class’ information control, our votes are rendered worthless.
Not hard to do at all —
Mass media in Western societies is controlled by a small group of wealthy elites, undermining any true democracy (which we’ve never really had).
To address this, we can create a system where citizens control a similar size sector of the media directly, through a non-profit media Commons/Common Ownership structure which excludes all private capital & revenue income. (Instead, they are controlled by members with equal voting rights, like Worker Co-ops or Community Businesses.)
In this model, only governments (as currency issuers) would fund the Commons media sector, but not directly – instead, citizens would receive an annual media voucher to sponsor their preferred Commons media providers, who would then redeem these vouchers for government funding.
This simple system ensures full democratic participation in the mass media, public political discourse which elevates politics to power, providing an alternative to commercial (or Gov controlled) media, & thus control of ‘democracy’, by a mere handful of corporations and billionaires.