Questions to consider when starting a news cooperative — and ways it’s helped journalists rethink their own work

As generative artificial intelligence (and the subsequent funds that accompany it) grows in favor with publishers — leading to more labor outsourced toward programs like ChatGPT — journalists’ work is increasingly being devalued by the people who purport to keep them employed. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas  found 3,520 broadcast, digital, and print workers lost their jobs by October’s end — up 31% from job cuts in the first half of 2023 and the most since 2020.

But the growing rise of journalism worker-led publications — in many different iterations, from local news to national culture reporting to industry coverage — can be one reason for hope. 

Cooperatives create more space for a non-hierarchical power structure (though not all are non-hierarchical) that ensures knowledge isn’t “above anyone’s pay grade”, showing democracy at work at a newsroom level. And the cooperative model isn’t new, though most of the over 30,000 co-ops in the United States are in the agricultural industry.

“I think worker coops in journalism show that, as much as it feels like it, journalism isn’t over,” Riley McLeod, one of the co-founders of Aftermath, told me. “People still want to read the kind of work media owners seem hell-bent on destroying.”

Or, more pragmatically, as Defector writer-owner Israel Daramola puts it: “I do think it’s the future —  in a sense that there is going to come a point where it’s the only way you can … have an effective website anymore is to have one that’s worker-owned.”

Workers at three co-operatives, all with varying scopes of coverage — Aftermath, Defector, and RANGE Media — spoke with me about the work of starting a co-op and how it changed their perspective toward journalism.

What kind of culture do you want to create? 

Many worker-owned news outlets formed in response to business decisions above workers’ heads that resulted in their original publications shuttering or laying off workers en masse. 

“Us and everyone who inspired us just wanted to do good journalism and found that increasingly challenging thanks to our owners, so we decided to see if we could run a better company ourselves,” McLeod said.

He and the other Aftermath founders had all worked together at Kotaku, formerly a Gawker Media publication that was taken over by a private equity firm, “with predictably bad results.” Eventually, they started Aftermath in November 2023. 

Defector formed after its private equity owners destroyed Deadspin. The same story holds true for Discourse Blog, which grew out of sibling site Splinter also shut down by Gawker’s private equity owners. The 51st, which covers local news in Washington, D.C., formed out of the second gutting of DCist, a blog purchased and then closed by WAMU, D.C.’s NPR affiliate. Flytrap Media came from the growing decimation of feminist blogs and reporting, including Bitch Media and Jezebel. Vice shuttering its gaming vertical, Waypoint (which it is now attempting to resurrect), resulted in Remap Radio; its handling of its technology vertical, Motherboard, resulted in former workers creating  tech site 404. The Appeal’s workers also took over from its original ownership team in 2021 after it ran out of money. 

Starting a cooperative has placed agency back in workers’ hands, especially after having their livelihoods yanked around by people making much more than them failing to properly communicate and lead a newsroom. But it also requires exercising potentially unfamiliar muscles, because you’re creating an entire organization and culture from scratch. 

“As the saying goes, ‘Someone has to wash the dishes in the revolution,’” McLeod said. “But there’s no dish-washing department in the org you start, so you really want to think about those metaphorical dishes and have a group understanding for how to get them washed before they become a problem.” 

Luke Baumgarten, a worker-owner of RANGE Media, which covers the Pacific Northwest with a focus on Spokane, WA, says creating a cooperative has also pushed him to think more expansively — especially since RANGE wasn’t formed in the wake of a specific Spokane newsroom shuttering. 

“Is it just, ‘I’m creating a really amazing job for myself?’ or ‘Am I creating a really amazing job for an entire newsroom?’” he said. 

Who’s doing what and what tools do you need? 

Another benefit of cooperatives is their ability to create greater flexibility for exploration across different mediums, since there are fewer bureaucratic hoops to jump through. 

“I think if more organizations didn’t try to put people into such small boxes, then more people, more young reporters, and more journalists would fully live up to their potential — and that’s something that cooperative work can do,” added Valerie Osier, also a worker-owner at RANGE Media. 

So an audience engagement editor, like Osier, can also chart a path back to doing more reporting and vice versa. 

But running a newsroom from scratch includes nitty-gritty details, including business logistics and editorial management beyond just crafting social plans and building editorial calendars. That means it can be a learning experience for journalists who have only ever done reporting prior to joining or forming a cooperative. 

Still, Sean Kuhn, who is among those handling said logistics at Defector, does say that modeling a cooperative as a subscription business — like Defector does — is “not rocket science.” 

“The hard work was done up front by the writing being excellent and having a large audience,” he said. “It just takes some unglamorous work like … spending a chunk of each day answering customer service emails or … going back and forth on edits to marketing copy on a subscription appeal.” 

Plus, platforms like Beehiiv and Substack have made it easier for cooperatives to start a web presence now compared to when Defector was founded. 

McLeod echoes that you don’t need millions of dollars and an MBA to jumpstart a cooperative: “There is no secret that CEOs and business people know that you can’t figure out your own version of. There is an astonishing amount of ticky-tacky legal and financial stuff that makes my head spin, but there are lawyers and accountants who can help you with that.”

How do you want to be funded? 

There is a demand for worker-owned news — borne out in the successful crowdfunding that has bolstered The 51st and Flytrap Media, among many of the other currently operating journalism cooperatives. Much of it has been primarily reader-funded, instead of drawing on venture capital or philanthropic funding. 

“Rich owners might have the names and the platforms and all the money, but they can’t own the things that matter to us and our readers,” McLeod said. “We can do it without them.”

Tom Ley, Defector’s editor-in-chief, said one of the first times he realized a cooperative would be feasible was after he and many of the Defector co-founders quit Deadspin, when a former editor tweeted “If you want to buy the staff a drink, Venmo this account.”

“We got somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 of just readers giving us money,” he said. “Months later, when we were thinking if we could prop up something like this with direct reader subscriptions, it felt like a good data point to have.” 

Dave McKenna, another Defector writer-owner, recalled an earlier precursor of Defector — a pop-up blog called “Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog” — receiving $50,000 in support. 

That reader funding in a cooperative structure also creates more thoughtfulness around coverage and responsibility, Ley said. 

“The money doesn’t belong to anybody else [like a corporate owner] — it just belongs to us, and however you spend it, however the company conducts itself,” he said. “I don’t have all these pressures coming from someone who doesn’t actually care about the website that I then have to transmit to the staff in some sugar-coated way.” 

What is your responsibility to each other and your readers? 

Because there’s no longer the stratification of information based on roles, Daramola with Defector said, it creates more onus to work together to make the site the best they can, “because it’s in our best interest to do so.” 

But there’s still work to do in the cooperative space, both in terms of systemic support for starting cooperatives and the people who want to work at them. 

There’s no “cooperative incubator” akin to the Institute of Nonprofit News, Google News Institute, or Listening Post Collective programming, meaning communication across publications has been crucial — McLeod, Baumgarten, and Osier all cited Defector as an inspiration and a resource as they’ve puzzled out the particulars of their specific coops. 

And workers across all three cooperatives — Aftermath, RANGE Media, and Defector — mentioned being open to and consistently having conversations about how to make worker-owned news work, both with people agnostic about them and already in them. 

“Everyone I know really thinks about this stuff a lot, but I’m not sure we’ve found solutions for it yet,” McLeod said. “Even the most successful worker-owned outlets don’t have enough money to give jobs to all the journalists who need them. There’s no denying that name recognition helps a lot in this space, so where does that leave writers without that, or who are just starting out? How do we actually foster and support the next generation of journalists?” 

Defector does have an internship program, and many cooperatives aim to pay and publish freelancers. Plus, the Reynolds Journalism Institute just launched a toolkit in partnership with worker-led The Appeal for newsrooms who want to include their journalists in the decisions that impact their lives and work. 

“It feels like everyone in this space wants everyone else to succeed, and wants to see people take a chance at starting a new outlet,” McLeod added. “There might not be a lot of money to go around, but there is just so much goodwill and support, and that’s been really inspiring to me.”

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Cite this article

Salanga, James (2025, Jan. 9). At journalism co-operatives, worker-owners take news into their own hands. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/at-journalism-co-operatives-worker-owners-take-news-into-their-own-hands/