Journalism coops seem utopian. What’s it like working in one?

Defector almost didn’t exist.

When 19 former Deadspin staffers — who’d resigned in November 2019 after parent company G/O Media told them to “stick to sports” — decided to launch a new website, “we looked at more traditional forms of funding,” Jasper Wang, 38, vice president of revenue and operations, told me. “We talked to all the venture capitalists in New York media, and we had some offers.”

The pandemic changed Defector’s course. New York shut down, the economy ground to a halt, and the offers of capital dried up. So the group decided to launch a new website on their own dime, this time structured as a worker-owned cooperative in which the journalists, rather than media executives, made all the decisions. The site became the kind of success that’s rare in digital media nowadays, bringing in $3.2 million in revenue from over 40,000 paying subscribers in its first year alone. It struck gold a second time in 2022 with the podcast Normal Gossip, which hit 100,000 downloads per episode just six months in and now averages about half a million downloads per episode. And it inspired a wave of worker-owned outlets across the country, covering science and gaming and local news from coast to coast.

Worker-owned media cooperatives (which I’m just going to call “coops” for the rest of this story) have existed for a long time; some, like Mexican daily newspaper La Jornada, are decades old. But the surge of digital coops in the United States in recent years — I counted at least 18 that have launched in the last five years — is a sign of the media times: as legacy and early-digital outlets shrink, shutter, get stripped for parts by private equity companies, or are transformed by the whims of billionaire owners, more journalists, tired of trying to find a port in the storm that may only provide a year or two of shelter, are building their own ships.

To some of those tired, overworked journalists, coops may look almost utopian — promising the agency and creative freedom you get from a personal newsletter, but with added structure and, in some cases, editors, salaries, and health insurance. And they give journalists a say in the future of their company.

But how does the promise play out in practice? What is the everyday experience of working at a journalism coop like — and how does that change depending on size, scope, and location?

To find out, I talked to worker-owners at six coops across the country. In the same way that it isn’t fair to compare the experience of working for The New York Times to the experience of working at a small local newspaper, Defector is unusual in its size, reach, and financial stability. What worked there would not necessarily work at other places, as they readily admitted in their fifth annual report (“Starting any new venture is difficult, but the conditions that Defector launched under were practically Easy Mode compared to today’s media environment.”)

“We want to devolve power to the people who are closest to the problem and its potential solution,” said Luke Baumgarten, 45, founder and publisher of Range and one of the members of the Spokane Workers Coop’s oversight board. “We try to do our best to treat the folks on those teams as experts and let them cook.”

At Defector, every staff member serves on a committee — dedicated to company culture, revenue, or events, for example — that meets regularly. (The managerial board has two permanent seats for Ley and Wang, while three rotating seats are filled by election.) Especially big decisions, like firing a staff member or the company taking on a loan greater than $50,000, are subject to an all-staff vote that requires a two-thirds majority to pass.

This does, however, mean that an already-busy journalist might end up having a lot more meetings on their calendar if they work at a coop. “Running an organization is a lot of work, especially if you have any level of commitment to horizontal governance,” Pinto said. “All of the clichés about movement organizing are true. What does it mean to herd a bunch of cats into all running the same direction? There are only so many models of that. And they all involve a lot of meetings. We spend a lot of time doing that stuff, and that’s time that we could be spending doing journalism. So that is one of the tradeoffs of worker ownership.”

Giving workers decision-making power changes the kinds of pressure bearing down on an editor-in-chief, Ley said. At publications like Deadspin, Ley got pressure from all kinds of people outside the editorial department — ad executives, sales departments, CEOs, board members — whose primary motivation was, in essence, to make traffic numbers go up. Ley would then have to translate those demands to his staff, even if he didn’t agree with them.

“The application of pressure is somewhat reversed now,” Ley, 37, told me. “Here, I’m only responsible to the staff. I don’t worry about what someone above me thinks about my job performance; I only worry about what everyone around me thinks. What I’m communicating to them [about editorial priorities] is just a reaction to the things I’m hearing from them, which is nice because it maintains that coop spirit. They know it’s not bullshit that I’m trying to repackage.”

If Ley’s colleagues think he’s doing a really terrible job, they can call a vote to replace him or Wang. The flip side of that kind of agency and lack of management pressure, Ley pointed out, is that it means the team as a whole has to be more self-motivated for the business to succeed.

“It’s not for everyone,” Rachelle Hampton, 29, the current host of Defector’s Normal Gossip, told me. “I’m a process-ass bitch. I love structure. If I was less self-directed, I’d probably be freaking out.”

Humans and their relations

Pinto acknowledged that while the vision at Hell Gate has always been to be primarily, if not exclusively, subscriber-funded — in part because of a “profound mistrust of the consistency of philanthropic interest” — the company has received support from a number of [philanthropic] donors that has helped them reach “something closer to a break-even point.”

While Hell Gate’s 2025 annual report doesn’t provide the same sort of detailed breakdown as Defector’s, it brought in “nearly $70,000” in monthly recurring revenue as of September, while it cost an average of $81,000 per month to run the newsroom (monthly recurring revenue fluctuates with subscriber numbers, and Hell Gate made less than $70,000 some months). The Hell Gate staff is mostly full-time, and Hell Gate fully funds their health insurance premiums; those costs, along with staff salaries makes up the majority of their expenses. Pinto told me that the outlet was profitable in 2025.

“To talk about only the finances completely discounts the satisfaction that I get from working with my three cofounders,” Sequencer’s Bender told me. “We’re doing this not to make money, necessarily. There are times when I really struggle in my day job, or while seeing what’s happening to science at large, and the Sequencer team are the people that I come back to…I do think there’s a case to be made for reassessing what a dream job in science journalism looks like.” Science reporting positions have been disappearing at publications big and small, and the ones that are left might not be the most creatively fulfilling. Instead, Bender said, while a day job could provide stability, “maybe [something like Sequencer] is how you can harness your joy.”

The coop structure allows worker-owners to “manage your money with your values,” MacLeod told me. The Aftermath team once received an email from a college student asking them not to publish anything “weird or horny” until a certain time or date, so that the student could prove to their professor that it was a reputable publication. The team complied; MacLeod even followed up with the student to make sure that everything went smoothly (it did).

“People are really enthusiastic about this project in a way they weren’t about my previous work,” said Coyote’s Ho, who used to work at the San Francisco Chronicle. “I think I have a much less pained relationship with my readers now.”

The reader relationship changes in other ways, too. “I feel like I’m learning a lot about parasocial relationships,” said Edwards, who joined Hell Gate in March 2025. “I get recognized because of the [Hell Gate] podcast, and people really feel like they know us…I actually think it’s our weirdness, and our individual quirks, that actually make this thing work as well as it does.”

“Gawker Media had its issues,” Ley said, “but I guess my dream would be something recreating that sort of spirit. If I woke up tomorrow and the Defector subscriber base had doubled, I would be like, ‘Oh, this is awesome. Should we start another website under the Defector Media umbrella?”

For now, however, the Defector team is mostly focused on doing what it knows. They launched two new podcasts, Try Hard and Only If You Get Caught, last fall, and acquired a third, Nothing But Respect, last summer. Imbler says they are also working on writing more “growth blogs” — the kinds of things that might draw in readers who don’t otherwise read Defector on the regular.

Range, which has seen some success with TikTok and Instagram Reels, plans to lean into those platforms, as well as putting on more in-person events — which Defector and Hell Gate also plan to do. Coyote, meanwhile, is planning to launch a classified section called Meet Cute Market later this year. Hell Gate in particular has a big year ahead: a grant from longtime media donor Ruth Ann Harnisch will cover two years of rent for a podcast studio and office space, which they intend to use for more livestreams and podcasts, and they also plan to expand their team.

In the end, what the media cooperatives are building may not look — to the average reader, at least — very different from all the publications that came before, and in many ways that is the entire point. The difference is in what practically every worker I spoke to mentioned: a workplace that puts its workers over profits. At the end of January, for example, Ley wrote a short obituary for his colleague Dan McQuade, who had been diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2024. For the rest of the week, the home page was filled primarily with McQuade’s writing, some of which had been written years before. It was the kind of editorial decision that probably wouldn’t have flown at a more traditional outlet, which would otherwise have been subjected to the pressures of the news cycle. But that was what the workers at Defector wanted to do with their website, and so that was what they did.

“Hell Gate was born of a reaction to institutions that did not serve us or, we believed, our readers,” Pinto said. “To the extent that we are anti-institutional, we are trying to build an institution that can house that feeling in a lasting way. And that’s just a different kind of work.”

“The idea,” he continued, “is that this lives forever. As long as people want to work at Hell Gate, we want there to be a Hell Gate for them to work at.”

This article has been updated to correct some details about roles and finances at Hell Gate.