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2023 has already been the worst year for media jobs yet. BuzzFeed will lay off about 15% of its staff and it's going to completely shut down the news unit itself. Vice Media was once one of the hottest names in new media. They've just filed for bankruptcy protection.
From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Meanwhile, the New York Times won the tumultuous era of digital media, in part by emulating the success of Silicon Valley. They're trying to be a kind of destination for people's whole lives. And if they can get there, then they...
have all sorts of other things they can sell. Plus, a handful of new publications are tearing down the old culture of the news biz. When you aren't determined to grow at a rapid pace and you aren't beholden to those kind of corporate bosses, running a media company really isn't that complicated. It's all coming up after this.
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From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. It's a bad time for the news business.
Actually, it usually is, but this is one of the worst. This year, a record number of job cuts so far, over 17,000 of them. Just this summer, the LA Times cut 74 staff positions. National Geographic laid off its staff writers. And earlier this year, NPR, Fox, NBC, Spotify, Insider, ABC, and Gannett also went under the knife.
Gawker closed for the second time. In May, MTV News folded, and Vice filed for bankruptcy. And in April... Internet media darling BuzzFeed is shuttering its news division. BuzzFeed will lay off about 15% of its staff, and it's going to completely shut down the news unit itself. It kind of feels like the end of an era. But it wasn't always so dire.
BuzzFeed was launched by Jonah Peretti amid the seemingly endless promise of digital news. In 2011, Peretti brought in Ben Smith to set up a newsroom to move BuzzFeed's content, best known for its quizzes and listicles, upmarket.
Now, Smith is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of the new website Semaphore, and author of the new book, Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion, in the billion-dollar race to go viral. He wrote that when Peretti launched BuzzFeed, he thought the site would be the next MTV, the next Viacom. We believed, and you can kind of argue now about whether this was delusional or whether it just didn't turn out that way,
that places like Facebook and Twitter would ultimately wind up paying for quality content the way, say, Netflix or Disney pays for quality entertainment. And what went wrong? I mean, what went wrong was they basically never paid a dime. There were moments in which it seemed like it was going that way. You know, there was a year when BuzzFeed News was
collecting checks from Facebook, Twitter, and Snap. And I thought, okay, this future is starting to emerge. But there were a few things. One was that the people running the platforms really liked user-generated content, which is free.
Another is they really often did not like journalism, really actively didn't like it, felt they'd been covered unfairly, had these kind of utopian ideas about citizen journalism and the wisdom of crowds. They weren't wires laid in the ground. They were social spaces where people gathered that maybe didn't prove as durable as we thought. Durable in what sense? One issue is that the platforms may turn out to have been things people had fun with in the 2010s, but that we may not be on much longer.
But in others, the platforms got really freaked out about news. I mean, particularly when American and global politics got so divisive, so toxic. You know, you're a tech CEO, you're getting hauled in front of Congress because of news content that really isn't where you're making your money anyway, and you start wondering why you are anywhere near it. I think there was also an assumption that the social platforms would take on more responsibilities or get better somehow. When we brought news to BuzzFeed,
It was a moment when the Facebook news feed was sort of new and delightful. And the idea that you could get journalism and baby pictures and memes and was considered kind of fun and was very popular. And so we were providing the whole range, essentially, that people would share on their Facebook feed. I think as the news itself changed and as this new, very confrontational media
Right-wing populism got very good at driving engagement on Facebook. A lot of consumers started finding that less fun.
And the platform started to deal with the kind of social and political consequences of amplifying this very divisive political debate. And that was something that we had not particularly seen coming and that really complicated our whole project. There was a day in 2015, you call it the last good day on the Internet. That morning, some llamas had got loose in Arizona.
And everybody spent the whole morning on social media watching these hapless sheriffs chase llamas around. And then that afternoon, a woman who had gone to a wedding, and I believe it was Scotland, came back with this out-of-focus photo of this dress and was arguing about it with her mom and her friends, messaged it to the woman running BuzzFeed's Tumblr and said, can BuzzFeed help us resolve this dispute? And it very quickly just became this delightful moment of global culture in a way that
Again, I thought at the time, oh, huh, this is this lovely new thing, like truly global, instant culture that is, you know, fundamentally basically quite sweet, divisive in a literal sense. A third of people, I believe, thought it was white and gold and the rest thought it was blue and black, but fundamentally sweet and harmless. Then things changed. Yeah, things changed. And I think things didn't just change on the Internet. I think all over the world you had this surge of real anger about migration, about
about trade, about globalization, and a new kind of right-wing populism embodied in the U.S. by Donald Trump. Facebook and Twitter and these other platforms, they measured their success by, and the success of a piece of content, say a tweet, by how many people were interacting with it.
Basically, I post a racist meme. You comment, you're a racist. I then comment, no, you're a racist. And the machine says, wow, look at this incredible engagement. Let's show it to every single person in North America right now.
And it really favored incredibly divisive content. You said that Facebook made a decision it later regretted to not just show you what your friends were sharing, but things like what your friends were sharing, just to keep people stuck to the platform.
Yeah. And, you know, Facebook was not full of people who are trying to elect the next president. It was full of people who could see that you were spending 23 minutes a day on Facebook and we're trying to get you to spend 24 minutes and we're tinkering with stuff that would keep you there a little longer and had the reasonable view that, oh, like a good way to predict what you're going to like is to look at what everybody else likes. And we'll show you that it's no longer really a social network. It's sort of a content network that's taking signals from
One person in learning and showing it to another. It was an attempt to fix a system in which people had just been sort of idly sharing stories that Hillary Clinton had been replaced by a body double without reading them. And so they said, no, we need to make sure that this is meaningful engagement. Let's favor comments in particular, you know, screaming matches about racist memes.
You wrote that while you and Jonah, quote, thought that you were inventing digital media, the figures who would create the new American far right were flickering just around the edges of that picture from the start.
by which you mean Andrew Breitbart was working alongside Jonah to found the Huffington Post. Chris Poole, the founder of 4chan, worked out of BuzzFeed's offices. A BuzzFeed video star baked Alaska stormed the Capitol on January 6th. The editor for your book mused that maybe you were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their tragedy.
Yeah, I mean, I think that was to me the most surprising thing about going back and reporting all this out was seeing in that early internet scene in the aughts, the people who I was writing about, Jonah and Nick and others, just it was a presumptively a progressive world. And it
to some degree explicitly for a blog like Jezebel or for a site like Huffington Post, the goal was the election of Barack Obama and they made no bones about it. And Facebook in particular was seen as obviously aligned with Barack Obama. You know, he went, as late as 2011, he went and visited Facebook and he didn't have to say he was visiting because it was like a democratic leaning company. I mean, it was like visiting Madison, Wisconsin or something. You're visiting a place full of college students because that's who votes for Democrats. And yet,
But it also is totally clear that the real apogee of this whole digital media world is the election of Donald Trump in 2016. And then when I went back and sort of tried to look at the whole picture, the folks who were very deeply involved in Trump's election, his style of media, were really there all along. We're looking at these tools and we're in some ways, you know, better suited and more willing to take them to their logical conclusion than we were.
Do you feel about BuzzFeed having trained some of these people? I mean, I find it pretty disturbing. And we clearly, I think we misunderstood, or I feel like I misunderstood the situation and the kind of politics that was emerging. You told CNN that the closure of BuzzFeed News made it really clear that the relationship between news publishers and social media is pretty much over.
The week after BuzzFeed announced it was shutting down news, Jonah Peretti wrote on the site that, quote, we've benefited from the previous era of the Internet, having struggled during this transitional period, and are poised to benefit again as this next era of the Internet takes shape. So what's the next era?
I think the late social media world gives you this illusion of a debate and of seeing all sorts of perspectives, but really what it's doing is it's a machine for elevating the dumbest version of the argument you hate and showing it to you constantly and convincing you that people who you disagree with are just utter morons all the time. But I do think we're moving away from that particular world into a bunch of different smaller spaces.
Why do you think that? I mean, I saw a really interesting statistic that really stuck with me the other day that we published on Semaphore, that if you ask people if they have a favorite podcast, not everybody does. The likeliest person to be their favorite podcaster, no surprise, is Joe Rogan. But what's interesting is only 5% of people say it's him. And that's the biggest share of the market, is somebody who has 5% of the market. And that's a very unusual long tail of a market where the biggest share is 5%. And
Many, many people are succeeding with fractional percentages. And it's a very wide open, kind of unconsolidated place where people are looking for smaller, more intimate conversations with people who specific take on the world they kind of relate to. And it's also just people are sick of the last thing and ready for something new. What are some of the lessons from the era that we might say is ending that you're hoping the news industry carries forth into the next one?
I mean, I think the biggest lesson, which isn't solely about news, is just the extent to which every technology, every technique, every form can be used by people with totally different motives for different reasons. And that these surges of utopianism, or I suppose kind of doomsaying about shifts in technology...
These things are morally neutral, and I think we were incredibly utopian about the promise of digital media without seeing that it could be used in all sorts of different directions.
The other one for me is that I don't think news is a good business for venture capitalists to invest in. There was a pressure on us to grow really fast, to grow explosively, to build a business that could return many, many times its investment very fast. News can be a good business if you do a really good job and are very careful about how you run it and can really provide good returns to good investors. But it's not something where venture capitalists should be looking to...
throw in millions of dollars and see it multiply by 100 over a period of a couple of years. Ben, thank you very much. Thank you, Brooke. Ben Smith is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Semaphore and author of the new book, Traffic. Coming up, two very different tales about profit and loss in digital news. This is On the Media.
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This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Hi. This is David Carr from The New York Times. Don't keep saying I'm from The New York Times. That sucks. I'm just... In February 2010, Times media reporter David Carr and a film crew visited the Brooklyn offices of Vice, then the edgy darling of digital media.
Carr's visit to Vice was captured in Page One, a documentary about the struggle of the newspaper of record to adapt to the culture and business of the Internet. According to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, more Americans are getting their news from the Internet rather than a physical newspaper now. This is a poll conducted that same year, 2010. It's the first time in the history of the polling that that has happened. We like to say that we're perfectly positioned.
Because we have to figure out how we can be meaner and faster and more dynamic than everybody out there. And we don't want to get hot and die, we want to get hot and get hotter. The next scene is probably the movie's most referenced. Carr is clacking away on his laptop in a glass conference room with the founders of Vice, including Shane Smith, who's describing his Gonzo documentary, The Cannibal Warlords of Liberia. Wow.
I don't know Liberia. I don't know what's going on. I don't know potential. I'm just a regular guy. Everyone talked to me about cannibalism. And the New York Times, meanwhile, is writing about surfing. And I'm sitting there going, you know what? I'm not going to talk about surfing. I'm going to talk about cannibalism. Time out. Car stops him. Before you ever went there, we've had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide just because you put on a...
The scene captured the stubborn pride of the old guard and a refusal to compromise journalistic integrity, even as it seemingly faced extinction. Fast forward to today, Vice got hot and died.
bankrupt as of May. And the New York Times is hotter than ever. After years of falling numbers, the New York Times is seeing a surge in subscribers, both print and digital. Just an unbelievable turnaround
I wanted to understand how the Times became a stable, profitable powerhouse of the internet at a time when most other outlets are struggling to survive.
I spoke with technologists, current and former staff, and read, watched, and listened to every interview I could with the people who run the company. The Times declined to give me someone from the Mass Head to speak on the record. What I've found is that the Times became profitable in part by transforming itself into a tech company.
The Times really had been the great winner of this era that began with people wondering if the New York Times could even survive it. Ben Smith again. He's the author of Traffic. He also spent two years in David Carr's old job as New York Times media columnist. There's a sort of maxim in the tech industry that you should follow fast, and there's a strategy of fast following. And the Times really did the opposite. They followed slow, they watched, they waited.
At the beginning of the 2010s, things were looking pretty bleak for the newspaper business. More and more readers were spending their time on social media. Facebook launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006. Google and Facebook had already gamed the ad market. And anyway, online ads were way less profitable than the print ads that had once bankrolled the paper's journalism.
In 2011, the Times took a controversial first step into a new subscription business model. Executives here plan to walk a fine line to generate subscription revenue from avid readers willing to pay while still retaining casual customers who boost advertising revenue with their clicks. The New York Times has a paywall where you have to pay to read the New York Times online. I predict that it will fail within a year.
The critics, and there were a lot of them, were wrong. According to Ben Smith, the company had timed it perfectly. They had to wait for Spotify and for Netflix to train people to pay for media. And then they launched this very painstaking effort to change their own internal culture to adapt belatedly to the internet.
The guy who's now the publisher, A.G. Salzberger, realized that to move the place required a kind of ritual, and the Timesian ritual is to do the reporting. And so he assembled a bunch of people who were well-regarded internally as journalists and reported out the Times' struggles with the internet and what they could do better. In 2014, the team produced a crisp 96-page document known as the Innovation Report.
It called for a more urgent approach to social media, more data collection, and a rethinking of the times as a truly digital-first news shop. The substance of the report was pretty banal. There are all these people on the internet reading stuff. You might want to write for them. But I think people who thought it was banal sort of underestimated the extent to which inside this institution it was like a papal encyclical or something. It was a very important signal. And over the past nine years, the company has seen a bonanza of digital growth.
NewYorkTimes.com is powered by recommendation algorithms. The site uses machine learning to analyze data from millions of Times readers and identify likely subscribers. And then there's the wellspring of apps.
The New York Times is going mobile. The New York Times is launching a new app called NYT Now. Over the weekend, the New York Times handed out virtual reality goggles to its readers. An audio-only app, their own podcast player. All of its digital experiments repackage the news in novel and engaging ways, but they're also fundamentally an attempt to lure readers away from the biggest sites on the web.
Like the rest of the news industry, the Times grew frustrated chasing traffic on Google and Facebook. We have to win at the game the big tech platforms are playing. This is the Times CEO Meredith Coppit-Levian speaking at a conference in 2020. More than 5 million people subscribe to the New York Times, which sounds like a really big number until you consider the fact that as many as
50 million people every week land on a New York Times story, and most of them are coming there from Google or Facebook or somewhere on the internet where they're already spending a ton of their time.
In her mission to beat big tech at their own game, Levian has started to draw from their playbook. The question is, will we have quality, original, independent journalism available to the masses in 10 years? Here she is speaking with CBS in 2018. I think the answer is yes, but it requires that news organizations make decisions
This word, addictive, one she and other Times leaders use regularly in interviews and earnings calls, is a term with roots in Silicon Valley.
Of course, it's very rare to become addicted in the medical sense, though many of us have developed enduring habits around social media and screen time in general. Which, as former Facebook president Sean Parker told Axios in 2017, was the goal. The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them to really understand it,
That thought process was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? How do we actually get people to engage with the times and build a habit in which we can expect people to just come regularly, regardless of whether there is like big news or not? Kathy Zhang is a senior manager of newsroom and product analytics at The Times. She told me the company has said it's building a lifestyle brand.
As one Times executive recently put it to Vanity Fair, what does it look like for the Times to have embedded itself deeply into every single moment? How do we get every second of your day? The leaders of this company really want to create these touch points that people are developing a habit with the Times. In the morning, like waking up, like checking your notifications, like reading the app. As you're getting ready or commuting to work, you throw on the dailies.
and then, you know, maybe play some games during your lunch break. Wordle, the New York Times, purchased the game for a seven-figure price tag. I'm more of a spelling bee guy myself. And you go home before you go to the grocery store, you check out the cooking app, and you...
Like, say, a new show from Serial Productions, which the Times bought in 2020. I think in your narrative, the one thing you have wrong is entertainment. Ben Smith.
The FX show is kind of dead. The Times, I think, wisely is basically staying out of the television business and will permit you to flip over to Netflix at night. Once you've read their summary of what you should watch on Netflix, they're trying to be a kind of destination for people's whole lives in a certain way. And if they can get there, then they have all sorts of other things they can sell. Am I just, like, naive for finding that slightly icky for a newspaper? Or is that just the attention economy? And is it just kind of like,
Wake up. This is the game. Let's play by the rules. I mean, I think that seems like a reasonable goal for a subscriber business trying to serve its subscribers. And I'm not sure, do you find it less icky to toggle between Google and Facebook and sift through the chaos of information? But I do think that what you're really suggesting is how many people want to live in a kind of monoculture. Yeah. And I think the thing is, some do. I think there are a lot of people who found the last decade of a sort of social media takeover really discomforting.
and like the idea of connecting with a single trusted brand and the Times will just clearly be the biggest of those. The company's biggest growth spurt came from the so-called Trump bump, when readers flocked to the Times and other outlets for the daily drip of drama and outrage. And when that tide receded, what you saw was the Washington Post and many other publications were back to being struggling newspapers trying to figure out the digital transition.
And the New York Times was this full-service media company that if you didn't want to read about Donald Trump, you could get recipes or games or podcasts or sports. Which the Times says is a digital recreation of the traditional newspaper bundle. It's remarkable how much you sound more like a tech CEO than a media CEO. Maybe that's because of the structure. This is Nilay Patel, editor of The Verge, interviewing CEO Meredith Kopit-Levian earlier this year on The Decoder podcast.
I have the privilege of being CEO of a journalism company. We're a tech-enabled journalism company. We have extraordinary digital product development and engineering and data talent. Right.
But make no mistake, we're a journalism company. I mean, obviously. The Times has won the most Pulitzer Prizes for its journalism and continues to drive the daily news cycle. These labels may be squishy, but they're not mutually exclusive. Is the Times a technology company? One answer is obviously yes. Clay Shirky is vice provost at New York University and a scholar focusing on media and the internet. The other answer is obviously
What is a tech company anymore anyway? It's true that tech company is a vague marketing term. It often obscures how most of these companies actually make their money. Google is an advertising company. WeWork is a real estate company. Uber is a transportation company, but would prefer to pay its drivers as contractors who just use its software.
But that term tech company still connotes an era of Silicon Valley's financial and ideological dominance, an era that Clay Shirky says may be coming to an end. At a time when Facebook and Amazon and Google are laying people off by the thousands, the sense we had of what it meant to be a tech company for the last 20 years was
Turns out to have been on some level a zero interest rate phenomenon, right? These companies simply had access to a kind of capital that other companies didn't. That what we're really going through is this big shift in even our sense of what it means to be a tech company. And my guess is that what we're going to start to see is that media companies and banks are
especially who have had a really hard time hiring competent, engaged technologists in the last 20 years because of this competition with Facebook and Google and Amazon and so on, are going to find it easier to actually bring people on board who know how to build things for the Internet. And I think the Times is an early example of that category.
It's a really tech-savvy media company. This blending of Silicon Valley's strategies, ideals, and workers with those of a news organization has triggered a kind of identity crisis for some within the New York Times. Some employees told me that their leadership's resistance to the tech company label mirrors an active labor battle. The reason that the company tries to, like,
Kathy Jong again. She's the unit chair of the New York Times Tech Guild, which is the country's largest tech union with collective bargaining rights. The Tech Guild includes positions like data scientists, software engineers and product managers.
Since they won their election last year, the Times has not agreed to a first contract. When it suits management, they will say to us specifically, like on the tech side, like, well, our competitors are the Washington Post or CNN or the Wall Street Journal. On the newsroom side, there was a presentation in which they compare the company more to other kinds of subscription services.
And it did have companies on it, like Netflix and Spotify. And we were looking at that and going, huh, that's pretty interesting to see the Times sort of positioning itself in this way. This is Stacey Cowley, a finance reporter at The Times and secretary of The Times Guild, the union on the news side.
She and her shop just won a hard-fought battle for raises. Under our previous contract, the least amount of money someone could be paid was around $38,000. There were writers who were making $38K? Largely non-writer positions. Our security guards, for example, our sales coordinators, our news assistants. And it was always really frustrating during the negotiations when we would say, look, you can spend $400 million on stock buybacks.
I mean, our CEO last year made in the ballpark of $7 million. That's not a number you would typically see for the CEO of something that's just a newspaper. She's starting to look like she's paid comparably to tech industry executives. And you're really turning around and telling us you can't afford a million dollars a year for a $65,000 salary floor? Really? We're not stupid. We're New York Times reporters. Come on. But two and a half years later, you succeeded on that front. We did.
We did win our $65,000 salary floor. It's a very different company financially than it was 10 years ago. I was walking into the office a couple months ago, and as I was walking in, there was a pair of teenagers taking a photo with their phones of the Times awning outside the building. And one of them said to the other, that's the company that bought Wordle.
I'm like, oh my goodness, this is a wild new world I live in now. So as someone who wants to see the New York Times be healthy and thrive, yeah, I support the concept that this is no longer a newspaper. This is a... You're just happy to do the journalism. I like to...
like to focus on that part. There's a lot to celebrate in the fact that the New York Times has figured out how to fund high quality journalism. But could beating big tech at its own game mean choking out the rest of the media? I think the Times benefits from the kind of digital scale that giant tech companies benefit from. It turned out that one search engine would win.
that one social network in Facebook would kind of win, at least for a time. Ben Smith. My first column for the New York Times was about the monopoly of the Incredibles and kind of sometimes, as you say, kind of scary success of the New York Times. And in your piece, you quote like an array of media muckety-mucks who all said a version of, you know, the Times is going up while the rest of us go down. And eventually, they'll be the last one standing. I mean, that's a pretty...
pretty dire future. Do you believe that we really are on that course? I think when it came to national news, where you had had 100 newspapers around the country, each doing its own version,
The Times got into this virtuous cycle where they were getting more subscribers, being able to pay people more, hiring more journalists, doing more news, breaking more news, as everybody else suffered. And then as a consumer, you look around and one is vastly superior to the others. When I last looked at this, the Times had more subscribers than basically everybody else combined in its category. And that includes the Washington Post. That includes the Los Angeles Times. That includes...
Just keep going down the list. On this show over the last two decades, we've done scores of interviews on the death of local news and the failed economics of the newspaper biz. We even wrote a jingle to herald those segments because we did them so often. ♪
So has the New York Times in its raging hotter than hot success finally solved the riddle? If Sulzberger were to pick up and move to the L.A. Times, he would not under any circumstances be able to recreate what he'd done for the Times. Clay Shirky. It's like trying to copy Harvard or trying to copy Google. Like there are just some fields where the company in the lead position doesn't
doesn't actually have a lot of lessons even for its own competitors. Coming up, so the New York Times is in a league of its own. That doesn't mean there can't be other leagues. What is the score? Anyone got a score? 5-2. Hellgate. This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
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This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Wall Street loves the New York Times leadership, which has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to investors over the past few years. Meanwhile, a cohort of new outlets across the U.S. are trying to wrestle journalism away from big capital, experimenting with a cooperative business model in which the journalists co-own and co-run their own outlets.
There's the Colorado Sun in Denver, 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, Hellgate. When the NYC friends and rivals met last month in Brooklyn to play softball, Micah was there to take notes.
Hellgate was winning when I arrived at McCarran Park, where I found a group of 20 or so writers, editors, and ringers from other newsrooms drinking White Claws and Mexican beers, stomping around in the mud, pretending they didn't take the game seriously. At the moment, it is the bottom of the third. This is Jasper Wang, Defector co-owner and VP of Revenue and Operations.
I feel good that, you know, we're going to make it a game by the end of the seventh. When I arrived, he was cheering on his writers as third base coach. Is the trophy the hearts and minds of people interested in independent media in New York City? I couldn't say. With just 2,500 paid subscribers to Defector's 40,000 plus,
Hellgate 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 kind of more to lose? It truly did not occur to me until you just said it now that they don't really cover sports.
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. He was a nerdy teen destined for business school, but he
fell in love with the uncompromising morals infusing Deadspin's coverage. 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.
So is it fair to say that you experienced something of a political awakening reading Deadspin?
Yes, my politics were shaped by the Deadspin editorial voice. That's a lot of credit to give a blog. It's a lot of credit to give to my now current co-workers who will surely make fun of me for so earnestly crediting them on the record. So I already regret a little bit saying that out loud. Oh.
Sorry. Then in 2019, Great Hill Partners, a small private equity firm, bought Gizmodo, Gawker and all their properties. Immediately, there were conflicts between editorial leadership at the various websites. Acting editor in chief Barry Pacheski was called in to meet with the new leadership and asked to, quote, stick to sports.
In other words, cut out the political analysis that their readers loved. It eventually led to Barry Pacheski 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. And 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. They chose the name Defector. Get it?
Jasper lent the team $50,000 to get the ball rolling while they reached out to investors. From the beginning of that process, there was already misalignment in what we wanted to do and what investors would want to see. So as an example, early stage investors are used to investing in a company that is owned by just a handful of co-founders. And we said, no, we're going to have like 20 co-founders.
I remember saying, I think the path to being a nice little profitable business is immediate. Like we can see that within 12 months.
And 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've got to draw that hockey stick on the chart. Investors clearly weren't down with their vision. So the writers asked old Deadspin readers to become subscribers. Eight to twelve dollars a month to access the community and commentary.
And they launched as a worker-owned company. Everyone had an equal ownership stake. Danny Funt is a senior editor at The Week magazine. He recently wrote about Defector and other media cooperatives for the Columbia Journalism Review.
Their salaries were known to everyone on staff. Their base salary is around $70,000. A lot of decisions are made in a very democratic fashion. And they've been, by and large, a remarkable success. In what ways would you say Defector and Hellgate are like significantly different?
from traditional news outlets? 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 kind of the corporate side of media as just fat that could be trimmed. And 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 kind of corporate bosses, running a media company really isn't that complicated. 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 subscribed to Defector. And so even though it's a new website, it's a legacy readership. What do you think of this idea that an organization like Hellgate can't be successful because it is truly new? It's not a reboot of an existing site.
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. I think some people on staff do have a little bit of a chip on our shoulders about like,
Jasper Wang. Yeah.
And they're rooting for him, too. Jasper! Did he just score a home run? Oh, damn, Jasper's really good! Back in McCarran Park, the game was tightening. There were a couple of errors in the last inning that allowed Defector to get back in the game. 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. This is one of Hellgate's founders, Christopher Robbins. Chris is up. You're up. Top of the order. He hit a pop fly.
which was fumbled by a defector fielder, and he got on base. Before helping start Hellgate, 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. And while he earned a reputation as an excellent journalist, he was laid off multiple times. At
At this point, it was like, you know, 2021. Two other colleagues that I've worked with a lot over the years, Nick Pinto and Max Rivlinather, we all were sort of underemployed. We sort of all looked at each other and we're like, how do we start a publication from scratch that embodies the sort of work we want to do and our values and is like 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, like whatever. We'll always have the one month of Hellgate. And so we did it for a month and it resonated and we all wanted to keep doing it. How did you come up with the name Hellgate? We were like scanning like the cool sounding landmarks in New York City. It's just like 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's like the, I believe it's the sturdiest bridge in New York City. We pitched it as like, it's a sturdy bridge over turbulent water.
That is our guiding ethos. Last spring, Hellgate launched as a scrappy team of five worker owners who could churn out stories both fun and trenchant. Among them, Esther Wong, who spent years reporting on social movements for Jezebel and the New Republic. She's one of Hellgate's primary editors and, among many other things, writes a column about urban fishing called Only Fins. I'm a blogger. I fully admit it. I love blogging.
And there are plenty of blogs, but in their first month, Max Rivlin Nadler, one of the co-founders, proved that Hellgate's small team could make an impact too. 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 guy
Yeah.
And I dug into the case, just having reported on the Queens 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. So I wrote about that and how, you know, 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. And then...
And then in May... Protests continue to swirl over the choking death of Jordan Neely on an F train last Monday. The medical examiner has now ruled that passenger's death a homicide by chokehold.
How could a train full of people just sit passively by and watch as the life was choked out of someone? Christopher Robbins. That was the question on so many New Yorkers' minds after that happened. Hellgate's Nick Pinto was the first reporter to offer a satisfying answer, tracking down several witnesses. I don't know.
I don't think anyone else had comprehensive accounts of what happened on that train other than Nick at that time. Hellgate 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. We're promising really slow, consistent, self-sustaining growth here.
He's betting readers will fall in love with Hellgate'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. I actually do think we've lost a lot of good writing on the internet the past decade.
The site has been growing 10% month over month, garnering around 200,000 unique visits a month. I visited Hellgate'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.
The Earth Church is the current home of Reverend Billy, who is the anti-capitalist reverend who is a big protest artist and activist. You wouldn't know it from all the radical artwork, but it's actually a former Chase Bank. All of the old bank teller slots are still here along with the...
bulletproof glass. Is it a coincidence that he chose an old bank to set up his church? Pretty anti-capitalist of him. I don't know. The symbolism's right. Even for Hellgate, on the ashes of digital media, we grow. I got a chance to see Hellgate's cooperative model in action as its now seven-person team met to discuss finances and the future of the site.
Okay, so this is a meeting of the growth committee. There's eight scenarios that I'm going to run through. Nadia Tykolsker is Hellgate's business manager. So the first scenario is the one that we won't do for the health and well-being of ourselves. We don't grow, we don't make any more money, we don't get a PEO. People following at home, what is a PEO? 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. As it stands, everyone at Hellgate makes $48,000 a year, plus a monthly $500 stipend in lieu of real health insurance. The second one is that we don't have a PEO, but we all make $72K.
And we run out of money in March. In another scenario, Hellgate 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. More people means more stories. More stories means more people interacting with Hellgate. More people interacting with Hellgate means more subscribers. More subscribers means more money, means more reporters, means everything else.
When you say raise money, what do you mean?
Our goal is to be subscriber funded, but we sort of have a runway of, because we didn't start in the same way that Defector did with like tons and tons of subscribers. We've been building our subscription base. So it's going to take us a little bit of time until our subscriptions allow us to pay for all of our expenses. So until then we need to raise money through individual donors, through foundation money, advertising, sponsorship, stuff like that. Like the, the entrepreneurial side of things outside of subscriptions, um,
Great. You can proceed. Sorry. No, thanks for asking. I have so many, so many feelings. This is writer-editor Nick Pinto weighing in via Zoom. I feel like we're confronting two opposing imperatives for Hellgate's foundational vision. And one of them is to be lean and mean enough that we can survive. And the other imperative is to...
It's been absorbed.
It's fully absorbed. Come on, Dad. Let us get the health insurance. They've tentatively decided on a very expensive option. A $60,000 salary, health insurance, a new team member, and, depending on fundraising, an actual office space. In other words, they're playing from behind. So let's get our hands in because we're going to have these f***ing
This is Max giving his team a pump-up speech in the Hellgate dugout. They were down 12-9 with one last chance at a comeback. Alright, on the count of three. One, two, three, Hellgate!
Moments later, Rick Polis, a Hellgate friend and freelancer, stepped up to the plate. Yeah, baby! Yeah, baby! Go, Rick! Go, Rick! It was a home run, but the rally stopped there. Defector picked off the remaining batters and won 12-10. Quote, a heartbreaking loss, reads Hellgate's own write-up of the game. Hellgate must solemnly report a bitter truth. Defector writers are good at sports, or at least better than us.
And so 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. 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 coexist 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? For On the Media, I'm Michael Langer. And that's the show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, Candice Wong, and Suzanne Gaber, with help from Sean Merchant, our technical directors, Jennifer Munson. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.