Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media, I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Wall Street loves the New York Times leadership, which has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to investors in the past few years. Meanwhile, a growing cohort of new outlets around the US is trying to wrestle journalism away from big capital, experimenting with a cooperative business model in which journalists co-own and co-run their outlets. There's Aftermath, a gaming site, 404 Media for tech news, Racket in Minneapolis. Maximum Fun, a podcast company in Los Angeles, and in New York there's Defector a sports and culture website, and the local news site Hell Gate. Michael went to a softball game between the NYC rivals and friends and reported this piece about them that we aired in July.

Micah Loewinger: Hell Gate was winning when I arrived at McCarren Park, where I found a group of 20-or-so writers, editors, and ringers from other newsrooms. Frank, and White Claws, and Mexican beers, stomping around in the mud pretending they didn't take the game seriously.

Jasper Wang: At the moment it is the bottom of the third.

Micah Loewinger: This is Jasper Wang Defector co-owner and VP of revenue and operations.

Jasper Wang: I feel good that we're going to make it a game by the end of the 7th.

Micah Loewinger: When I arrived he was cheering on his writers as third base coach.

Jasper Wang: Is the trophy the hearts and minds of people interested in independent media in New York City? I couldn't say.

Micah Loewinger: With just 2,500 paid subscribers to Defectors 40,000 plus, Hell Gate is the underdog in the media survival game and the softball game. Do you feel added pressure that you are the sports-oriented website and that you have more to lose?

Jasper Wang: It truly did not occur to me until you just said it now that they don't really cover sports, so the answer is yes now. In the last 30 seconds, I feel more pressured.

Micah Loewinger: Jasper was on the sidelines of Defector long before it was a publication. Most of its writers came from another site Deadspin, the Gawker Sports blog.

Jasper Wang: I started reading Deadspin the summer of 2007. I was 19 years old and I was immediately hooked.

Micah Loewinger: He was a nerdy teen destined for business school, but he fell in love with the uncompromising morals infusing Deadspin's coverage.

Jasper Wang: A very labor-forward view of sports that ultimately the owners who get to hold the championship trophies first at the end of the season really play just a minimal role in the actual product. Viewing the Battle of Millionaires versus Billionaires as a meaningful reflection of labor politics is something that I don't know that many people would've thought of without the Deadspin editorial team.

Micah Loewinger: Is it fair to say that you experienced something of a political awakening reading Deadspin?

Jasper Wang: Yes. My politics were shaped by the Deadspin editorial voice.

Micah Loewinger: That's a lot of credit to give a blog.

Jasper Wang: It's a lot of credit to give to my now current coworkers who will surely make fun of me for so earnestly crediting them on the record. I already regret a little bit in saying that out loud.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] Sorry. Then in 2019, Great Hill Partners, a small private equity firm bought Gizmodo, Gawker, and all their properties.

Jasper Wang: Immediately, there were conflicts between editorial leadership at the various websites.

Micah Loewinger: Acting editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky was called in to meet with the new leadership and asked to "stick to sports". In other words, cut out the political analysis that their readers loved.

Jasper Wang: It eventually led to Barry Petchesky getting fired unceremoniously in October 2019 and the rest of the editorial staff quit in solidarity, and within 48 hours they had nobody on staff there. I reached out to the editors and writers who quit that company just to say I'm sorry, and by the way, I'm just a business guy around the city and if you're thinking about starting a new company, I'd be happy to help you however I can. In July of 2020, we formed the company and announced it.

Micah Loewinger: They chose the name Defector, get it? Jasper lent the team $50,000 to get the ball rolling while they reached out to investors.

Jasper Wang: From the beginning of that process, there was already misalignment in what we wanted to do and what investors would want to see. As an example, early-stage investors are used to investing in a company that is owned by just a handful of co-founders. We said, no, we're going to have 20 co-founders. I remember saying I think the path to being a nice little profitable business is immediate. We can see that within 12 months. A person we were pitching said, well, I don't want a nice little business, I want a big business. You hear about the hockey stick growth that venture capital funds want to see and that you got to draw that hockey stick on the chart.

Micah Loewinger: Investors clearly weren't down with their vision, so the writers asked old Deadspin readers to become subscribers $8 to $12 a month to access the community and commentary.

Danny Funt: They launched as a worker-owned company. Everyone had an equal ownership stake.

Micah Loewinger: Danny Funt is a senior editor at The WEEK Magazine. He recently wrote about Defector and other media cooperatives for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Danny Funt: Their salaries were known to everyone on staff. Their base salary is around $70,000 and a lot of decisions are made in a very democratic fashion and they've been by and large a remarkable success.

Micah Loewinger: In what ways would you say Defector and Hell Gate are significantly different from traditional news outlets?

Danny Funt: The biggest one is that they don't have anyone on a publishing or business or corporate side calling shots. The journalists are the ones steering the ship. They view the corporate side of media as just fat that could be trimmed. As the editor-in-chief of Defector told me, when you aren't determined to grow at a rapid pace and you aren't beholden to those corporate bosses running a media company really isn't that complicated.

Micah Loewinger: One narrative I've come across with regard to Defector is it can't be replicated, to those who read Deadspin religiously for years, they really liked this group of people, and those readers left Deadspin and some of them subscribe to Defector. Even though it's a new website, it's a legacy readership. What do you think of this idea that an organization like Hell Gate can't be successful because it is truly new, it's not a reboot of an existing site?

Danny Funt: That was a pivotal question as I reported this story and I heard really divergent answers from people in media. Some said worker-owned media really will only work at the local level, so if you're paying $10 or whatever their monthly cost is, is more tolerable than if it's just like one of a dozen national publications you're paying for. Others said, no, this really only works on a national level because you need to have such a big audience to make it viable, and Defector is certainly an example of that.

Jasper Wang: I think some people on staff do have a little bit of a chip on our shoulders about like, oh, well, Defector was a one-in-a-million thing.

Micah Loewinger: Jasper Wang.

Jasper Wang: The model is not scalable. It doesn't apply to businesses that are triple-digit employees nor does it apply to other small groups of journalists who are trying to start their own thing. I'm just rooting like hell for Hell Gate.

Micah Loewinger: They're rooting for him too.

Speaker 34: Jasper.

Micah Loewinger: Did he just score a home run?

Speaker 34: Yeah. Damn, Jasper's really good. [chuckles]

Micah Loewinger: Back in McCarren Park, the game was tightening.

Jasper Wang: There were a couple of errors in the last inning that allowed Defector to get back in the game.

Christopher Robbins: This could be the rope-a-dope strategy in which they come back and destroy us, so we want to make sure we finish the job here.

Micah Loewinger: This is one of Hell Gate's founders Christopher Robbins.

Christopher Robbins: Chris is up, you're up, top of the order, hit a pop, fly.

Micah Loewinger: Which was fumbled by a Defector fielder and he got on base. Before helping start Hell Gate, Christopher Robbins cut his teeth as an editor and

reporter for the Village Voice and Gothamist, the local news site owned by my employer, New York Public Radio. While he earned a reputation as an excellent journalist, he was laid off multiple times.

Christopher Robbins: At this point, it was 2021. Two other colleagues that I've worked with a lot over the years, Nick Pinto and Max Rivlin-Nadler, we all were underemployed. We all looked at each other and we're like, "How do we start a publication from scratch that embodies this sort of work we want to do and our values and is a fun place to work?" Defector was a huge inspiration and we said, "Let's just work really, really hard for a month, and if it resonates with people, excellent, if not, whatever. We'll always have the one month of Hell Gate." We did it for a month and it resonated and we all wanted to keep doing it.

Micah Loewinger: How did you come up with the name Hell Gate?

Christopher Robbins: We're scanning the cool sounding landmarks in New York City. It's this part of the water on the east side that is historically treacherous and that lots of ships wrecked at. It's also a rail bridge that I believe it's the sturdiest bridge in New York City. We pitched it as it's a sturdy bridge over turbulent water. That is our guiding ethos.

Micah Loewinger: Last spring, Hell Gate launched as a scrappy team of five-worker owners who could churn out stories both fun and trenchant. Among them, Esther Wang, who spent years reporting on social movements for Jezebel and The New Republic. She's one of Hell Gate's primary editors and among many other things, writes a column about urban fishing called Only Fins.

Esther Wang: I'm a blogger, I fully admit it. I love blogging. [laughs]

Micah Loewinger: There are plenty of blogs, but in their first month, Max Rivlin-Nadler, one of the co-founders, proved that Hell Gate's small team could make an impact too.

Max Rivlin-Nadler: It was a classic alternative magazine piece where I dove back into this court case that had been playing out in Queens for a number of years where this young Guyanese immigrant named Prakash Churaman, had essentially spent his teenage years on Rikers Island. He'd been found guilty of felony, murder, and he was actually set up for a retrial last summer before I published.

I dug into the case just having a report on the Queen's criminal justice system for a number of years. I looked into the detectives and sure enough, they had just recently had a huge settlement against them for hiding evidence or withholding exculpatory evidence in a very similar case. I wrote about that and how the city had already paid out a gazillion dollars to people who had been wrongfully imprisoned. Within a month, the charges were dropped against this kid.

Micah Loewinger: Then in May.

Speaker 38: Protests continue to swirl over the choking death of Jordan Neely on an F train last Monday.

Speaker 39: The medical examiner has now ruled that passenger's death a homicide by chokehold.

Christopher Robbins: How could a train full of people just sit passively by and watch as the life was choked out of someone?

Micah Loewinger: Christopher Robbins.

Christopher Robbins: That was the question on so many New Yorkers' minds after that happened.

Micah Loewinger: Hell Gate's Nick Pinto was the first reporter to offer a satisfying answer tracking down several witnesses.

Christopher Robbins: I don't think that anyone else had comprehensive accounts of what happened on that train other than Nick at that time.

Micah Loewinger: Hell Gate regularly advances stories on policing and local government at a time when local journalism is drying up and it needs solutions. Max Rivlin-Nadler thinks his team has found one.

Max Rivlin-Nadler: We're promising really slow, consistent, self-sustaining growth. I believe that the cooperative ownership model can replace these medium-range newsrooms that cities used to be just chock full of.

Micah Loewinger: He's betting readers will fall in love with Hell Gate's irreverent, lyrical editorial voice. Articles like One Weird Trick to Forget About the Housing Crisis and Why Does a Plastic-Wrapped Turkey Sandwich Cost $15 At The Airport? A Seinfeldian premise that turns into a crash course on open records laws.

Max Rivlin-Nadler: I actually do think we've lost a lot of good writing on the internet the past decade or so, and I really appreciate that Hell Gate's mantra is really good writing about stuff that you care about.

Micah Loewinger: The site has been growing 10% month over month, garnering around 200,000 unique visits a month. I visited Hell Gate's temporary office. Max showed me around. It's really just two white folding tables in the middle of an East Village community space called The Earth Church.

Max Rivlin-Nadler: The Earth Church is the current home of Reverend Billy, who is the anti-capitalist Reverend who is a big protest artist and activist.

Micah Loewinger: You wouldn't know it from all the radical artwork, but it's actually a former Chase Bank.

Max Rivlin-Nadler: All of the old bank teller slots are still here along with the bulletproof glass.

Micah Loewinger: Is it a coincidence that he chose an old bank to set up his church?

Max Rivlin-Nadler: It's pretty anti-capitalist of him. [laughs] I don't know. The symbolisms, right? Even for Hell Gate on the ashes of digital media, we grow.

Micah Loewinger: I got a chance to see Hell Gate's cooperative model in action as it's now a seven-person team met to discuss finances and the future of the site.

Okay, so this is a meeting of the growth committee?

Nadia Tykulsker: There's eight scenarios that I'm going to run through.

Micah Loewinger: Nadia Tykulsker is Hell Gate's business manager.

Nadia Tykulsker: The first scenario is the one that we won't do for the health and wellbeing of ourselves. We don't grow. We don't make any more money. We don't get a PEO

Micah Loewinger: For people following at home, what is a PEO?

Nadia Tykulsker: It's health insurance, basically. If we do that, we essentially hit negative balance in our bank account in April and we need to raise about 181K in order to get through the entirety of 2024.

Micah Loewinger: As it stands, everyone at Hell Gate makes $48,000 a year plus a monthly $500 stipend in lieu of real health insurance.

Nadia Tykulsker: The second one is that we don't have a PEO, but we all make 72K and we run out of money in March.

Micah Loewinger: In another scenario, Hell Gate pays part of the health insurance. In another, they decide to rent an office since the Earth Church is looking for a new home later this year. In another, they don't get a raise, but they hire someone new.

Speaker 41: More people means more stories. More stories means more people interacting with Hell Gate. More people interacting with Hell Gate means more subscribers. More subscribers means more money, means more reporters, means everything else.

Nadia Tykulsker: The last scenario is that we get a PEO starting in January. Owners make 60K. We hire another editorial employee in June 2024. We don't have an office space and we make it through 2024 with 360K raised.

Micah Loewinger: When you say "raised money", what do you mean?

Nadia Tykulsker: Our goal is to be subscriber-funded, but we have a runway because we didn't start in the same way that Defector did with tons and tons of subscribers. We've been building our subscription base. It's going to take us a little bit of time until our subscriptions allow us to pay for all of our expenses. Until then, we need to raise money through individual donors, through foundation money.

[laughter]

Max Rivlin-Nadler: Advertising, sponsorships, stuff like that. The entrepreneurial side of things outside of subscriptions.

Micah Loewinger: Great. You can proceed. Sorry.

Nadia Tykulsker: No, thanks for asking.

Nick Pinto: I have so many feelings.

Micah Loewinger: This is writer/editor Nick Pinto weighing in via Zoom.

Nick Pinto: I feel like we're confronting two opposing imperatives for Hell Gate's foundational vision, and one of them is to be lean and mean enough that we can survive, and the other imperative is to treat ourselves like human beings who deserve health insurance and to make a living wage and we're now looking at 300 and some thousand Dollars just to get through the end of next year. I think we should all just really absorb that.

Esther Wang: It's been absorbed. Yes. It's fully absorbed.

[laughter]

Micah Loewinger: "Come on dad, let us get the health insurance."

[laughter]

They've tentatively decided on a very expensive option, a $60,000 salary, health insurance, a new team member, and depending on fundraising and actual office space. In other words, they're playing from behind.

[laughter]

Max Rivlin-Nadler: Let's get our hands in because we're going to have these fucking runs back. There we go.

Micah Loewinger: This is Max giving his team a pump-up speech in the Hell Gate dugout. They were down 12 to 9 with one last chance at a comeback.

Max Rivlin-Nadler: All right, on the count of three. One, two, three.

All: Hell Gate.

Max Rivlin-Nadler: All right.

Micah Loewinger: Moments later, Rick Polis, a Hell Gate friend and freelancer stepped up to the plate.

Max Rivlin-Nadler: Yes, baby. Yes, baby. Go Rick. Go Rick.

Micah Loewinger: It was a home run, but the rally stopped there. Defector picked off the remaining batters and won 12 to 10. "A Heartbreaking Loss," reads Hell Gate's own write-up of the game. Hell Gate must solemnly report a bitter truth. Defector writers are good at sports or at least better than us, and the two teams lined up, said good game like you do in Little League, and they walked down the block together for beers and burritos.

[music]

Move fast and break things. Disruption, hockey stick growth, huge payouts for investors. These were mantras of the tech boom and digital media. Refugees from that system are ready for a new paradigm, one in which excellent journalism can co-exist with humane working conditions, and good old-fashioned survival can be humbly aspired to.

Look, there are bright spots. I work at one and I know New York isn't representative of what's happening in one paper or zero paper towns all over America, but maybe if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang. With help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director's Jennifer Munson, Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Happy Thanksgiving.

Micah Loewinger: Happy Thanksgiving. I'm Micah Loewinger.

[00:50:44] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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