How Journalists Are Taking the Power Back

The media world is seeing a fresh wave of layoffs and closures due to the pandemic, and it’s clear that the industry is broken. So what are people doing about it?

Before COVID, local newsrooms were already understaffed and underpaid, and national newsrooms had been gutted in the interest of investors and private equity owners. I myself was laid off less than a year ago when my employer, a private equity firm, shuttered our entire website. During the pandemic, things have only gotten worse. Local journalists found themselves partially furloughed, then laid off, while larger for-profit newsrooms fired hundreds of people. These days, I often hear variations on the same dry joke: If you're a journalist and think you haven’t been laid off, you actually have – your manager just hasn’t told you yet.

But reporters and editors, tired of depending on the whims of media profiteers, are making something new from the ashes of our industry. Across the country, worker-owned publications and nonprofit newsrooms are showing us that there are alternatives to permanent insecurity. Many of these models rely on subscriptions, an audience-based alternative to traffic-driven advertising that may be more sustainable and freeing. Here are a few potential beacons of hope:

Block Club Chicago

Launched in June 2018, Block Club Chicago is a nonprofit, subscription-based publication started by three former editors of the now-defunct neighborhood online newspaper DNAinfo Chicago. When DNAinfo billionaire owner Joe Ricketts shut down the operation in November 2017, the three editors, Shamus Toomey, Stephanie Lulay and Jen Sabella, turned to Kickstarter and Civil, the former journalism-focused cryptocurrency platform, to jumpstart funding its platform for hyper-local coverage of Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods. Subscriptions start at $6/month or $59/year.

BORDER/LINES

Launched in September, BORDER/LINES is a weekly immigration newsletter analyzing changes in immigration policy, published every Friday. It’s written by independent immigration reporters Gaby Del Valle and Felipe De La Hoz, and runs on Substack, a newsletter tech platform. While they publish weekly dispatches for free, subscribers can pay $5/month or $50/year for premium newsletters, like interviews with policy experts and attorneys, and deep dives into policy proposals.

The Devil Strip

Originally an Akron, OH, culture and business alt-weekly, The Devil Strip became a fully reader-owned media cooperative in December. To support the co-op’s founding membership drive, NewsMatch, a project of the Institute for Nonprofit News, gave the publication $20,000 as a donation match. Member-owners pay as little as $1/month and become fully vested shareholders for life once they pay $330. Once that happens, member-owners can run for and vote in board of trustees elections, and have a role in budgeting, programming and editorial projects – but they must live in Ohio.

The Oaklandside

Launched in June, The Oaklandside is a local Oakland, CA, publication, and a sister site to Berkeleyside. Both publications are run under Cityside, a nonprofit media organization. With initial funding from the Google News Initiative, the site started publishing under Berkeleyside and launched a COVID-19 newsletter during the pandemic. Its Editor-in-Chief Tasneem Raja, a co-founder of Cityside, previously founded The Tyler Loop, a community-led nonprofit publication for East Texas, in 2017.

Heated

Launched in September, Heated is another Substack newsletter on the climate crisis by climate change reporter Emily Atkin, who went self-employed after getting fed up with the industry. Since then, Atkin’s project has become one of the top paid on the platform, accruing her a six-figure income. Atkin’s newsletters feature original reporting, analysis and interviews on the forces behind the inaction taken to respond to the crisis. Atkin posts four newsletters a week, among them one premium newsletter. For access to all newsletters, subscribers can pay $8/month or $75/year.

Defector Media

Launching this upcoming September, Defector Media is a worker-owned publication and podcast by the former staff of sports website Deadspin. In October, the Deadspin staff quit en masse after being told by new management that they couldn’t write articles unrelated to sports, a popular coverage area for the site. Defector Media’s 18 employees have a roughly 5% stake each. And, in lieu of ads, the site runs on subscriptions as low as $8/month or a discounted $69/year. “If you’re going to take a moonshot, you may as well do it exactly the way you want to,” Kelsey McKinney, a former Deadspin writer now at Defector Media, told The New York Times.