Several nonprofit models are leading the industry routinely investing in consequential investigative journalism at a time when the scope of so many of their peers seems to be shrinking—including Mother Jones, ProPublica, and The City—the last of which staved off its own bout of potential layoffs in 2023 by giving its employees the option to take a group pay cut. And other emerging media models are earning their own wins: HellGate and Defector have both maintained consistent workflows under an employee-owned framework.
Medill, meanwhile, notes that where hedge funds are evacuating the industry, family-owned companies are stepping in, reclaiming papers that haven’t shuttered—though those operations aren’t nearly as profitable as they were during the 1990s. In the last five years, 164 news startups have launched, with private, non-traded, locally owned outlets maintaining their staff and revenues the best.
On the occasion of The Messenger’s collapse, Defector’s Chris Thompson took stock of the $50 million that Jimmy Finkelstein set on fire and used his own outlet as an example of what’s possible. “Readers of Defector’s annual report will note that operating Defector over its most recent fiscal year cost about $4.4 million,” he wrote, noting that this sum paid for “a 23-person editorial staff and a(n extremely overworked) two-person operations team,” benefits for the full timers, lots of freelance work, and all manner of operating expenses.