How Worker-Owned News Outlets Are Changing the Media Industry
For growing numbers of media companies, employee ownership offers journalistic freedom and job stability.
This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.
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The arrival of COVID-19 in the United States kicked off an ongoing period of job insecurity within the media industry. In April 2020, the New York Times reported that about 37,000 news company employees had been laid off, furloughed, or had their salaries reduced since March of that year.
This instability was still evident in 2024, with media outlets like the Los Angeles Times, the Messenger, and HuffPost undergoing major layoffs and closures.
An October 2024 report from the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, Inc. found that 13,279 media jobs had been cut that year. This included 3,520 cuts in the broadcast, digital, and print news industry—the most since 2020. Companies cited cost-cutting, business closures, and poor market and economic conditions as the main reasons for this downsizing.
According to Andy Challenger, a senior vice president at Challenger, Gray and Christmas. “[T]he news business… [has] changed with ad revenue being captured by Google and Facebook at such a high percentage. Now, artificial intelligence could potentially affect jobs in the news industry as well, particularly for reporting that is based on data, like sports reporting or certain financial reporting,” states a 2024 Columbia Journalism Review article.
Job insecurity has helped spur the rise of worker-owned journalism cooperatives like Flaming Hydra, Aftermath, Racket, and RANGE. According to the Poynter Institute, “[a]t least six worker-centered [news] outlets launched in 2024 alone.”
Emanuel Maiberg is a worker-owner at 404 Media, a “journalist-founded digital media company exploring the ways technology is shaping—and is shaped by—our world.” Before co-founding the company, he was the executive editor at VICE Magazine’s technoscience publication, Motherboard. He and three other former Motherboard employees launched 404 Media in August of 2023—three months after VICE filed for bankruptcy.
“We didn’t like how the company was operating at that point, and we decided to make a go of it on our own,” Maiberg says. “Given our experience at VICE and constantly having to advocate for our journalism to businesspeople and advertising people, we wanted a company owned by journalists.”
This journalist-owned business model frees cooperatives like 404 from many restrictions that non-worker-owned media outlets face. For instance, in 2023, a cyberattack shut down several of MGM Resorts International’s services in Las Vegas and other locales. The “unauthorized third party” accessed the personal information of some of the company’s customers.
“What you want to do at that moment is get someone on the ground who can report what is happening from where it is happening,” Maiberg says. “When you’re [working for] a big company like VICE and you want to do something like that, you have to go through several levels of approval [such as] your manager, your manager’s manager, and people in charge of budget, HR, and travel. That slows you down, and a lot of people want to say no because they have different priorities for what the money should be spent on. When you work at a small, worker-owned company, if the story can be better if we send someone there, we can just do it. When [the MGM hack] happened, my colleague Jason got on the plane that day and went to Las Vegas.”
Like 404 Media, Defector is a worker-owned journalism cooperative founded by former staff members of a large media outlet. “Many of us used to work at Deadspin, the sports website at G/O Media (formerly Gizmodo Media Group, and before that Gawker Media),” Defector’s website explains. “In October of 2019, new private equity ownership took over and tried to make us ‘stick to sports’—despite that violating the very spirit of Deadspin—and fired deputy editor Barry Petchesky on the spot. In response, the rest of the editorial staff quit in solidarity.”
When Defector launched in 2020, Editor-in-Chief Tom Ley wrote, “Who ultimately wins when publications start acting less like purpose-driven institutions and more like profit drivers, primarily tasked with achieving exponential scale at any cost? What material good is produced when private equity goons go on cashing their checks while simultaneously slashing payroll throughout their newsrooms? Things have gotten so bad that even publications that get away with defining themselves as anti-establishment are in fact servile to authority in all forms and exist for the sole purpose of turning their readers into a captive source of profit extraction.”
The 2021 paper “Impact of Media Ownership on News Coverage” highlighted how corporate ownership can compromise journalistic integrity, noting that “media conglomerates may place greater emphasis on profits, with media coverage reflecting the financial interests of its owners.” Similarly, a 2025 study published in the International Journal of Communication found “overwhelming evidence that ownership influences journalistic content.”
In January 2025, ScienceBlog.com presented an example of the journalistic bias and homogenization that can occur within non-employee-owned media outlets. A study of almost 290,000 articles about earnings announcements showed that news sources owned by the same companies “often present similar coverage of financial events.” Flora Sun, assistant professor of accounting at Binghamton University’s School of Management, explained, “You might be subscribing to 10 newspapers or online news websites, but the information you’re getting might be pretty similar, and all those sources happen to be owned by a common media company.”
This situation has been exacerbated by the fact that only six corporations control almost all of the media in the United States, according to a 2024 article by Motley Fool.
Rather than relying on corporate funding, outlets like 404 Media and Defector earn revenue from paid reader subscriptions. Many employee-owned media companies also take little or no money from advertisers. For instance, in 2023, Morning Brew reported that Defector got 95 percent of its revenue from subscribers during its first year [2020], and “outside of a few small, DTC brands, the company was focusing on other areas of the business rather than advertising; a year later, Defector said it had ‘largely stopped’ running ads on its site and in its newsletters.”
In 2025, Brett White, the editor-in-chief of the employee-owned entertainment news outlet Pop Heist, told Poynter he was “very adamant against on-site advertising.” He added, “Just as much as corporate interests and the Google algorithm notification of everything has ruined pop culture journalism, I think ads have as well.”
Besides helping journalists avoid pressure from advertisers and corporate overseers, employee ownership can boost job security. According to a 2022 study published by IZA World of Labor, worker-owned companies “have more stability, higher survival rates, and fewer layoffs in recessions.”
This business model has brought financial success for Defector, whose annual report for September 2023 to August 2024 showed a total revenue of $4,600,000. Meanwhile, the Nieman Journalism Lab reported in 2024 that Hell Gate “doubled its subscription revenue in its second year as a worker-owned news outlet.” Hell Gate, which launched in 2022, attributes this “growth to its hard paywall and a website redesign that made subscribing easier.”
Maiberg explains that each member of 404 Media owns an equal percentage of the company. “[When we founded this group,] our theory was that if journalists own the company, journalism leads the business, and we publish good articles, people will want to pay us for them. So far, it’s working.”
As co-owners of the business, 404 Media’s members make all their decisions by consensus. “It’s not like if it’s three against one, we go with the three,” Maiberg notes.
He adds that all the company’s members were active in VICE’s editorial union before starting 404. Rather than taking votes, the union’s 12-person bargaining committee “talked about issues until we arrived at a decision we were all comfortable with.” 404 continues to use that model. “Even if it takes time, I think it’s better to [find] something that everyone feels good about than have one person be sour about a decision they were voted down on.”
