Silver said on Tuesday that he expects to leave the politics and sports news site when his contract ends this summer. Several others at FiveThirtyEight — including deputy managing editor Chadwick Matlin, sports editor Neil Paine, senior audience editor Meena Ganesan, senior science reporter (and 2015 Nieman Fellow) Maggie Koerth, business operations manager Vanessa Diaz, and senior designer Emily Scherer — announced they were affected by layoffs, too.

Disney layoffs have substantially impacted FiveThirtyEight. I am sad and disappointed to a degree that’s kind of hard to express right now. We’ve been at Disney almost 10 years. My contract is up soon and I expect that I’ll be leaving at the end of it.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 25, 2023

I had been worried about an outcome like this and so have had some great initial conversations about opportunities elsewhere. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. I am so proud of the work of FiveThirtyEight staff. It has never been easy. I’m so sorry to the people impacted by this.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 25, 2023

FiveThirtyEight — named, of course, after the number of electors in the U.S. electoral college — has its roots in the “Community” section of the liberal news site Daily Kos, where, in 2007, a 29-year-old baseball statistician named Nate Silver began writing posts about the 2008 U.S. presidential election under the username “poblano.”1

Silver launched FiveThirtyEight as its own blog in March 2008, and in the general election that year, his model correctly predicted the results in 49 out of the 50 states, as well as all 35 winners of the U.S. Senate races. The early, wondering coverage of Silver’s work frequently invoked magic. “Silver’s box of tricks sounds baffling, laced as it is with talk of regressions, half-lives and Monte Carlo analysis,” The Guardian’s editorial board wrote in 2008.” The New York Times, announcing its FiveThirtyEight “partnership” in 2010, referred to Silver a “statistical wizard.” FiveThirtyEight quickly became a massive traffic driver for the Times, where his presence provided fodder for then-public editor Margaret Sullivan. (He is now the frequent subject of discussion by the Times’ current public editor, Twitter.)

In 2013, Silver left The New York Times (Sullivan wrote about that, too) and took FiveThirtyEight to ESPN. Under parent company Disney, it was transferred from ESPN to ABC News in 2018 as ESPN sought to distance itself from political commentary, and has operated from there since.

When Silver leaves ABC News, he’ll leave behind the FiveThirtyEight trade name, but his models will go with him. “The models are licensed to them and the license term is concurrent with my contract,” he confirmed to Nieman Lab in a message. “They have limited rights to some models post–license term, but not the core election forecast stuff.”

Van Scott, ABC News’ vice president of publicity, said in a statement that “ABC News remains dedicated to data journalism with a core focus on politics, the economy and enterprise reporting — this streamlined structure will allow us to be more closely aligned with our priorities for the 2024 election and beyond. We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the team members who will be departing the organization and know they will continue to make an important impact on the future of journalism.”

Not mentioned in that statement: Sports or science, both of which are key verticals on the current FiveThirtyEight.

I think the big biz question with this is, what happens to the 538 models in late JUNE when the contract and licenses expire? Almost an election year… https://t.co/sYZeXN195p

— Clare Malone (@ClareMalone) April 25, 2023

Horserace always tends to suck up the oxygen, but the FiveThirtyEight crew has done a metric ton of smart, thoughtful work on data, politics and society. Sending good thoughts to everyone affected. https://t.co/qUoDpGURSS

— Ariel Edwards-Levy (@aedwardslevy) April 25, 2023

Buzzfeed News and FiveThirtyEight are huge organizational leaders in data transparency and reproducibility, ie. sharing your work. It’s a sad time for data journalism.

— Andrew Ba Tran (@abtran) April 25, 2023

1. Bill Kristol, writing in The New York Times opinion section in February 2008: “An interesting regression analysis at the Daily Kos Web site (poblano.dailykos.com) of the determinants of the Democratic vote so far, applied to the demographics of the Ohio electorate, suggests that Obama has a better chance than is generally realized in Ohio.”

BuzzFeed News’s first few years were a time of global expansion and excitement. This is the era when Stratechery’s Ben Thompson called BuzzFeed “the most important news organization in the world.”

But there were warning signs. In 2017, BuzzFeed was receiving more than 50% of its traffic from platforms — setting it up for trouble when the algorithms changed and social traffic to news sites plummeted. And the public always seemed to have a hard time distinguishing the Pulitzer-winning BuzzFeed *News* from cat-video BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed, like many other digital publishers, went through multiple rounds of layoffs. When the company went public, its stock price began falling almost immediately, and investors pushed for BuzzFeed News to be eliminated entirely.

“Investors can’t force me to cut news, and the union can’t force me to subsidize news,” CEO Jonah Peretti wrote in an internal memo in spring 2022. But, he added, “We can’t keep losing money.”

Just about a year later, he announced that BuzzFeed News would be shut down.

[Part I: 2011 to 2017]

In a memo to staff on Thursday, Peretti announced that BuzzFeed News would be shut down entirely, amid broader layoffs at the company. From now on, “we will have a single news brand in HuffPost, which is profitable,” Peretti wrote. As of Thursday afternoon, BuzzFeed stock was trading below $1 a share.

We’ve chronicled the ups and downs of BuzzFeed News since 2011, when the company hired a blogger named Ben Smith. Here’s part I of its history, from 2011 to 2017. (And here’s Part II.)

NewsMatch is the annual end-of-year fundraising campaign that uses gift-matching to encourage donations to nonprofit newsrooms. In 2022, the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN)-backed program secured $4.6 million in matching funds from national, regional, and interest-based funders.

The 303 participating newsrooms — all members of INN — then turned around and leveraged those commitments into $5.5 million in matching funds from small businesses, local philanthropists, and community foundations in their area.

Courtney Lewis, chief of growth programs for INN, has managed NewsMatch since 2020. She called this year’s tilt toward local funders “a more sustainable funding solution” for journalism.

NewsMatch has used growth in individual giving as a central marker of success, but Lewis implemented “a strategic shift” in 2020 toward thinking about the end-of-year program as an opening for newsrooms to form relationships with more local and issue-based funders. The program now provides training and financial incentives to nudge newsrooms toward securing local matches.

Since 2016, NewsMatch campaigns have helped to raise more than $270 million for nonprofit newsrooms that belong to INN. The vast majority of INN members participate in NewsMatch — about 300 of roughly 400 total members. Those who opt out tend to be more established nonprofit newsrooms — those “beyond the startup phase” and blessed with larger budgets, Lewis said.

Smaller and newer outlets “rely on NewsMatch for more than just matching gifts they can leverage for support from their communities,” Lewis said, including training, advice, and other resources.

Across the 303 participating newsrooms, NewsMatch brought in $38 million in individual donations from more than 231,000 unique donors in 2022. The largest 50 newsrooms brought in $24 million of the $38 million total, Lewis said, and the median amount raised from individuals across all newsroom was roughly $36,000.

While philanthropic investment rose this year, the amount raised from individuals dipped in 2022. In 2020, NewsMatch recorded more than a million donations from nearly 434,000 unique donors. Two years later, those numbers have dropped to 344,000 donations from 231,000 donors. How concerned should nonprofit newsrooms be about some of these downward trends?

Lewis noted that the NewsMatch results line up with giving trends across the entire nonprofit sector. In 2022, the total number of charitable donors declined 7.1% from the year before even as total revenue increased, according to data from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project.

“The bulk of the decreases were among the 50 participating newsrooms with the largest budgets, but we continue to see growth among smaller newsrooms,” Lewis told me. “For newsrooms with operating budgets under $2 million, the total amount raised and average amount raised per newsroom were up over last year.”

I asked Lewis where she sees room for improvement in NewsMatch. What is looking like fertile ground to INN’s chief of growth programs? She pointed to funders and foundations that may not have previously funded journalism before.

“This year, the Joyce Foundation contributed to a regional NewsMatch partner fund because bringing quality news to these communities aligns with the foundation’s philanthropic priority: advancing racial equity and economic mobility in the Great Lakes region,” Lewis said. (The Joyce Foundation gave $50,000 in matching funds to 10 newsrooms in 2022, including the Detroit-based Outlier Media.) “I anticipate we’ll see more placed-based and issue funders recognizing that providing news as a public service complements their mission.”

A little over a year after its launch, the news site Grid is being absorbed into The Messenger, a forthcoming news site that plans to employ 550 journalists within a year while changing “the face of the media landscape.”

What is Grid?

The Washington, D.C.–based Grid launched in January 2022 with a mission to provide a “fuller picture” around big news stories. “Grid is meant for people like you and me who follow the news but want something more,” cofounder and executive editor Laura McGann, the former politics editor of Vox.com and Politico, wrote at launch. The site touted its “creative formats,” like the “360,” which would examine news stories via “multiple lenses, including science, economics, misinformation, the law, politics, technology, identity and global.”

Grid’s “About us” page currently lists 50 staffers, including 13 reporters, and publishes around 5 stories a day. McGann also hosts a weekly podcast, “Bad Takes,” with editor-at-large Matthew Yglesias, and the site has one daily and three weekly newsletters.

Grid CEO and cofounder Mark Bauman stepped down last November amid what Axios’s Sara Fischer described as “slow revenue growth” and struggles to build an audience.

Second part of the release: As part of the deal, the UAE-based fund IMI has invested in the parent company of the Messenger pic.twitter.com/dHryUf3lBn

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) March 22, 2023

What is The Messenger?

The Messenger is a forthcoming digital news site founded by Jimmy Finkelstein, the wealthy 74-year-old media entrepreneur and former owner of The Hill. Finkelstein has raised $50 million to launch the site this May.

The Messenger’s LinkedIn page describes it as

a new digital news media company, launching May 2023, whose mission is to deliver accurate, balanced, non-partisan news and information. Powered by one of the largest digital newsrooms in the country, The Messenger’s coverage will span news, politics and all our readers’ most important passion points, from sports and entertainment to technology, health and business.

Finkelstein recently told The New York Times that he hopes The Messenger (aka TheMessenger.) will recreate the media of the past:

“I remember an era where you’d sit by the TV, when I was a kid with my family, and we’d all watch ‘60 Minutes’ together. Or we all couldn’t wait to get the next issue of Vanity Fair or whatever other magazine you were interested in. Those days are over, and the fact is, I want to help bring those days back.”

From The Messenger’s website:

The Messenger is founded on the belief that it is not our role to shape or alter the news, it is our role to deliver the news with an unflinching dedication to accuracy, balance and objectivity. In doing so, we aim to earn your trust and rekindle your passion for media.

What do Grid employees think about the acquisition?

A Grid spokesperson directed me to The Messenger’s spokesperson. No Grid employees are quoted in The Messenger’s Wednesday press release, which was tweeted by Semafor media reporter Max Tani. I could not find any Grid employees tweeting about the news.

“Grid has built a successful and impressive news site that reaches an influential audience and we are thrilled to be associated with their brand and talented team,” Finkelstein said in a statement.

The Grid had a lot of employees. Will The Messenger be really big?

If The Messenger keeps all 50 Grid staffers on*, they will make up less than 10 percent of the staffers that Finkelstein claims his site will have within a year. From a recent New York Times piece by Ben Mullin:

Financed with $50 million in investor money, the site will start with at least 175 journalists stationed in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, executives say. But in a year, Mr. Finkelstein said, he plans to have around 550 journalists, about as many as The Los Angeles Times.

I'm sorry, but I just keep coming back to the idea that The Messenger (@Messenger_Now) is going to have a 550-journalist newsroom in a year, and how absolutely, hilariously insane that ishttps://t.co/mdLLLdsWAZ

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) March 16, 2023

*The Messenger has not committed to keeping all 50 Grid staffers on. Messenger spokeswoman Kimberly Bernhardt told me, “We look forward to taking on the majority of Grid employees over the coming weeks.”

How much money does The Messenger plan to make?

Here’s the Times again:

Richard Beckman, a former president of The Hill and Condé Nast who will be The Messenger’s president, said in an interview that the company planned to generate more than $100 million in revenue next year, primarily through advertising and events, with profitability expected that year.

To build its digital audience, the company has hired Neetzan Zimmerman, who has been a digital traffic maven at The Hill and Gawker Media, and is expecting more than 100 million monthly readers — an ambitious goal that would make it one of the most-read digital publications in the United States.

Zimmerman was also formerly editor-in-chief of the secret-sharing app Whisper. Beckman “is perhaps best known for a horrific ‘joke’ gone wrong,” per The New York Post.

Wow, 100 million monthly readers?

A “longtime media exec who is close to Finkelstein and Beckman” told The New York Post that the traffic goal is “delusional”: “It’s wishful thinking. They are a few ghosts from the past. If they were a public company, I wouldn’t invest in them.”

As someone who worked at The Daily, which had $60 million (in 2010 dollars) and the infrastructural support of both the Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch empires, I think $50 million and 175 employees to generate $100 million and 100 million readers **NEXT YEAR** sounds… lol. https://t.co/4i54AG5Q87

— claire howorth (@clairehoworth) March 22, 2023

So who is investing in them?

The United Arab Emirates, for one. (As Brian Morrissey wrote in his Substack last week: “These days, it’s hard to imagine any venture investor touching the media business. There’s a reason more media companies are rationalizing their decisions to turn to Middle East autocracies.”) Grid was tied to APCO Worldwide, “which is headquartered in D.C. but is a registered lobbyist for various clients in the UAE,” Politico reported last year. John Defeterios, an APCO senior advisor and former CNN anchor, was a member of Grid’s board. The Messenger’s Wednesday press release refers to the Abu Dhabi–based International Media Investments, which is reportedly tied to the UAE royal family, as Grid’s “primary investor,” and says a paragraph later that “Grid is owned by IMI.”

At any rate, IMI is now also investing in The Messenger. “We are proud of what we built at Grid and are now excited to be joining with The Messenger,” Nart Bouron, CEO of IMI, said in the release. “The move is part of IMI’s investment plan to invest in digital first products and content.”

As part of The Messenger's news re: acquiring @gridnews, it says Grid is "owned" by Abu Dhabi-based IMI & w deal, IMI will make minority investment in Messenger's parent
—Grid had 2 investors: IMI & Brian Edelman: It never said how much either invested, just that it was over $10M pic.twitter.com/i71oPIA8Cs

— Sara Fischer (@sarafischer) March 22, 2023

1/3 How do folks feel about UAE ownership of news outlets?
Genuine question – we turned down a (small) investment from a certain North Asian country because we felt long term it wasn't compatible with credible media, even though the chances they meddled would be minimal. https://t.co/FZXW2hDoPm

— John Fowler (@johnsnonsense) March 22, 2023

After all, who could ask for a better point of comparison? Alden is the perfect industry villain, a faceless private equity fund dedicated to nothing but cost-cutting and cashflow-draining. Its corporate website contains a total of 21 words, nine of which are “Alden,” “Global,” or “Capital.” It’s run by a secretive billionaire who last gave an interview in the 1980s — the sort of person who can own 15 mansions in Palm Beach and still think: I could really use a 16th.

It’s the type of company that inspires debates over whether “vulturous” is too kind of an adjective. If you’re writing an Atlantic cover story on “Who Killed America’s Newspapers?” Alden Global Capital will hand you the murder weapon, already dusted for prints.

Gannett, meanwhile, is at least a newspaper company, one more than a century old. It’s rarely been considered a particularly good one, mind you — its reputation for cheapness and cookie-cutter products go back decades. (As The New York Times described it in 1986: “a chain of mostly small and undistinguished, though highly profitable, newspapers.”) But it was at least a familiar name, run by news people and with at least some dedication to its civil role in hundreds of communities.

When Alden attempted a hostile takeover in 2019, anyone who cared about local news was put in the unfamiliar position of rooting for Gannett. Heck, if you squinted hard enough, Gannett could almost feel like the good guy. (If only because people like to believe there is a good guy in their industry, somewhere or another.)

But “we’re better than Alden!” has its limits as a brand promise, and Gannett’s most recent annual report drives home the fact that no company has done more to shrink local journalism than it has in recent years. Let’s total up the damage — in raw numbers, if not in stories unbroken and facts not uncovered.

Vaporizing a newspaper chain in four years

While Alden failed in its bid for Gannett in 2019, it sparked a wave of newspaper industry consolidation that some had foreseen for years. Within a few months, the two largest newspaper companies in the United States — No. 1 Gannett and No. 2 GateHouse — announced they were merging. The name would remain Gannett, but GateHouse execs were mostly left in charge.

At the end of 2018 — the last full pre-merger year — the two companies had roughly 24,338 employees in the United States and 27,600 worldwide. (Gannett also owns a small group of newspapers in the U.K.) The merger closed in mid-November 2019, by which time it had about 25,000 worldwide and was diving headlong into a hunt for “inefficiencies.”

By December 31, 2019, the combined company was down to 21,255 employees in the U.S. By the end of 2020, that had dropped to 18,141. A year later: 13,800. And its most recent SEC filing reports that, as of the end of 2022, Gannett had just 11,200 U.S. employees remaining (plus another roughly 3,000 overseas).

In other words, Gannett has eliminated more than half of its jobs in the United States in four years. It’s as if, instead of merging America’s two largest newspaper chains, one of them was simply wiped off the face of the earth.

That’s a cut substantially deeper than the rate of newspaper revenue decline. Why? Well, one reason is that to get the merger done, Gannett had to take out a giant loan at high interest rates, meaning hundreds of millions in revenues have had to be redirected to debt payments. To put it in perspective: In Q4 2022, digital subscriptions at Gannett newspapers — all of them — brought in a total of $35.5 million. But the company spent more than that, $47.3 million, just on debt payments. (This may remind you of Elon Musk’s ongoing evisceration of Twitter, driven by the same sort of M&A debt.)

You can also see the shrinkage in the number of newspapers Gannett publishes. In 2019, post-merger, it owned 261 daily and 302 weekly newspapers. By the end of 2022, those totals were 217 daily and 175 weekly newspapers. Some of that decline is Gannett selling a few newspapers to local buyers, but a lot of it is straight-up closures. Last spring, Gannett shuttered 24 weekly newspapers here in the Boston area alone.

Circulation has evaporated

Per capita newspaper circulation has been declining in the United States since World War II, so it’s hardly shocking that it’s still dropping. If you’re The New York Times, you’ve been able to more than make up for the loss in print subscribers with digital ones. But for most local newspapers, digital gains are nowhere big enough to stop the print bleeding.

Still, Gannett’s newspapers stand out for the steep angle of their decline.

An important caveat up front: Different newspaper companies use different standards and make different choices in the numbers they report. And those choices can change over time. Gannett has stopped reporting some of its digital subscribers to the Alliance for Audited Media, for example. And some papers still count many more non-paying readers than others. Comparisons across papers and years are always going to be imprecise — but these are the numbers they’re reporting to the industry body.

Here are Sunday circulation numbers for (pre-merger) Gannett’s largest local newspapers, according to the company’s own filings with AAM.

Let’s compare Q3 2018 to Q3 2022:

Every Gannett paper here saw a circulation decline of at least 52%. The average drop across these papers is an incredible 67%. [See update below.] They’ve lost two-thirds of their reported circulation in four years’ time.1

How bad is that? To find out, I assembled a comparison set of non-Gannett papers in other metro areas to see how their declines compared. These aren’t outlier successes like The New York Times — they’re metro dailies, most with chain or hedge fund owners, facing the same problems as everyone else in the business.

It’s a much better showing. Take The Seattle Times: It lost 62,000 print readers over this period — but it also gained 52,000 digital subscribers, making the overall trend lines tolerable.

There are plenty of explanations for the gap — but it’s hard not to believe that Gannett’s gutting of their editorial products hasn’t been a driving factor.

And I haven’t yet mentioned the most important Gannett paper: USA Today. In Q3 2018, USA Today reported a total daily circulation of 2,632,392. In its most recent filing, Q3 2022, that was down to 180,381. (For what it’s worth, that 2018 number was artificially inflated in a few ways, including counting the subscribers of some Gannett local newspapers. A fairer comparison might be just paid print circulation: 579,692 in 2018, 134,629 in 2022.)

I asked Gannett for comment on this decline, and a spokesperson sent this statement: “Gannett continues to make tremendous progress on our strategic priorities which include a focus on increasing digital growth. We have an increasingly engaged digital audience with digital-only subscription revenue growing nearly 30% year-over-year. Digital-only subscriptions grew to over 2 million during the fourth quarter of 2022. Since the second quarter of 2022, paid digital-only subscriptions have outnumbered full access or print subscriptions.”

Death by a thousand cuts

Let me finish by looking at a single Gannett paper — the one I grew up reading, The Daily Advertiser of Lafayette, Louisiana. It’s far from the company’s most important paper — No. 109 in circulation among Gannett’s dailies — but it’s important to me; I read it nearly every day. Lafayette is a city of 121,000 and the hub of a region of half a million people.

Here’s what’s happened to the Advertiser’s Sunday circulation since 2015. (Data is from Q3 of each year and as Gannett reported it to the Alliance for Audited Media.)

2015: 26,885
2016: 23,773
2017: 20,177
2018: 14,670
2019: 10,389
2020: 8,592
2021: 6,528
2022: 3,996 (plus a few hundred more)2

That’s an 85% decline since 2015. Those numbers include both print and digital — but maybe the digital trend is better? Let’s see:

2015: 1,421 digital subscribers
2016: 1,054
2017: 1,247
2018: 1,473
2019: 1,283
2020: 1,146
2021: 928
2022: 468 (plus a few hundred more)3

Yikes. All that decline has come amid round after round of Gannett budget cuts. You can debate the direction of causation: how much the cuts were driven by declining revenues, versus how much the declining revenues were driven by the cuts. But the end result is the same either way — a newspaper that is, today, an embarrassing product.

The Advertiser reported having 17 newsroom employees in 2020 and it still had a handful of people covering hard news as recently as last year. But a combination of cuts, buyouts, and escapes left it with exactly one local news reporter by January. Its staff directory is stuffed with reporters who left months ago. There are now days when zero news stories out of Lafayette are published. The copy hole is filled by stories from wires, Gannett’s one-reporter state capitol bureau, or other Gannett Louisiana papers (all of which look like thinly reskinned versions of each other). It misses obvious stories and runs press releases and error-filled copy. Its morning email is stuffed to overflowing with stories about LSU basketball, simply because Gannett actually has someone outside the Advertiser who covers LSU basketball.

The local college team in Lafayette is the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns, and they had a big weekend. On Monday, they won the Sun Belt men’s basketball tournament, meaning they will go on to March Madness and the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2014.

Was this mentioned in Tuesday’s newspaper? No. Was the fact they were even playing in the conference final mentioned in Monday’s newspaper? No. Probably the single biggest local sports story in the past year, and you wouldn’t know about it reading The Advertiser. (They eventually published a story online Tuesday morning — written by a sports reporter for the Gannett-owned Pensacola News-Journal, three states away.)

Speaking as a reader (and a grudging longtime digital subscriber), it’s just an abomination of a newspaper. Lafayette residents are lucky to have a few other options. The local TV stations, while nothing special, keep up with the usual TV news basics. A local nonprofit outlet named The Current does good work, but its small size means it has to pick its spots. Most importantly, the Baton Rouge paper, The Advocate, has invested in a Lafayette edition that does more Lafayette reporting than the actual Lafayette daily paper. In the five core Lafayette ZIP codes, The Advocate actually has more print subscribers than The Advertiser does (2,598 to 1,869).

But not every community is so lucky. When the local paper stops reporting, there’s often no one else to take its place. Everyone gets a little less informed about the world around them. And Gannett has increased local ignorance at a scale no other company can match. Maybe Alden Global Capital should be giving thanks for Gannett too, not just the other way around.

—

Update, March 10: A mea culpa. I originally referred in this section to “paying readers” and “paid readership” when quoting the circulation numbers Gannett (and other companies) file with the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM; formerly known as the Audit Bureau of Circulations, or ABC). I meant it to be an umbrella term bigger than “subscribers,” since the numbers also included single-copy readers who don’t subscribe. But the vagaries of circulation reporting mean that the totals publishers report both exclude some paying readers and include some non-paying readers. (More about that later.) That’s my mistake.

I’ve also updated the 2018 circulation number for the Detroit Free Press. The paper reported a “total combined average circulation” that year of 933,926, which is the number I’d used before. But to get to that outsized total, the Freep counted not just the regular newspaper but also something called Yes! Your Essential Shopper, a weekly free shopper thrown on porches around the region. (Some consider this genre of publication more litter than newspaper, but advertisers appreciate their larger reach versus a paid daily. Many metro newspapers have similar products — though in my experience most list them as separate publications for circulation-counting purposes, rather than lump them together with the main paper.) But between 2018 and 2022, the Free Press stopped counting Your Essential Shopper as part of its circulation, which increased the scale of the decline between those years. In order to make the comparison more parallel with the others, I’ve removed the shopper’s 716,455 copies from the Free Press total, bringing it down to 217,471. That change reduces the overall Gannett circulation carnage from 77% to 67%.

1. One nerd note: During this period, AAM tweaked how it counts digital subscriptions in such a way that it could reduce their numbers. (The less generous framing would be it made overcounting harder.) But this change affected all newspapers, not just Gannett’s, and the impact was not drastic.
2. Update, March 10: Note that this 2022 number does not include a certain type of digital sub known as a digital nonreplica edition. Gannett stopped reporting those publicly in 2022. In 2021, The Advertiser reported a digital nonreplica circulation of 348, so you can probably mentally add a similar number to the 3,996 number they reported for 2022.
3. Update, March 10: The same as above: You can probably add in another 350 or so to that 2022 number to make up for the digital subscriptions that Gannett has stopped reporting publicly.

All this is to say that a dedicated video game desk — or at least a dogged video game reporter — is an essential requirement for any newsroom dedicated to fluent coverage of pop culture. When Ilhan Omar is showing off a monster PC rig and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is playing “Among Us” as part of a voter registration drive, we’re certainly in the midst of a vibe shift. And yet, even as the hobby’s imprisoning nicheness crumbles, a ton of journalists on the games beat have suddenly found themselves out of jobs. The field is in the midst of a brutal, paradoxical contraction. The world’s power brokers are investing desperately in the games industry, but games media is another story entirely.

Last month, Launcher — The Washington Post’s gaming vertical that broke ground in 2019 — announced it would be shuttering operations and terminating five of its staffers. (In total, 20 people from the Post’s editorial division were laid off.) The news came on the heels of a number of smaller, more enthusiast-oriented publications hemorrhaging staff members at the behest of management. GameSpot and IGN, two bastions of games coverage, were shrunk by their ownership groups (Fandom and Ziff Davis, respectively), as the calendar turned over into 2023. Fanbyte, which perfected a breezy, chatty, almost Gawker-like approach to industry news, has been rendered a ghost ship by cuts last summer by parent company/Chinese entertainment conglomerate Tencent. Even G4, the ancestral early-aughts cable broadcasting company dedicated exclusively to video games — which relaunched in 2021 with a slew of familiar faces — lasted barely a year before it was shut down by Comcast in October.

The carnage has engendered a fatigued pessimism in those who want to make a career writing about video games. There are so many stories in this sphere waiting to be broken, and ostensibly, interest has never been higher. But who, exactly, wants to publish all of that hard work?

“I don’t believe games journalism in the form we’ve known it is going to exist in a few years,” said Merritt K, content manager of Fanbyte, and one of the few employees of the site who wasn’t affected by the layoffs. “There will be a few people covering big stories, either brought on by large media outlets or crowdfunding through Patreon, but there doesn’t seem to be any appetite for traditional coverage of games either on the supply or demand side.”

Merritt, like everyone else who writes about video games, understands that the current bleakness of the games media ecosystem can be attributed to some macro trends in a febrile economy. Media companies across the board are slashing budgets, and many of the offices affected — like BuzzFeed, Vox, Bustle, and Gannett — aren’t reporting stories about “Final Fantasy XIV.” Still, it’s telling that when The Washington Post began its layoffs, the video game staff was so vulnerable.

The fear is that these kinds of pivots are emblematic of an ongoing discrepancy in the way games media organizations maintain their bottom line. Fanbyte has ditched its blogs and reports to function exclusively as a repository for guides, walkthroughs, and explainers for a slew of popular video games — the advice you might seek out when you find yourself stuck on a “Zelda” That content draws a ton of easily monetizable SEO traffic, and ideally, the corresponding revenue would be reinvested in the more artistic faculties of games coverage. But in a moment when every venture capital prognosticator is warning of a forthcoming recession, editorial mandates have regressed into their most avaricious forms. 

The same fate awaited GameSpot and Giant Bomb, two veteran video game media companies that were previously owned by CBS, and were both sold to Fandom in 2022. Fandom’s speciality is its Wiki system: The company hosts a vast network of Wikipedia-like rubrics themed after popular media franchises (the Marvel Database, the Resident Evil Wiki, and so on), which provide huge swathes of empty HTML stubs where an army of anonymous amateurs can write dubiously sourced treatises on the origin of the X-Men. The crucial distinction? Wikipedia is a nonprofit organization, while Fandom is owned by a private equity firm in Dallas. Naturally, Fandom doesn’t have to pay those who add content to its Wikis, nor is it traditionally in the business of funding professional editorial shops. So nobody was too surprised when, months after the acquisition, the company sanded down its payroll and terminated around 50 employees across both of its newly purchased assets. The aspirations of Fandom’s subsidiaries are incongruent with the priorities of those who currently own and operate games media. The marriage was always going to end badly.

The mercenary implication of this strategy is that both Fandom and Tencent hold a remarkably dismal perspective on the overarching value of games journalism. Rather than bankroll anything additive for the hobby, they have instead decided to build a nameless, faceless empire out of the muck of SEO optimization. It is, perhaps, easier to make these cynical decisions in the realm of video games, which still carries a kiddy, low-art stench among the graying cadre of media executives.

Those executives are obviously wrong to dismiss the dignity of gaming culture out of hand, but lately, like Merritt, I’ve been wondering if a sustainable audience truly exists for the sort of imaginative, in-depth coverage of the industry that might encourage an idealistic J-school student to sign up for the job. Are the walls closing in for a reason? Is the juice not worth the squeeze? Stephen Totilo, a fixture of the beat who served as the longtime editor-in-chief of the pioneering gaming blog Kotaku and currently covers games at Axios, rejects that premise entirely. To him, a profitable games media organization requires a long-standing vote of confidence from upper management. Totilo has seen what that looks like himself: During his most well-resourced stint overseeing Kotaku, the site reliably harvested 16 million readers per month.

“Games media does need to be paid for, which requires leadership at outlets like the Post and elsewhere to sell enough ads or subscriptions to support it — or, get this, not expect this beat to immediately justify its cost,” said Totilo. “For gaming outlets, it requires leadership that understands that reporting takes time, requires strong editors as well as strong writers, and that it will ultimately pay off.”

A source at Launcher told me that some of the site’s best performing stories were its investigations into the seedier underbellies of the hobby — mismanaged e-sports organizations, bad labor practices, and so on. I’ve been working in the media for over a decade, and in that time I’ve learned to never take the lowest-common-denominator consensus of venture capital brokers at face value. Jeremy Gordon nailed it recently when he noted, in the fallout of the Gawker shuttering, that there is a certain type of digital media proprietor who sincerely believes “that anything unique or smart or fun has to be dumbed down for readers to get it, but when you dumb it down it turns out nobody wants to read that either.”

That said, games journalists are at one unique disadvantage compared to the rest of the cultural dialogue, because an expansive alternative media ecosystem exists on YouTube and Twitch where hugely influential content creators, like Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg and Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach, provide their own commentary about the games industry in direct competition with reporters. No, PewDiePie isn’t launching the investigations you might find at a more formal media enterprise, but he does possess millions of subscribers who rely on him to illuminate and extrapolate upon the daily slate of headlines in the hobby. For some young gamers, a confederation of their favorite talking heads — all operating their own bespoke social brands — achieves the same purpose as the IGN homepage. It makes you wonder if the sudden spike of unemployed games journalists might be felt more acutely by the public if there weren’t a bedrock of YouTubers sharing the same foundational bandwidth. After all, a YouTube channel is never at the mercy of mercurial ownership.

Gene Park, a former Launcher reporter who is now migrating over to The Washington Post’s Style desk, acknowledges that some gamers believe that platforms like YouTube and Twitch have marginalized the roles of games reporter. But he also notes that there’s a symbiotic relationship between those who report the news and those who parrot the findings on camera. “Many of those creators rely on the journalism produced by places like Bloomberg, Kotaku, or IGN, all of which have the kind of support and protection you’d need to accomplish such coverage,” said Park. “The industry is a gargantuan beat to cover, and the broader audience, that holy grail for anyone in the media today, will only grow more skeptical of companies who seem out of touch.”

Additionally, while some influencers create a product that is journalism-like, there are no ethical precepts or fact-checking protocols buoyed to a YouTube video, and Merritt speculates that that laxness makes creators more amenable to cozy relationships with games industry agents. “Publishers and PR are likely happier dealing with them,” she says. “[They’re] likelier to agree to deals for positive coverage.”

I like to believe that the media business is resilient — that, despite the enveloping aura of precarity, we’ll always be able to find a new buyer for good work after the old one boards up shop. I still believe that to be true, but it’s also undeniable that we’re running dramatically low on dream jobs in games journalism. If you wish to savor the triumphs and heartbreaks of the reporting process, if you want to sink your teeth into a story without getting sidetracked by engagement mandates or daily blogging duties, you’re unlikely to find those thrills on this beat right now. There are a few venues left for that kind of discursive games writing — Wired and Bloomberg both employ talented games reporters who are given the slack to chase down ambitious projects — but for the most part, writing about games during this employment crunch requires one to grind out an endless slew of skeletal, AdSense-mining templates that have been strategically expunged of the faintest whiff of voice or verve. Case in point: Fanbyte has a Wordle section. Every day, one of the dwindling members of staff writes up a short guide to the daily puzzle’s latest solution, squeezing out whatever ambient Google traffic is left to be found. That is what constitutes a job in games journalism in 2023.

“Arts coverage has always been slim in every general news outlet. I got into journalism because I wanted to be a music critic, and there’s usually just one of that in each city newspaper. You either have to wait until that critic retires or dies before you get a chance at that job,” says Park. “There seem to be many opportunities to be part of games media, but if you want to do the kind of journalism that takes lawyers and document hunting, I do think there’s truth that there’s very few opportunities for it. It is a painful truth.”

Park’s conclusions bring to mind another conversation I had with a Launcher reporter, who asked me to keep her anonymous so she could speak freely. She told me that covering games at The Washington Post was the culmination of a lifelong aspiration. At last, after a career of stray bylines and institutional uncertainty, she could enjoy the ironclad security of legacy media. But nowhere, not even a newspaper owned by the richest man in the world, is safe for long. Now, as she shores up her portfolio and embarks on another job search, the reporter is contemplating a sobering realization: There isn’t another spot for her to land. Launcher represented the ceiling of her field. And now it’s gone. So she’s considering pivoting to a different beat. Maybe, at her next stop, she’ll be a tech journalist, rather than a games journalist. Before long, there might not be anyone left to cover the video game boom.

Al Día, the Dallas Morning News’ Spanish-language sister newspaper, will be disbanded on March 1, according to an announcement by the Dallas News Guild last week.

Al Día’s five full-time staffers have been reassigned to roles within the DMN newsroom, where they’ll be required to produce content in English. The Dallas Morning News will continue to publish Al Día’s weekly print edition and update its website, but there will be no staff producing original journalism for Dallas’s Spanish-speaking community. Instead, the product will include translations of DMN stories that were written in English and pieces from Spanish-language wire services, according to Leah Waters, the unit chair of the Dallas News Guild and an equity reporter.

On February 6, DMN executive editor Katrice Hardy told Al Día staff about the change. When those staffers got their reassignments and reached out to their new editors, Waters told me, it turned out that they were breaking the news to the rest of the newsroom.

“Those editors had no idea. They had no plan for them,” Waters said. “It all just feels very haphazard. It’s like [management] is cutting up a car and using the pieces for parts.”

Dallas County’s population is 40% Hispanic/Latino (1.05 million people) and 34% of residents speak Spanish at home, according to 2020 census data (though Latinos were also heavily undercounted in that census).

: We have news of a major change at The Dallas Morning News’ Spanish-language newspaper, Al Día, which has been covering the Hispanic community in North Texas for 19 years. On Monday, Feb. 6, the staff of Al Día was notified that its team would be disbanded as of March 1. 1/5

— Dallas News Guild (@DallasNewsGuild) February 9, 2023

The Dallas Morning News did not respond to interview requests, but CEO and publisher Grant Moise sent the following statement via email:

The Dallas Morning News and Al Dia remain committed to reaching the growing Hispanic audience in North Texas.  We will continue to publish Al Dia every Wednesday in print and aldiadallas.com will continue to publish daily stories in Spanish. The Al Dia team is now reporting into the same content areas as reporters from The Dallas Morning News in an effort to better serve the growing Latino community in North Texas. This community is not only our future, but it is the present, and it deserves enhanced coverage from our newsroom.

The Society of Professional Journalists released a statement on February 10, including a quote from Hardy:

Katrice Hardy, Dallas Morning News managing editor, told SPJ via email that stories will “continue to be written and published in Spanish as they always have.” She said the move is to have Al Día staff integrate into other teams around the newsroom for two reasons: “So that all the DMN teams begin to learn how to write for this audience and so that Al Día has the chance to write more enterprising content. Al Día staff will still write content in Spanish. But in this new structure, other staff on their teams will also write stories with this lens and we will have other stories to augment the traditional Al Día content, which will remain mostly local and not wire.”

Hardy said the move will allow more English content to be translated into Spanish and the Al Día team will continue to write and produce in Spanish as they always have. “This integration will allow us to have stories for ALL in our Hispanic audience, those that are not bilingual and those who are, which we had not focused on the latter much at all before.”

Sources in the newsroom said they were concerned about the loss of a publication providing service journalism in Spanish — from how to renew your passport at the Mexican consulate to where to get vaccinated to changes in immigration and homelessness policies. Spanish-speaking communities have some specific information needs, these sources said, that are not the same as those of English-language readers.

Al Día staffers have been reassigned to desks where they will cover all of Dallas. Some have been moved onto beats that don’t align with their reporting expertise (one reporter built their career covering hard news on topics like drug trafficking and immigration but was reassigned to arts and entertainment). Community organizers have told staffers that they plan to protest the decision, and on Tuesday, Dallas News Guild protested the decision outside of the newsroom.

¿Qué queremos?

A FAIR CONTRACT

¿Cuándo lo queremos?

AHORA pic.twitter.com/vS7NJJfSX6

— Dallas News Guild (@DallasNewsGuild) February 14, 2023

Al Día launched in 2003 as the first Spanish-language newspaper in Dallas, publishing five days a week with a circulation of 40,000. Managing editor Alfredo Carbajal has led the paper since it started. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s La Estrella was once Al Día’s stiffest competition, but ceased printing its weekly newspaper in 2021.

While an estimated 2.16 million Hispanic people live in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, neither of the region’s major newspapers now provide original news in Spanish for Spanish-dominant audiences. There are eight Spanish-language news outlets in the region, according to the Latino Media Map by the Center for Community Media. Al Día and La Estrella are two of them, Telemundo and Univision each have a local television station, KMPX is a Tegna-owned channel affiliated with Estrella TV, and the remaining three websites — El Líder USA, Novedades News, and El Heraldo News — focus more on sports, entertainment, national immigration news, and advertising for local events.

“For our Spanish-speaking community here, this is a true loss,” Waters said.

The change follows a years-long trend of cuts to Spanish-language journalism by American media companies. In 2007, ImpreMedia — which owns Spanish-language newspapers El Diario in New York, La Opinión in Los Angeles, and La Raza in Chicago — bought Hoy New York from Tribune Company, only to shut it down in 2009. In 2019, Tribune Publishing shut down Hoy, the Spanish-language sister newspaper to the Chicago Tribune. In 2022, the Orlando Sentinel did the same with El Sentinel while ImpreMedia sold itself to an advertising startup.

National news outlets have also experimented with providing news in Spanish for a few years a time before ultimately deeming the projects not worth continuing. Examples include The New York Times en Español (2016–2019), The Washington Post’s El Post podcast and Opinion section (2019-2022), and Huffpost Mexico (2016-2019), which originally launched to cover the country in Spanish after former president Donald Trump’s racist comments about Mexicans on the campaign trail.

One of the ongoing issues the guild is negotiating with management is pay parity, particularly for Al Día staff. The median annual salary in Dallas is about $42,000. According to a pay disparity study the guild conducted and shared with Nieman Lab, an Al Día reporter with 15 years of experience makes $49,000 a year, while a Dallas Morning News reporter with the same amount of experience makes more than $70,000. An Al Día editor with 23 years of experience makes $53,000 a year while a Dallas Morning News editor with the same experience makes $75,000 or more. Management did not mention pay increases to Al Día staffers when they were told about their new assignments, Waters said.

The Dallas News Guild and the company are close to finalizing their first contract, Waters said. She called the changes a status quo violation, meaning the company changed employees’ conditions of employment without bargaining with the union while the parties were still negotiating a contract.

“Moves like this, right before we finish our contract, [are] completely destructive to a workforce,” Waters said. “It’s disruptive to the operation and it is destructive to the spirit of our newsroom.”

The @AlDiaDallas team saw potential in me before I saw it in myself. I’m so grateful to everyone there because I wouldn’t be where I am without their support. It’s devastating to see this. Every time I see this happen to Spanish-language news media, it truly hurts. https://t.co/eBWRzCGgAl

— Elvia Limón (@elvialimon) February 9, 2023

Any time legitimate Spanish-language outlets are dissolved — typically from lack of investment/promotion — it frees room for disinfo to fill the void.

Latines/Spanish speakers make up a larger audience than ever, and we risk our communities being pawns in a broader info war. https://t.co/9JA0hgvmNK

— Cristóbal Reyes (he/él) (@chreyesrios) February 10, 2023

If my parents were alive today, they’d be deeply sad & disappointed by this decision. My parents first language was Spanish & subscribed to Al Día for years. In fact, they read, watched & listened to the news in both Spanish & English. https://t.co/qEkuISg00X

— Stella M. Chávez (@stellamchavez) February 10, 2023

cannot emphasize enough how important @AlDiaDallas is to dallas, where nearly 40% of residents speak spanish at home.

how a company responsible for informing and listening to that very community can justify this move is beyond me https://t.co/HrcNSnmZBL

— mallorie sullivan (@malloriesullivn) February 9, 2023

It is impossible not to feel sad. My solidarity always with my colleagues from Al Día. I know we will shine in the face of adversity. It pains me that their voices will no longer share the stories of the DFW community as they have been doing for 19 years. https://t.co/XvPC2Mf8OB

— Lorena Flores (@loreeflores) February 10, 2023

This. Is. Heartbreaking.

I’ve always been blown away by the creative and community-centered coverage that the Al Día team produces. They connect with and respect a group of people (40% of our city!!!) that gets overlooked time and time again.

Shameful decision by DMN execs. https://t.co/tiHxBowA0X

— Lynda M. González (@lyndamgonzalez) February 10, 2023

Note to my followers: Beginning March my “original content” immigration law column will no longer appear in Al Dia Dallas. For the latest guidance on immigration law, read my column @NYDailyNews and use Google translate if u need it in Spanish. https://t.co/y5WWQE3P8Y

— Allan Wernick (@awernick) February 10, 2023

The Five Guys on the Syracuse University campus is hiring, and they’re paying $17.85 per hour. That works out to $37K per year. Attention local TV station managers: If you are looking to hire our graduates, are you paying better than Five Guys? pic.twitter.com/IXnbNqHHdf

— Elliott Lewis (@NewUrbanBlend) January 27, 2023

The job at Five Guys pays significantly more than my first job in media, where I was earning $12 an hour to copy edit, blog, and manage social media for an online magazine. I eventually worked my way up to $15 per hour, but when I had my second child and asked for more money, I was told my position was being eliminated.

And it’s not much better now. In 2019, I was hired at my local paper for a columnist job that paid $49,500, which put me just above poverty-level wages in Iowa. According to the nonpartisan group Common Good Iowa, a single parent with one child in Iowa needs to earn $21.16 per hour to live above the poverty line. I am a single parent of two children and my salary worked out to $29.79 per hour (or it would have if I were working 40 hours a week — but the reality is I was working far more). It wasn’t a poverty-level wage, but it certainly wasn’t a living wage — not by my standards or by societal standards. And I could only live on that salary because I was earning extra money writing books and freelancing.

But I was one of the lucky ones.

Iowa Public Radio journalist Zachary Oren Smith has worked hard to be transparent about his salary.

Coda for wage transparency:
Jackson Free Press (2014-2015) – $25/article
MS Today, reporter (16-17) – $25k w/ benes
Muscatine Journal, reporter (17-18) – $13.75 w/ benes
…

— Zachary Oren Smith (@ZacharyOS) June 7, 2022

From 2018 to 2021, Smith wasn’t earning a living wage with his job at the Iowa City Press-Citizen, but it was certainly a lot more than he’d earned elsewhere — for example, writing for $25 an article at the Jackson Free Press in Mississippi. Smith is now making $45,000 at Iowa Public Radio. His experiences and mine highlight the money problem at the root of local media.

Smith and three other Iowa journalists — Linh Ta, Elijah Decious, and Ty Rushing — are organizing a survey that they hope will provide transparency and solidarity in a state where journalists are overworked and underpaid, and where jobs in the field are quickly disappearing.

Pay transparency is an essential component of closing the pay gap and building trust between employers and workers. But the industry that prides itself on shining a light on the powerful isn’t often willing to shine a light on itself (unless it’s forced to do so).

Pointing out problems with money in media, especially local media, can meet with immediate pushback. In 2021, I called Peter Wagner, a local newspaper owner who had recently bought The N’West Iowa Review. Wagner was a donor to disgraced former Iowa congressman Steve King, and I had some questions. But when I called and asked Wagner about how as an owner he would separate his politics from newsroom coverage, he yelled that it wasn’t important and he didn’t have to answer questions. Then he hung up. When I tweeted about the incident, local journalists defended Wagner. Douglas Burns, the former owner of the paper who sold it to Wagner, didn’t reply to texts or calls asking for comment.

A newspaper in Iowa struggling and local journalists trying to advocate for pay transparency may seem like different issues. But they are the same. And they aren’t just Iowa problems. They are money and media problems.

In 2022, The New York Times noted that 360 newspapers had shut down since March 2020. And more have closed since. In the past month, large media outlets like Vox and The Washington Post have laid off journalists. Jaya Saxena, a writer for the Vox vertical Eater and a member of the Vox Union, told me that the layoffs have been seemingly arbitrary, affecting people who were high-profile and well-respected, who brought in high traffic numbers and won awards.

The layoffs and newsroom closures come during a years-long trend toward union organizing in newsrooms. Workers across industries are tired from working all the time, never receiving raises, and being told that, in a time of historic corporate profits, there is never enough money. Consequently, the approval rate of unions is at an all-time high. But union participation is at an all-time low. This may be because unions take time to form and consolidate, or because people are afraid for their jobs. Because the implicit corporate position is always, “Just be grateful you have a job. Don’t ask for more. Don’t criticize.”

This round of layoffs in particular it feels clear that this isn't about a recession or profit or even worker quality. It's about fear induction. Lay off a bunch of people, and you grab a bit of power back out of the fear among the remaining. It is easier to exploit them.

— kelsey mckinney (@mckinneykelsey) January 20, 2023

The problem is that money matters maybe more than it ever has. And journalists should be asking questions about power and money — even (especially!) the power that employs them.

Transparency is a tricky thing in an industry that runs on a scarcity mindset. So many journalists are passionate about their jobs — passionate enough to take poverty wages and work grueling hours, only to get eviscerating and abusive emails from community members (in my case, at least, the same community members who they see at their kids’ school pickups or swim meets). Journalists hold on to those jobs through gumption and the income of a spouse (usually a husband — but that’s a whole other cultural sinkhole) and are often afraid of upsetting the balance for fear of losing their jobs. After I was fired, I heard from so many journalists that they felt that if they said the wrong thing they might be the next to go. Like ants, journalists can smell death.

But fear makes for bad writing and bad reporting. And it makes for bad newspapers and magazines.

Career journalist Megan Greenwell, an instructor at the Newhouse School of Journalism, sums up the problem this way: “Media outlets can’t attract people without doing good and interesting work. And they can’t do good or interesting work without paying people a living wage.”

It’s an era of disinvestment in local media. Newsrooms are being gutted, scrapped, and sold for parts. The newspapers and media outlets that do exist often don’t pay journalists enough to cover rent, but still expect them to be grateful. The result is a land of news deserts — vast regions of America where misinformation thrives. Where the only media outlets that hold power or sway — or can exist at all — are the ones funded by partisan media groups or right-wing talk radio, and where people find more local news of value to them on Facebook than they do in their newspaper.

I was recently talking to an elected official in Iowa who is working hard to combat the glut of bills being proposed by the GOP, and I asked her how she was doing with it all. “I don’t know how to fight all the misinformation people have,” she said.

So often I hear people asking me why reporters don’t cover certain stories, why they don’t ask certain questions, why they don’t push back against certain ideologies, I try to be transparent and say, “We don’t have enough journalists. And the ones we have are not getting paid enough to feed their families. And the ones who can survive and can hold on can only do so because of privilege — maybe they are white men and getting paid more; maybe they are women married to men who make money.” For me, I was freelancing and selling books while also working full-time. It was not sustainable and it left me extremely burned out.

Low pay and grueling hours mean barriers to entry that skew journalism toward a certain demographic — white and male. It’s impossible to do your best work shining light on the activities of elected officials when you make $12 an hour and those same elected officials are organizing social media campaigns to put you out of work altogether. And it’s impossible to cover the needed range and depth of stories when you are overworked and underpaid and understaffed.

If you are lucky enough to work somewhere that offers you a decent income and benefits, the constant turmoil of the industry sends a clear message, as Saxena pointed out. The message: “Be careful, or you could be next.”

Greenwell, who is also writing a book about private equity in America, sighed as she tried to describe the problem. “It’s like the snake eating its tail, or the monster you can’t kill — pick your metaphor.” For years, people have been trying to address the issue with non-newsrooms, digital startups, social media collaborations, pivots to video, and so much more. Some people blame media consolidation. Others blame Facebook. They’re all correct and also all wrong.

“The question,” Greenwell said, “gets to the heart of not just how do you change media, but also how do you change America.”

Change has to start somewhere. And that change starts with transparency.

I reached out to Lewis, the Syracuse professor, to ask about the responses to his tweet. He told me that many people pointed out that fast-food work doesn’t guarantee 40 hours per week or benefits. But he has heard from some reporters who thanked him for shining a light on the issue. “One former student emailed me to thank me for the tweet and told me he’d recently gotten a raise at the small-market television station where he works. But he said that was only because he lived in a state that had just raised its minimum wage.”

If you are a journalist in Iowa, please fill out the pay transparency survey!

Projects like these, which focus on giving people information they need to make the places they live better, are the focus of a new report, out Thursday, that calls on local journalism’s would-be saviors to focus their energy and funding on collaborative efforts, startups, and community groups — not on legacy news organizations.

“Too much time and energy has been spent propping up and mourning the declining legacy systems,” the report’s lead authors — Chalkbeat’s Elizabeth Green, City Bureau’s Darryl Holliday, and Free Press’s Mike Rispoli — write. All three, of course, run or are part of media organizations that operate squarely outside of legacy media. (Disclosure: Green is my close friend.)

The opportunity now is to shepherd and accelerate a transition to this emergent civic media system. This new ecosystem looks different from what it will replace: while the commercial market rewarded information monopolies, what is emerging now are pluralistic networks in which information is fluid, services are shared, and media is made in cooperation with the people it seeks to serve.

“The Roadmap for Local News” was built on conversations with more than 50 local news folks, leaders of nonprofit news organizations, and funders. It focuses on “civic information” and “civic media,” which it defines like this:

Civic information: High-quality, verifiable information that enables people to respond to collective needs by enhancing local coordination, problem-solving, systems of public accountability, and connectedness.
Civic media: Any practice that produces civic information as its primary focus.

The authors write:

Civic media practitioners are united by a vision of a world in which people everywhere are equipped to improve their communities through abundant access to high-quality information, on urgent health and safety emergencies, the environment, the people and processes of local government, and daily social services like healthcare, education, and transportation. In this vision, the community librarian facilitating conversations around authoritative, trusted digital news is as celebrated as the dogged reporter pursuing a scoop.

They call for “a new level of investment to the civic media field,” with “leaders in philanthropy, journalism, and democracy” “[coordinating] work around the goal of expanding ‘civic information,’ not saving the news business.”

The goal should not be to save legacy businesses that remain in decline, but instead to meet the civic information needs of all individuals and communities.

The report also stresses the need for more open-ended funding (“including conversion of project-based funds to general operating support”), shared services and infrastructure, and major public policy initiatives.

It will require investing significantly more into our current public media system, creating new forms of public funding, and passing a suite of other policy solutions at all levels of government to create the conditions for local civic information to thrive.

Coauthor Holliday also delved into some of the report’s themes in a thread.

We won’t emerge from this by “saving” the old system. We need to accelerate the transition to a new system centered on community info needs & news products that help people act & solve local issues

A participatory public good that's worth investing in. Yes, I made a chart pic.twitter.com/gO97IlfyI1

— Darryl Holliday (@d_holli) February 2, 2023

The development of the report was funded by the Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, Democracy Fund, MacArthur Foundation, Walton Family, and American Journalism Project. Funders came together with many of the report’s sources last week to meet at a local news summit at the former Annenberg Estate in California. Lenfest’s Jim Friedlich wrote up the event for our sister publication, Nieman Reports, describing it as “extraordinarily positive.”

Former ProPublica president Dick Tofel offered some criticism of the initiative here. “If the upshot of all this is more money for great journalism, that’s all to the good,” Tofel told me in an email. “What I hope can be avoided are especially two things: a new bureaucracy doling out a pool of funds, and a centralized support mechanism. Both, in my view, would tend to inhibit experimentation and innovation, of which we need more, not less.”

But “most funders seemed aligned in the view that coordinated effort toward common goals and funding of key priorities could best be accomplished through close communication and coordination,” Friedlich wrote, “rather than consolidation into a kind of fund of funds.”

You can read the full thing here.

NEW: I helped a bit with this, and am very happy to see the focus of this effort on the information needs of communities. It's not about "saving" organizations. It's about solving problems. #localnewsroadmap https://t.co/7DAYqGYZAu

— Chris Krewson (@ckrewson) February 2, 2023

I’m not saying this bc I am one of them. But I have colleagues at McClatchy, Gannett and others who work on many of these premises within difficult systems. They deserve to be cheered on.

Go ahead and hate these companies, they still hold power and house good souls.

— P. Kim Bui (@kimbui) February 2, 2023

Proud to be among 60+ news leaders & practitioners who engaged in the development of the #LocalNewsRoadmap.

Released today, the new report is a vision statement for the field, with strategies, evidence, & examples to scale civic media.

Read and share: https://t.co/Dx63QzRCwJ https://t.co/7WIlmQtGjZ

— Mukhtar M. Ibrahim (@mukhtaryare) February 2, 2023

“We are proud of the site that Leah [Finnegan] and her team built,” Goldberg wrote in an email to employees that was tweeted by Semafor’s Max Tani. “Gawker published a lot of brilliant pieces in these nearly two years. But in this new reality, we have to prioritize our better monetized sites.”

In an email to employees, Bustle Digital Group CEO Bryan Goldberg announces the company is laying off 8% of staff and “suspending operations” at Gawker pic.twitter.com/ushUzsISUa

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) February 1, 2023

Goldberg, who in addition to BDG owns Napoleon’s hat, told Axios’s Sara Fischer on Wednesday that Gawker was “essentially an early-stage startup within our company” and “now just isn’t the moment to push millions of dollars into a pre-monetization product.” But the brand is really old in internet years. The original Gawker Media was founded in 2002 and filed for bankruptcy in 2016 following the sex tape lawsuit that awarded Terry Gene Bollea (a.k.a Hulk Hogan) $140 million in damages. (The lawsuit was bankrolled at least in part by billionaire Peter Thiel; Bollea and Gawker Media ultimately settled for $31 million.) That year, Univision acquired all the Gawker Media brands except for Gawker (Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, and Jezebel); they were later sold to equity firm Great Hill Partners.

Goldberg’s BDG acquired Gawker’s archives and social media accounts for $1.35 million in 2018. (He spent $1.4 million on the hat.) The site relaunched, after a couple false starts, in 2021 under Leah Finnegan, who had been a features editor at the original Gawker.

BDG’s remaining brands include Bustle, Mic, Nylon, Romper, and Elite Daily, among others. In the past couple years, it has shut down The Outline and Input. I asked the company where the other layoffs this week are taking place, and will update this post if I hear back.

Well, after an incredible 1.5 years, BDG has decided it is done with Gawker 2.0. Can't say enough about how proud I am of the site and all the brilliant people who worked to create it, and what a staggering shame this is. I had an absolute blast, and I love you.

— Leah Finnegan (@leahfinnegan) February 1, 2023

people asked me about gawker to get whatever “real” gossip on what it was like they would be disappointed when i’d say “it’s the best job i’ve ever had and i get to work with people i love very deeply” but that was the truth…only job where i truly felt like myself https://t.co/4rxN4ZjKXp

— sarah hagi (@KindaHagi) February 1, 2023

RIP to working the dumbest most fun job with some of the funniest girls and one guy in the game, all for less money than bryan goldberg spent on napoleons hat https://t.co/raeLCLaLGY

— tarpley (@tarpleyhitt) February 1, 2023

RIP to the last place i could’ve pitched “I ate an entire weed lollipop in a day, here’s what happened” if i were white

— ashley ray (@theashleyray) February 1, 2023

Is the Defector model really the only way to do a site like this? It's clear that a voicey, attitudey, non-bootlicky site can't survive under One Of Today's Leading Global Media Companies With A Portfolio Of Distinct Digital And Experiential Brands That Are Shaping Culture https://t.co/K9rCNdFizg

— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) February 1, 2023

It was never anyone's must-read. Old Gawker not only would've had a field day with George Santos, Anna Delvey, Hilaria Baldwin, etc. but, for better or for worse, it would've been breaking the news on them. Now that stuff primarily happens in Twitter threads from randos. https://t.co/h8eQyX3m9g

— caroline mccarthy (@caro) February 1, 2023

If you feel like you’re just tweeting into the void and getting minimal replies of any kind, the corpse of @gawker has >500k followers. Here are some interaction numbers from the past couple days pic.twitter.com/1N2LRXQnPF

— The Ball Is Orange (@theballisorange) February 1, 2023

if you want to make something valuable and lasting in this world then prepare to do it yourself entirely because the people who hire you are dumber than you and less talented which is why they are in the business of allocating dollars instead of doing stuff

— noah kulwin (@nkulw) February 1, 2023

The blow-up rat — a staple at union protests — was joined by dozens of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette employees outside the Duquesne Club, a “premiere private club,” where Post-Gazette publisher John Robinson Block was celebrating his wedding.

The mid-November rally was one of dozens of protests the Post-Gazette workers have held since walking off the job on October 18, 100 days ago — and becoming the first American newspaper to strike since journalism entered the digital age.

Even as newspaper profits have plummeted and job losses have piled up, newsroom employees in the U.S. have stopped short of open-ended strikes for more than 20 years. But the Post-Gazette is ending that streak. Strike actions have included picketing the newsroom, running radio ads in Pittsburgh, calling for C-SPAN to remove a Post-Gazette owner from its board of directors, encouraging sources to sign a solidarity pledge, and asking subscribers to cancel their Post-Gazette subscriptions until the strike ends.

This isn’t a case of a rapacious hedge fund draining local news’ profits from a distance: The Post-Gazette has been owned by the same family, the Blocks, since 1927. In a statement released in response to the strike, their family company, Block Communications, said the Post-Gazette last turned a profit in 2007. Over the past 17 years, the paper has lost nearly $264 million, according to the statement.

Despite those economic headwinds for newspapers, frustration over stagnant wages, disappearing benefits, and newsroom cuts is spilling over into action in Pittsburgh. Post-Gazette union members say the paper’s financial outlook has improved, especially as it has cut printing to two days a week, reduced its headcount, and surpassed 50,000 paid digital subscribers. (A spokesperson for the Post-Gazette declined to comment on the paper’s finances or confirm subscription figures.)

The strike may be inspiring others. In the weeks since the Post-Gazette union went on strike, hundreds of journalists from 14 Gannett-owned newspapers walked off the job to protest low wages, layoffs, and other cost-cutting measures in local news. Journalists at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram went on strike for 24 days. And The New York Times saw its first major labor protest since 1981.

“I feel like we’re the canary in the coal mine,” said Andrew Goldstein, who, when not on strike, writes about education for Post-Gazette. “What happens here could go a long way to predicting what’s going to happen in other disputes.”

Goldstein, who’s been at the Post-Gazette since an internship in 2014, serves on the executive board of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.

“We’re here fighting because we love Pittsburgh and we love the Post-Gazette, but we also know that the eyes of the journalism community across the country are on us,” Goldstein said. “Yes, we’re fighting for ourselves, but we’re also out here fighting because we want journalists everywhere to be treated fairly.”

“A trigger for us”

There are a couple of ways to tell the story of how the Post-Gazette strike started.

The first is that Post-Gazette journalists narrowly voted (38-36) to follow about 60 colleagues in distribution, production, and advertising, a couple of weeks after those groups went on strike over a health plan that members say costs more for less coverage. (At the protest in November, one Post-Gazette employee wore a “will work for healthcare” sign. Another said the health care plan would “blow a $10,000 hole” in his family’s budget.)

“When you’re part of a union, you’re supposed to honor picket lines. When the advertising and other groups went out, that was a trigger for us,” said Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA, the national organization for the Post-Gazette’s union.

(Nearly five months after that narrow initial vote, a number of Post-Gazette journalists, including some of the paper’s most high-profile sports reporters, still have not joined the strike. I reached out to a handful of union members still working for the Post-Gazette and all declined to comment.)

The other story of how this strike began starts farther back. Journalists at the Post-Gazette have been working without a contract since 2017. The newsroom hasn’t seen an across-the-board pay raise in more than 16 years.

“We were called into a solidarity strike with [the other unions], and then decided to go on strike for our own unfair labor practices with the company,” said Natalie Duleba, a news designer and digital news editor at the Post-Gazette.

Duleba said she didn’t believe a work stoppage — “something you’d prefer to keep in your back pocket” — could have been avoided, even if the newsroom union hadn’t followed the other Post-Gazette unions on strike in October.

“It was probably always going to happen sometime,” Duleba said.

That’s because in the years since the last contract expired, disputes between the newsroom and management have only grown more contentious. In 2019, a staff exodus took place even as the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. (That same year, Rob Rogers was a Pulitzer finalist in the Editorial Cartooning category. The Post-Gazette had fired him in 2018, allegedly for being too anti-Trump.) Toward the end of the year, the union voted “no confidence” in management and went on a byline strike.

In July 2020, the Post-Gazette declared an impasse with the union and unilaterally imposed changes to wages, vacation time, severance packages, and health benefits. The National Labor Relations Board eventually intervened, finding that the Post-Gazette management had “bargained with no intention of reaching an agreement” before “prematurely declaring impasse.”

Duleba, who started her job during the pandemic and worked some evening hours as a designer, met several of her coworkers in person for the first time when the strike began. Duleba said fair wages are probably the most important issue to her, but when she was picketing outside or sitting in drawn-out meetings, she found herself thinking about colleagues trying to raise kids or take care of ailing parents.

“I want them to be able to take care of their families,” she said. “The longer you’re with a company, you should be able to take more vacation and build wealth — but we’ve found the opposite, that we’re just losing all that.”

In 2022, a federal court ruled that the Post-Gazette had to reimburse workers more than $100,000 after refusing to cover union contract–required health care costs for nearly four years. That history does little to instill confidence in the new health benefits that newspaper management is trying to impose.

“Under the imposed conditions, our company has set it up [so] they can change anything they want to, at any time, with no notice and no recourse for us,” Duleba said. “They could raise the costs every week.”

“Continuity at the top since early 1989”

In 2019, a Washington Post column declared the storied Post-Gazette was becoming a “chaotic circus.”

“What makes Pittsburgh’s situation particularly regrettable,” columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote, “is that the Blocks are a family who seem to have the resources — if not the wisdom — to do much, much better.”

The Block family has been in the media business for nearly a century and has owned the Post-Gazette since 1927. Post-Gazette employees who worked under former publisher William Block, Sr., say the union was able to conduct fair negotiations during his tenure and that he treated journalists as worthy partners in his newspaper business.

Those values, they say, have not been passed down from generation to generation intact.

The Post-Gazette and its sister paper, the Toledo Blade, are now controlled by William Block Sr.’s twin nephews, Allan Block and John Robinson Block, now in their late 60s.

“I was in charge and that’s one of the things that some people these days can’t seem to grasp,” John Robinson Block wrote in his “life’s accounting” in the Pittsburgh Quarterly in 2018. (Block did not respond to requests for comment.) “Nothing has changed at the Post-Gazette through the years because there’s been continuity at the top since early 1989 — almost 30 years.”

Allan Block has indicated that he’s ready to part ways with the newspaper business entirely, and his brother has said he’s the one preventing the Post-Gazette from falling into the hands of hedge funds that now control so many local newspapers.

“What people in Pittsburgh must understand is that, in my family, I am the one who stood in the way and said, ‘We will cut our costs, but we will cut them with a minimum impact on the product,'” John Robinson Block wrote in the Pittsburgh Quarterly. “I assure you, my brother and cousin would have been much more abrupt in their changes, and would have cut much deeper. But I am proud of our product, much of the time.”

The Post-Gazette union has acknowledged that the newspaper business is not exactly booming but points to profits at Block Communications — which also has internet, telephone, and cable television holdings — when making their demands. (Even with its diversified business, Block Communications still leads with Pulitzer Prizes won by the Blade and Post-Gazette on its website.) The union’s argument has, to put it mildly, irked the Block family.

“In the estimation of our unions, our company is successful, despite today’s intense challenges,” wrote Block. “They think that the resources we earn in other businesses should subsidize our newspapers. Well, guess what? That’s what’s been happening but, again, it can’t continue.”

The Post-Gazette union chose to protest the Block wedding reception — and bring Scabby and a “congRATS” cake along — to put pressure on the family with the power to sign a new contract. Outside the reception, Post-Gazette writer and editor Bob Batz Jr. was clear about one thing: he’d really rather be back in the newsroom.

“We want to save the paper and we want to go back to work,” Batz said. “If [Block] came out right now and said, ‘Come in and have a brandy and work it out,’ that’s what we’d do.”

And now?

It looks as if the newspaper industry’s first strike in decades won’t end anytime soon.

After four negotiating sessions — the most recent one was held on Dec. 20 — no agreement has been reached. Post-Gazette marketing director Allison Latcheran confirmed that there are currently no additional meetings scheduled.

Alex McCann, secretary of the Pittsburgh Newspaper Guild and a digital news editor at the Post-Gazette, said the company has continued to “bargain in bad faith” and has yet to bring “a meaningfully different proposal,” despite the union offering concessions on job security, layoffs, and health benefits.

A lawyer representing the Post-Gazette in negotiations seemed to confirm that assessment. In December, Richard Lowe told assembled union members that he hadn’t been coming to bargaining sessions with new material because leadership would prefer to keep the contract imposed on workers in 2020. (“When I say I like it, it’s because it’s worked for us,” Lowe said.)

The last time Pittsburgh had a newspaper strike, more than 30 years ago, the largest newspaper in the city at the time, The Pittsburgh Press, didn’t survive. The Block family bought the rival newspaper in 1992 and quickly announced the Press would no longer be published. The Blocks are adding to their media empire this time around, too. They announced earlier this month that a subsidiary company had purchased the Pittsburgh City Paper.

A pending labor unemployment claim, if won, would give striking workers a weekly check in addition to the few hundred dollars they receive each week from the NewsGuild’s $400 million strike fund. Some Post-Gazette employees already had second jobs, from refereeing soccer games to working in retail to freelance work.

Since the strike began, several Post-Gazette journalists have left for other outlets rather than cross a picket line. The departed include Gillian McGoldrick, a statehouse reporter who staged a one-woman protest from Harrisburg at the beginning of the strike, and veteran journalists Bill Schackner and Jonathan Silver, who both moved across town to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Other striking workers have started something new.

Meet the Pittsburgh Union-Progress

Here’s something you hear over and over again in Pittsburgh: “It’s a union town.”

Talk to Post-Gazette staffers and it’ll feel as if each one has a story of a parent or grandparent who was active in a union — whether they were a mill worker or baker, worked in insurance or steel or as a fellow journalist.

Many of the remaining newsroom employees have been channeling their journalistic skills into a digital strike publication called the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Hometown support for their union-backed news org has been strong, and more than 1,000 people have subscribed for free updates.

Local elected officials have shared Union Progress stories and promised not to speak to the Post-Gazette as long as the union’s labor disputes go unresolved. As a candidate, U.S. Senator John Fetterman declined to cross the picket line to meet with the Post-Gazette’s editorial board and U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio refused an election day interview with non-union reporters.

This means that until strikers’ demands are met, I will NOT be speaking with the @PittsburghPG. I will, however, gladly speak with the striking worker-run @thePUPNews — which I encourage you to subscribe to today.https://t.co/Uy7ZD3y5Od

— Mayor Ed Gainey (@MayorEdGainey) December 20, 2022

Pittsburgh is a city built by union workers. It’s time to show the country why Pittsburgh is, and has always been, a union town.

I stand with @ThePUPNews and the call of the @PGHGuild’s for the @Steelers to drop @PittsburghPG as a sponsor. #solidarity #unionstrong https://t.co/V3iVnN92LO

— Sara Innamorato (@Innamo) January 9, 2023

At the Union Progress, journalists are publishing multiple stories a day online. One vertical is dedicated to strike news, but the bulk of work is the kind of coverage the journalists would normally be filing to the Post-Gazette. And, unlike some of their predecessors, strike publications in 2023 can start up without acquiring printing presses or delivery trucks.

“That’s what I keep telling people: we don’t need anybody else to do what we do,” said Batz, who serves as interim editor. “It’s a WordPress. Just fire it up and go.” (They have office space, too.)

Even as the Union-Progress enters its fourth month of publication, the striking workers say they’re committed to not crossing any picket lines. Many mentioned not wanting to let down a long line of guild members who have fought for fair conditions at the Post-Gazette.

“What I tell a lot of the young people is — some of you don’t want to strike because this is your dream job. You’ve never made more money. You’ve never had better benefits. You’ve never done such great work with such great editors. Why do you think that is?” Batz said. “We’re a good place to work because people before us helped set those standards.”

But what if refusing to allow subscribers to cancel online is not only annoying, but also actually counterproductive?1

The Minneapolis Star Tribune is working to hold on to subscribers with a position focused solely on subscriber retention, WAN-IFRA noted Thursday. One counterintuitive way to do that, the Star Tribune found, is to give subscribers the option to cancel online.

Toby Collodora joined the Star Tribune in 2019 as its first senior manager of retention and engagement. The paper now has 100,000 digital subscribers. “Our goal is discuss retention as often as we discuss acquisition,” she said at WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress last fall.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Star Tribune found that allowing online cancellation, as it started doing in December 2021, hasn’t resulted in more cancellations. Instead, it may actually be helping the paper keep more of its subscribers who are on the fence. The Star Tribune’s “total online save rate” is 18.5%, while the “call center save rate” — where you have to talk to a person who tries to persuade you to stay — is only 8.8%.

While allowing online cancellation initially raised some concerns that more people might cancel, Collodora said they’ve implemented a low-tech solution where users enter in some simple information, such as their name, email address and answer a short series of questions to help identify what kind of subscription they have.

“That information is then used to present an offer, sometimes it’s a price-based offer, sometimes it’s a different offer such as somebody is experiencing a problem with their digital account, we offer that somebody will give them a call back or send them an email to try to resolve that technical problem, and then of course that entices that person to retain their subscription with us,” she said.

The best indicator that a subscriber will stick around, the Star Tribune has found, is when they renew for the first time:

While Collodora is the person in charge of Star Tribune’s retention efforts, she said they also spend time talking about how retention is part of the job of everyone who works for the company.

For example, she said, “we talk about what each person in the organization can do to get a subscriber to make that first renewal payment. That’s really something we focus on because once a person makes their first renewal payment, they are far more likely to retain. It’s our single best indicator.”

You can read the full post about the panel here.

1. In fact, our 2021 survey on cancellations suggested that this might be the case. “Oppressive cancellation policy that requires calling customer support to cancel,” one respondent wrote to explain why they canceled their subscription to the Chicago Tribune.

The Times journalists join employees at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, many of whom have been on strike since October, and journalists at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, who have been on strike since November 28.

The New York Times Guild argues that while the paper is flourishing economically, profits haven’t been shared fairly with workers. Times employees on strike plan to protest outside the company’s headquarters in Manhattan at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday.

From CNN:

The act of protest, which has not been staged by employees at the newspaper of record in decades, will leave many of its major desks depleted of their staffs, creating a challenge for the news organization that millions of readers rely on.

An executive at the Times, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, acknowledged to CNN on Wednesday that the work stoppage would certainly create difficulties. But, the executive said, management has readied for the moment and could rely on the newspaper’s other resources, such as its international staff which largely are not part of the union, to fill the voids.

Joe Kahn, executive editor of the Times, said in a note to staff, “We will produce a robust report on Thursday. But it will be harder than usual.”

Times journalists encouraged readers not to engage with any Times products during the strike, and yes, that means reading about Brittney Griner’s release elsewhere and breaking your Wordle streak. Critic-at-large and VP of the Guild Amanda Hess:

We’re asking readers to not engage in any @nytimes platforms tomorrow and stand with us on the digital picket line! Read local news. Listen to public radio. Make something from a cookbook. Break your Wordle streak.

— Amanda Hess (@amandahess) December 7, 2022

I try not to cross picket lines, but for Nieman Lab purposes was curious to see specific ways that the strike was affecting Times output Thursday, so I fired up an RSS reader that I hadn’t used in several years. A few things I noticed:

• Breaking news alerts are still being sent out.
• A new episode of The Daily was released Thursday, as was a new edition of The Morning. Those products were presumably produced on Wednesday before the strike began, though, and I’ll be curious to see if they come out tomorrow.
• A liveblog on Brittney Griner’s release primarily consisted of posts bylined by international correspondents, who are not part of the Guild. Most other stories in the Times’ “Top Stories” RSS feed for Thursday were also by international correspondents. A very brief Celine Dion story was written by an editor. Some pre-written stories by journalists who are on strike today were published as well.
• Two top Times reporters are not participating in the walkout, and their bylines appeared in the Brittney Griner liveblog Thursday.
• The Washington Post’s Elahe Izadi notes that comments may go unmoderated.

NPR’s David Folkenflik:

“From my point of view, this is an absolutely necessary shot across the bow,” says guild member Michael Powell, a veteran reporter who covers free speech matters for the New York Times national desk. “We’re approaching two years without a contract, which means we’re approaching two years without a raise….Each month that goes by, they’re taking more money out of our pocket.”

Several managers at the Times, speaking to NPR on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment, acknowledge concern about the tensions and the burden of putting out the paper without hundreds of their colleagues.

Editors are scrambling to make sure long-held stories are ready for publication. Some are preparing to flex dormant reporting muscles. Others are unlikely to miss a step. But the sheer volume of copy produced by the paper’s newsroom each day is unlikely to be matched with more than half of the chairs metaphorically empty.

NYT management is trying to ride out the walkout using a mix of pre-written stories from guild staff (it has a lot of those) and a skeleton crew + editors to handle breaking news. Here’s the un-bylined story for Griner’s release: pic.twitter.com/sZW5MWfojY

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) December 8, 2022

If you see someone's name on a story on Thursday or Friday, it does not necessarily mean they crossed the picket line to write it. Newspapers often have reporters write portions of stories ahead of time when possible.

— NYTimesGuild (@NYTimesGuild) December 8, 2022

A rare unbylined @nytimes story: https://t.co/sYUJwcO7kQ

— David Gura (@davidgura) December 8, 2022

A news alert with my name on it just went out. It was a pre- written story ahead of an expected vote.

I stand with the guild!

— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) December 8, 2022

How many times have we heard that old saw resurface in the past several years? But that saying applies to the business of local news revival, too.

We knew that our local fall elections offered a big test for Lookout Santa Cruz. We’d launched just after the 2020 November election, and this election, following a June test run, offered us the ability to show our fundamental essentiality to the wider community. Our coverage — voluminous, analytical, informational, and multimedia — showed our community what a digitally centered news operation can do for local democracy.

“In my years in Santa Cruz, I’ve never seen the scope of coverage you did,” the new mayor, a veteran politico, told us. In total, there were probably almost 100 content pieces, including those on usually neglected school and water boards, but we also wanted to extend into the community itself. We hosted three in-person candidate forums that we Zoomed, and then posted, in short segments, on our site for views to watch later on. We used texting, with help from an American Press Institute grant to solicit reader election questions — and got hundreds of them.

As Lookout Santa Cruz enters its third year, it’s become a primary local news medium for lots of locals. After two years of publishing — through the early news and information demands of Covid and recent, divisive local elections — we’re closing in on meeting the goal of our model: Powering a large, strong, fair, nonpartisan, and trustworthy new news brand on recurring revenue. It’s a model that can work beyond the territory of any single market.

Our advertising business is growing and diversifying. Our membership business has moved beyond a one-size-fits-all paywall, into a nuanced revenue line that aims to maximize both revenue and access for those unable to pay directly. Our student engagement programs help bring emerging adults into civic life and provide a steady stream of recurring revenue as well. Targeted philanthropy helps us build more quickly.

We’re on track to meet our goal of sustainable recurring revenue by next summer. We’re not declaring success yet, but we’re tangibly close, even as we ready ourselves for expansion into other communities. The work is tough and painstaking. We’ve made mistakes; fixing them costs us time and money — the two pressure points for all new ventures. We’ll undoubtedly make more.

In a world of surprises — Twitter self-immolation, Meta exiting news, midterm shocks — all that seems likely is recession. As a fellow local publisher remarked to me last week, “Given what’s already going on with the dailies, recession could be an extinction event.”

Hyperbole? Maybe. All I know is that we have to be thinking “replacement” for the dailies when we see stories like this one in The Washington Post: “They were some of the last journalists at their papers. Then came the layoffs.” As Kristi Garabradt told the Post of her layoff from the “Daily Jeff,” in Missouri’s capital city: “When you’re the paper’s only reporter, you don’t consider yourself nonessential.”

Recession will make remaking local news tougher. Money will be harder to get; timelines may lengthen. The world is unpredictable, but I continue to believe that the need for trusted, fact-based local news will never disappear. How it gets paid for and delivered is all in flux, but people want and value local news and information.

I’ve shared early lessons about our work building Lookout Local in two previous columns here at Nieman Lab, and am offering new takeaways below. My Newsonomics readers will note consistent themes through my 10 years (one million words!) of writing for the Lab. Over the last decade, we’ve seen financial players profit from the death spiral of the local newspaper industry, squeezing the last dollars out of a business dependent on the habits of senior readers. Many readers and journalists have already reached the end timess. Recently, Gannett — which controls 25% of U.S. daily newspaper circulation — forecast an operating loss of $60 to $70 million this year, even before the toll of recession.

The urgency of those who seek to rebuild local news — some advocating billions of dollars in funding — is only intensifying. Will we be ready, as the intersection of democracy and the cratering of the local press become more apparent? The clock is ticking.

Replacing the dailies takes investment — and the melding of mission and model

On hiatus from my analyst work covering the digital transition of national publishers and the demise of the local press, I now fit everything through the local lens: The lived experience of one local news company serving a county of 276,000.

Taking the longest view I can at the moment of that experience, I’m gobsmacked by the convergence between our mission and our business model.

Lookout Santa Cruz aims to help make Santa Cruz County a better place for all who live here. That mission isn’t a news one, per se, but news is a primary vehicle to achieve it.

Lookout is a public benefit company, and we saw mission and model as complementary from the start. The more we invest in community coverage and community engagement, the faster our business grows. The more that small- and medium-sized businesses, as well as larger nonprofits, buy advertising and memberships, the more we’re able to invest. It’s a virtuous circle that serves as a guidepost for Lookout — and, I think, for all of us intent on building pro-democracy local news organizations now.

The local credit union or beloved local grocer buys into Lookout because they like what we bring to the community. With their ad spend, we better our product and expand reach for them at the same time. They believe us when we say we’re built to last — and can compare that to local print, which looks more fragile and fatigued every month. (“We no longer buy print” is the increasing refrain.)

Authenticity is fundamental. But what differentiates our model from many others is size. Despite much advice to the contrary, I believed that we had to offer a big enough product to succeed in our goal to replace the local Alden daily, which is down to less than a handful in its newsroom. (If you missed the latest Alden takedown, check out Hasan Minhaj’s latest Netflix special, starting 12:36 from the end.) Start too small, and it’s too hard to propel the revenue generation forward.

Lookout Local has never been about money itself, but money to the end of the mission — money that can prove out the proposition that a robust replacement for suicidal dailies can, indeed, be built. That’s especially important in the age of Gannett’s trainwreck, Axios Local’s skimming, and the misguided Journalism Competition and Preservation act currently before Congress.

We raised a couple million dollars from the likes of the Knight Foundation, the Google News Innovation Challenge, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and local and regional philanthropists. “That’s a lot of money for a place the size of Santa Cruz,” some told me. But it’s not. Replacement takes investment.

We now have a real local news company growing well in all the vital benchmarks — audience, revenue, community regard, and credibility — with 15 full-tume people working in Santa Cruz Count. We have a newsroom of 10 and a business staff of five. We’re old-fashioned, working in a real office, with face-to-face communication throughout the week.

Without print costs, 80% of our expenses are in people — a terrific advantage going forward. Our staff, paid above local newspaper standards, drives our success and the pace of it. We know we are doing something both contrarian and absolutely vital.

We have to create a set of products — mobile site, desktop site, email newsletters, text alerts, social media posts, reels, events — that are good and newsy enough to merit regular check-ins and reading. We’re big enough to earn the audience, ad effectiveness, and membership value these kinds of operations require — in Santa Cruz and, we believe, more widely.

That means accountability journalism, and an increasing amount of it. This fall, we focused on pesticides near schools, overcrowded jails, teenagers’ fentanyl use, homelessness, and county fair upheaval.

As much as accountability is core to our mission, though, it will never pay the bills — or bring in sufficient readers to engage real thought and change in the communities we intend to serve. So we also offer entertainment calendars, puzzles, obituaries, a job board, and a Community Voices opinion section that in its first six months broadened political and cultural conversation — and served as a vital part of our election 2022 coverage, when we offered endorsements for the first time.

As central as political and civic coverage is, a wider variety of content pushes people from being in-and-out visitors to readers. Food is foremost. Arts, education, coastal life, public health, and culture also serve to satisfy readers.

As we become a primary news medium for an increasing number of people, we’re confronted with fundamental questions of expectation: How do we cover courts, crime, business, traffic, smaller government meetings, and more? As a fellow publisher put it to me recently, “We started offering news of choice. Now, we are expected to be the news of record.”

Here are 11 takeaways as we enter our third year.

Be patient — and aggressive. Acceptance follows on the heels of awareness, but it may take five or six brand touches for someone to really take notice. Before we launched, I’d tell people about what we were planning and receive mainly quizzical looks. I’d say to good news readers, “you know, a through-the-day changing news product on your phone, like The New York Times.” They’d smile and say, “You mean a blog.” They couldn’t imagine a product that didn’t exist: a local, mobile-first news service that changed through the day. Surveying readers about whether they wanted it would have been pointless, and I’m glad we didn’t.

Two years in, though, we hear, “I read Morning Lookout every morning, and know that when something happens you’re going to send me an alert.” We’re now hitting about 250,000 pageviews a month, growing at about 17% year over year. We love direct traffic and benchmark above average on it. We roll with Google and Facebook and also find Apple News to be an ascending brand builder for us.

Keep diversifying revenue streams. That should be a big duh to anyone trying to fund any venture, but I’m still amazed by how many organizations are focused almost exclusively on reader revenue as the ramp forward. We believe deeply in it, but it’s only one support. Here’s our percentage mix, still in flux, of course: 50% advertising; 35% membership, and 15% targeted philanthropy for key growth positions.

Act like a real marketing partner. How many (smart) people in the news revival movement are still allergic to advertising, or buy the line that Google and Facebook have “taken” the local market? Advertising makes up half of our revenue and has doubled over the past year. We call these “marketing partnerships” because that’s what they are — a deeply relationship-building form of community-driven commercial and nonprofit organization development. We call our business side Commerce and Community. We started with branded content (clearly demarcated and untouched by the newsroom) and have now added a range of innovative digital display products, a job board, obituaries, Instagram reels, and event sponsorships. We run no programmatic ads. Our ads reflect the local small business and nonprofit communities back to our whole community of readers. That means they not only bring in dollars, they reaffirm the community itself. It’s a twofer.

Move flexibly into Membership 2.0. It’s time to make the paywall/no paywall argument obsolete. We started with a tight paywall and a high price ($187 a year, or $17 per month). We’re glad we did. We gained real supporters, and we’ve kept them.

Now, though, as we’ve shifted access providers, we’re taking a more nuanced approach to membership. We want to provide access to Lookout to as close to 100% of the communities we serve as possible. That means lots of different kinds of memberships. Memberships now total more than 7,000, and we have 10,000 in our sights by early next year. All are paid for, in a range of ways. We have individual, enterprise, student, educator, and group memberships.

Paywalls should never have become a religious argument in the new news trade. In our work balancing access and revenue, we are building a model that I hope moves that discussion forward. Access control is fundamental; we are finally moving into an era of deploying it more imaginatively.

Show up. Be active, go to events, talk to anyone and everyone — not just the company’s leadership, but the full staff. Events — sponsoring and co-sponsoring them — are key, but it doesn’t stop there. There’s nothing like face-to-face gatherings. Fifteen people on the ground is a community force, multiplying the power and reach of the journalism.

Bring students directly into local news. Our paid access for students is supported by media literacy and civic-minded individual donors, and by the Google News Initiative. This isn’t the old daily Newspapers in Education program that often just dumped newspapers (the better to count for circulation) at schools. We’re doing more than providing access — we’re creating a local news-based curriculum and now see it being incorporated at the high school and college levels. We’re adding student voices into the fabric of Lookout. The societal value is a no-brainer, but we also see how this program can generate recurring revenue going forward — and serve as a model for getting local news to others who can’t, or are unlikely to, pay.

Planning is great, but it’s a lot of improv. The best models only offer a blueprint. From there, it’s relentless problem-solving — something that newsrooms have done daily for decades, and that is essential for building the sustainable business model in each community. Instagram is as much art as science. Some school programs fail to catch on, while educators quickly adapt other stuff our newsroom is producing every day.

Team-building takes time. We’re now fully staffed, with our most recent hires coming from places like the Globe and Mail and Monterey County Weekly. The team matches up pretty well with the across-the-generations readership profile our analytics display. After too much turnover in our first year, we’ve settled in well, though our culture is still forming. We’ve found nothing beats an in-office environment to build both culture and product. It’s as old-fashioned as you can imagine: 10 people sitting around a conference room table talking local stories.

Democracy is local. Santa Cruz has its share of polarization. It looks different here than it does in the red/blue patterns that swamp CNN every two years, but it’s the same phenomenon. For us, the work of building a stronger democracy starts with news and information, fair and deeply reported analysis, and rumor- and fact-checking. It extends to a wide-ranging opinion section and in-person community forums that are then given long life on the site. The more work we do, the more people accept us as a player, and both praise and criticism grow. It’s long-term work, and difficult, but we’ve got to be in the fray as an honest broker.

The tech stack is still unnecessarily hard. We’re not a technology business, though we are wholly digital. But we are a technology-based business. That’s an essential understanding as the dailies gasp for breath and newspapers abandon print. The advantages we have are real and long-term, but they’re still not properly rationalized. From CMSes to access controls to analytics to search optimization, we see a motley assortment of tech with too little integration among the moving parts. There’s real movement toward higher-performance standardization, optimization, and networking, but dealing with partial solutions continues to retard the fundamental work of remaking local news.

Make good friends and lean on them. Workshops, webinars, trainings, and the like are good. But there’s nothing like having friends in the business, enduring the same workloads, confronting the same issues, and understanding that innovation, rather than invention, is largely the name of the game. Six months ago, I wrote about the “3 a.m. Club,” made up of the leaders of the Daily Memphian, Colorado Sun, Baltimore Banner, Long Beach Post, and Block Club Chicago. As we approach 2023, our support for each other is evolving into possible networked solutions, tech and otherwise, that maximize our precious resources. We must all find our friends and stay close to them.

As we finish this year and look ahead, we’re about where we hoped to be, though the journey’s been unpredictable. We’ve built a model that’s working in Santa Cruz County. We believe many parts of it are widely applicable across the country. How do we apply what we’ve learned so far? How could the model, or parts of it, be applied to the world of dailies and large weeklies?

As a publisher and as an analyst, I balance those and numerous similar questions within the bounds of time. The brutal combination of local press destruction and assaults on the democratic process itself pose an unprecedented challenge for our time and place. It’s one we have to get right.

But Post has bigger ambitions. The “social platform for real people, real news, and civil conversations,” was founded by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin. It counts Kara Swisher as an advisor and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as one of its two investors. The other investor is Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and cohost of the Pivot podcast with Swisher. “I’ve never seen anyone, except maybe at a few strip bars, throw more money at someone than they’re throwing at Noam Bardin right now,” Galloway said on an episode of the Pivot podcast last week, in which he and Swisher interviewed Bardin. (Bardin wrote that, beyond funds from Andreessen Horowitz and from Galloway, “the only other money invested is mine.”)

Bardin wrote on Monday that Post has approved around 65,000 users out of a wait list of 335,000.

I used Twitter, posts on Post, and Swisher and Galloway’s podcast interview with Bardin to get some insight into how the company is thinking about news.

Post wants to build a business around micropayments for news

“We want to allow you to read premium news from multiple publishers,” Bardin wrote in a post on Sunday.

So far, the only publisher I’ve seen with content for “sale” on the platform is Reuters, which invites users to read its articles using “points.” (Each Post News user is given 50 points at sign-up.) Reuters is posting all its articles to Post News. But all these same articles are free on Reuters’ website, so I’m not sure why anyone would pay for them, even with imaginary free points.

This is quite a thing for Post News to claim when right now the only premium news provider I've found is Reuters, who is republishing wire stories you can read for free on their website for money while WSJ has uhhh this. https://t.co/hgPHWDXMg1 pic.twitter.com/swjkLVvpgm

— Aram Zucker-Scharff | @Chronotope@indieweb.social (@Chronotope) November 25, 2022

Ultimately, the vision seems to be that Post will allow users to pay micropayments for individual articles on Post. It’s a setup that Bardin says is good for both publishers and for itself, so I imagine he’s envisioning a revenue share, though he doesn’t say that explicitly. Here’s Bardin talking about the business model on the Pivot podcast (emphases mine):

I’ve been obsessing, the last, like six years, about this triangle between publishing and news journalism, social media networks, and the changing consumer behavior. And these three things have been working together, I believe, to bring us to the worst possible place.

News has moved to subscription, which basically converts maybe 2% of the users and so blocks 98% of the users from getting real editorialized content. Consumers have changed their behavior. They want to consume their news in their feed. And so, obviously, consumption from a feed does not work with subscription. And social media networks, with their advertising-based model, promote the worst in us because it works. I mean, the algorithms are don’t really care. They just, you know, try to achieve the engagement at any cost, right?

I spent a lot of time since I left Google about two years ago, building different products in this space, trying different things, and finally realized there’s no choice but to build something new, and what I’ve realized is that there’s a moment of opportunity now, and it’s wider than just what’s going on on Twitter, right? Facebook basically decided to drop news, move it out of the News Feed, and then stop paying news organizations. On the legal side, regulators are trying to force platforms to pay publishers. There’s this whole ecosystem of — where does news fit in? — that is kind of broken today…

What I believe consumers want is to be able to get multiple sources of news in their feed — some from creators or from people, some from professional journalists. They are willing to pay something for it. It doesn’t have to be free if you want good-quality news, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to subscribe to every publication. The fact that every publication thinks you’re gonna subscribe to it just mathematically can’t work, right? Obviously, that’s not going to work. So we need other models and we can’t have a world of just advertising or subscription. […]

We want to be able to bring the right content to the right user at the right price. And that means that if you come on the platform, spend 15 minutes, walk away feeling smarter, that’s success. But it also means that our incentives are aligned with content creators’, whether it’s publishers or individual content creators. We both make money or we don’t make money, unlike today where the platforms make a lot of money, but the publishers and the creators make nothing. […]

Let’s start, always, from the consumer. By the way, that’s one of the problem with publishers: They don’t talk about the consumer at all. It’s not part of their DNA. They’re saving the world. But when it comes from the consumer perspective, right, the modern consumer wants to get multiple sources in their feed. Why can’t you do that today? Because every time you click on it, you hit a paywall, and you’re not gonna subscribe to everything, right?

And so this means that publishers are losing 98% of the traffic. Now, the 2% that subscribe are obviously very, very valuable for them. So this means from a newsroom perspective, they end up writing for that 2%, which are the most extreme and politically aligned group, and they’re not writing for the average. And if they could hear — hear, in terms of monetization — the requests of the average, I believe it would also impact dramatically what they cover and how they cover it.

So in my view, you’re going through your [Post] feed, you see an article from The Washington Post on inflation, you click on it, and you read it. No friction. Friction is our biggest enemy, right? One click, you pay for it, you read it. The next article coming in might be The Wall Street Journal on inflation, because your feed has been changing based on what you’re reading. And you’re gonna read that suddenly. So suddenly, you’ve read two different takes on inflation in your feed, but you’re not subscribed to either of them. But the publisher can set the price. They can set the terms.

There are a few questionable statements here: It isn’t true that consumers can’t get multiple sources of news in a feed. They can! On Twitter, for instance, or on Apple News+.

It also isn’t true that you hit a paywall as soon as you click on a link to an article from a news outlet you don’t subscribe to. Most news outlets give you a bunch of free articles; local news sites are worse about this, but the two news sources that Bardin mentions, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, definitely let you read plenty of stuff for free.

And it isn’t true that publishers don’t talk about the consumer “at all” — as publishers become more reliant on subscriptions, most are talking about audiences constantly. (Maybe Bardin is referring here to “the consumer” as someone somehow separate from “the subscriber,” i.e., a person who will absolutely never pay to subscribe?)

I’m also generally skeptical of the notion that the average news consumer wants to read — and pay for — takes from multiple political perspectives on an issue like inflation, though It’s unclear here if Bardin is referring to politics, specifically.

But who does Bardin think the average news consumer is? Later in the podcast, he speaks about that:

I want to care about the 75% of users that today on Twitter don’t tweet. They really are who I’m thinking about, more than anything — not the small percentage that make all the noise and have all the followers and all the excitement. [But] regular people who want to use social media to get their news. They want to communicate with others, ask questions, and they don’t want to be called a Nazi or communist for just having a question out there.

Post hopes you’ll tip

Every post on Post has a little dollar sign to tip. It’s unclear how the tipping part will work with the micropayments part, or if they’d be separate. On the podcast, though, Galloway intertwines the two: “Yeah, I think the micropayments part — whether it’s Simon Holland with his dad jokes, or the wolf conservation group that has these wonderful videos of wolves, just the idea, and what I love about Post.news so far, is I can just say this, ‘This made me feel good. Here’s a buck.'” Simon Holland tweets PG family jokes and the Wolf Conservation Center is this.

I guess — think about which tweets you’d pay for, and then imagine that they were Posts instead and that you were paying a little bit. Would you do that? Maybe! (There have definitely been a few Twitter threads by one expert or another that I’d maybe pay $1 for, but Post doesn’t allow threads yet.)

Anyway, everyone starts off with 50 free points and if you click the “tip” button on a post, you’ll see this:

If you want to buy more points, you can, with a credit card. (Payments are processed via Stripe.) Post’s FAQ says that each point is equivalent to $0.01, and “the Points you [purchase] will be used towards supporting creators and content of your choice, and enabling the Post platform to operate.”

For “batches” of points up to 1,000, Post is taking a 29% cut. 300 points cost $4.20 (so $1.20 goes to Post), 500 cost $7 ($2 goes to Post), and 1,000 cost $14 ($4 goes to Post). If you buy larger numbers of points, there are slight discounts (10,000 points cost $126, meaning Post takes about a 20% cut.)

Most news publishers aren’t on Post, but Post is making it look as if they are

I found a lot of news publishers that appeared to have Post News accounts. But these accounts are actually placeholders created by Post News in an effort to get publishers to move there — the idea being, I suppose, that if they come on over they’ll already have a bunch of followers.

https://t.co/tUChf5Yfkt is creating fake/placeholder accounts for publishers to try to entice them to move there? pic.twitter.com/qlOQr5TFy8

— Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) November 28, 2022

Rather… media companies see Post needing..

1) Their brands to establish Post as legitimate
2) Their content to give Post actual value

Creating dummy placeholder accounts with astroturfed petitions to "bring the NYT on Post" only furthers this observation

— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) November 28, 2022

Reaction to this practice has been all over the place, from “genius” to “gross.” Personally, I think it’s a little sketchy, especially since Post says it wants to work with publishers as partners and considers their content a key part of its business model.

Yep. It sails *awfully* close to this. https://t.co/FWcC9HdAUB. I get that the line "convince them to join" makes it clear it's not an official account but I'd be furious if someone did this t me personally cc @fergb @Chronotope

— Corinne Podger (@corinne_podger) November 29, 2022

Did I sign up for post news? yes.

Have I actively been using it? no.

Do I think news orgs should jump in feet first as a Twitter replacement? no.

Does it seem like they legitimately want to work with publishers to distribute news? Um…. no. https://t.co/I4GFDLezBw

— Emma Carew Grovum (@emmacarew) November 28, 2022

Here’s Andrew Zalk, Post’s head of publisher development (he previously spent more than a decade at Flipboard):

“You can attack anyone’s ideology, but you can’t attack the person.”

Bardin wrote on Sunday that he wants to “keep Post civil”:

We are focused on moderation and operational tools, hiring and training people, flagging posts, blocking, muting, tuning the comment moderation keywords. This is the biggest constraint on letting more people in faster.

He also spoke about content moderation on the Pivot podcast:

I think that’s one thing that I want to make very firm on this platform. You can attack anyone’s ideology, but you can’t attack the person…Having debates about content, about ideas, is super important. But as soon as we start throwing in, you know, what we think about that person’s lifestyle, that obviously degrades us, to where we are today.

So then can you not, say, call Nick Fuentes a white supremacist? Like many other things about Post News at the moment, it’s unclear how this will work in practice.

Until Sunday, the company’s mission statement noted that nobody should be discriminated against based on, among other things, “net worth.” Maybe they just meant “income” and meant poor people, but anyway, the “net worth” part has since been removed, though you can see it archived here.

honestly too funny that post explicitly says no making fun of billionaires. no surprise it’s funded by a16z!https://t.co/Z8HAg4raje pic.twitter.com/oWhJDIqhYz

— Paris Marx (@parismarx) November 27, 2022

As for diversity, Bardin wrote on Sunday that this is how he’s thinking about who he approves from Post’s wait list:

I am working hard to keep the audience as diverse as I can (from what I can gather reading 200 characters) but this means that some people may be invited before others. I understand the fairness argument but I feel strongly that having broad diversity at the early stage is crucial for the long term success of Post.

I am increasingly worried when I observe what I see as the increasing fragility of many nonprofit newsrooms juxtaposed with the robust growth of the intermediaries whose mission is to support them.

In 1955, an observer of finance wrote a book with the subtitle “A Good Hard Look at Wall Street.” The title derived from the reply of a visitor to New York who was told to look out to the harbor at all the fancy boats owned by bankers and brokers. It was called Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? It is a question we should metaphorically be asking ourselves in the emerging digital news ecosystem.

Here are a few facts that make me worry:

• A recent study by the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) reported that of its 400-plus member organizations, two-thirds saw revenue growth from 2018 through 2021 (which is also to say that one third flatlined or actually shrank), and that the median growth was 25% over the four-year period. Over the same period, INN’s own operating revenues grew by 107%; from 2017 through this year, its operating revenue is estimated to have grown by 221%. From 2018 to 2021, the number of INN’s full-time equivalent employees grew from 9 to 15; it has 20 full-time employees currently. The median INN member has six employees and $373,000 in revenue; INN’s own operating revenues are 14 times larger.
• LION Publishers, a group of both nonprofit and for-profit newsrooms, most of them smaller, reports that half of its members saw revenue growth from the crisis year of 2020 to 2021 (which again means that half did not), with an increase to a median figure of $125,000. LION’s own revenues are expected to have more than quintupled from less than $700,000 in 2019 to about $3.8 million in 2022. That is to say, LION itself is now, by revenue, the size of about 30 of its average members combined. The median LION member has a staff of two; LION itself has 11 staff members, up from three in 2019. (Disclosure: I am doing some coaching for LION.)
• The Knight Foundation, the leading institutional funder of journalism, just made a grant of $4.75 million to INN, the second largest Knight journalism grant in the last three years (the largest was to a university), and a $2.85 million grant to LION.

Let me be clear: a great deal of good work has been and will be done with such money by these and other fast-growing intermediaries, including the News Revenue Hub, Media Impact Funders, the Solutions Journalism Network, and many others.

But I wonder if more good might have been done by directing much of institutional foundations’ money instead to the most deserving news nonprofits — both those with proven track records of excellence and convincing plans for the future AND those with exciting ideas, innovative models and promising leadership.1

The temptation of intermediaries

For institutional foundations (those with paid staffs whose job is to give away the money of absent, usually deceased, donors) intermediaries can be especially tempting grantees. Dispensing the money to trade associations, for instance, can be portrayed as gifts to all the members, avoiding the necessity of choosing a few and possibly alienating most. Moreover, it is almost unquestionably true that there are more news organizations deserving of institutional funding than there are currently institutional funds to give them, especially if one seeks to avoid that other temptation of large numbers of grants too small to make a meaningful difference.

I would argue, however, that making these choices, no matter how difficult, is precisely what institutional foundation staff is paid to do. The Knight Foundation, for instance, spent more than $10 million on staff and trustees in 2020 in order to make $71 million in grants. The much larger and more diversified Ford Foundation spent on staff and trustees in the same year about as much as Knight spent on grantees ($71 million again) to make about $805 million in grants. I don’t necessarily have a problem with this. Having assembled an expert staff of capable people, however, hard choices should not only be possible, they should be required. Experts should not outsource the heart of their own work.

In fact, I would have no problem with foundations increasing program staff a bit if they think that’s required to make the necessary choices at the appropriate scale. It would surely be more efficient than subsidizing an ever-expanding web of intermediaries, remembering that every time water is poured out of the philanthropic bucket, some of it necessarily leaks.

The metaphor that worries me most on this topic is not actually Wall Street capital and missing yachts. It’s organized labor and lost jobs. In the last third of the last century, the proportion of the workforce that was unionized fell by more than half, as good jobs disappeared by the millions, spurring a significant part of the alienation that is tearing this country apart even now. At the same time, top union leadership at places like the AFL-CIO held comfortable sinecures, hobnobbed in Washington, and convened comfortably in Florida. A visitor looking to Bar Harbour might have asked, “Where are the rank and file’s jobs?” Too few asked that question until it was too late. I hope we can avoid that mistake in the news business.

1. The American Journalism Project, for which I also do work, seems something of an in-between case, as it re-grants much of its money to newsrooms. Similarly, Report for America sends the bulk of its money out to newsrooms directly, in the form of corps member salaries. And NewsMatch promotes small contributions to newsrooms directly, although the nationwide institutional matching grants (as opposed to the locally or otherwise targeted matches) are subject to the separate critique that they are each too small to be impactful.

Unlike the pilot program that offered single podcast subscriptions, the paid bundle is getting a very soft launch. To start, NPR+ will only be available in the 34 locations where a member station1 is participating in the program. That means listeners with IP addresses that put them in, say, New York City or Boston will only see single show subscriptions available for now, while those living in Orlando or Baltimore or Normal, Illinois can choose the bundled NPR+ option.

A team at NPR developed the NPR+ program and will manage marketing as well as customer service for the bundle. (It’s still not exactly easy to add a paid feed to the most popular podcast app in the U.S.) Member stations, meanwhile, get to keep 100% of the donations.

“We’re reserving our bundle for the benefit of supporting your local member station — that’s really the offer that we’re hoping becomes a resounding success,” said Joel Sucherman, NPR’s vice president for audio platform strategy. “Because, you know, ‘listeners like you’ supporting local member stations, which support NPR — that’s what makes the world go ’round in public radio.”

The podcast bundle has two origin stories. The first starts with die-hard podcast fans asking for bonus content, merch, and other ways to support their favorite show. (“We are a tribe of tote bag people,” Sucherman said at one point.) The other emerged from NPR reading the tea leaves and seeing increased competition and consolidation in the audio space.

“For many of our 50-plus years, our high standard of audio and fact-based journalism was a lane that we had to ourselves in many ways. But over the course of the last five to 10 years, it’s been amazing the number of folks who have jumped into the field and are doing great work — including folks that we never really truly competed against, like The New York Times,” Sucherman said. “What we do differently than The New York Times, or another commercial media company, is realize that we’re in it together.”

An NPR spokesperson said that “tens of thousands” of people subscribed to individual shows as part of the pilot program for NPR+. (Fresh Air and Planet Money were the most popular “singles” offerings.) The pilot phase also confirmed to NPR the importance of bonus content — not just ad-free episodes — in converting listeners into paid subscribers, said Leda Marritz, program manager for the NPR+ podcast subscription service.

“We knew from our technology platform partners that offering bonus content or early access to content is going to move the needle way more than ad-free,” she said. “Having said that, it was very gratifying to see that once we did start doing that, the number of subscribers just immediately started going up.”

If you’re a subscriber to @planetmoney +, you can listen to today’s bonus content – the very first edition of Planet Money Movie Club!

I join @RadioMalone and @VelocityWong to talk ~Brewster’s Millions~

Listen and take a shot every time we say ‘conceit’https://t.co/uo3pasOlM0

— Sam Yellowhorse Kesler (@samkeslr) August 22, 2022

NPR+ bonus content has included extended interviews, listener Q&As, and show-specific tidbits like a Planet Money Movie Club and early access to a chatty episode between Peter Sagal and Emma Choi from Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! and their executive producer Mike Danforth.

“We wanted to differentiate bonus content from the core offering, both for philosophical reasons and editorial reasons,” Marritz, who joined NPR earlier this year from Apple Podcasts, said. “Planet Money is a highly polished, highly produced work of art, right? They can’t do that and a piece of bonus content, too. It would just not be achievable on an ongoing basis.”

Marritz emphasized the technical hurdles involved in linking a subscription to a recurring local donation when different stations use different systems to accept payments, share content, and manage donors. For now, Marritz said, NPR is focused on some of the unsexy stuff that’s nevertheless critical to scaling this project to their coast-to-coast vision.

“This is not ‘get rich quick.’ We’re not expecting stratospheric success right out of the gate,” Marritz said. “This group of 34 stations is basically going to be an informal advisory body for this product. We’re obviously going to be staying very close to them, hearing what’s working, hearing what’s not working, triaging those, and addressing them as much as possible.”

The fact that NPR+ subscriptions will only be available to new recurring donors at first was a sticking point for some stations presumably worried about antagonizing current members while recruiting their next generation of donors. NPR heard “loud and clear” from “many, many stations” that they only wanted to offer NPR+ when the technological infrastructure was in place to offer the bundle to their existing members, too.

In addition to the technical hurdles, there are cultural challenges for NPR+ contend with. Radio, NPR’s legacy platform, has long been on the decline. The pandemic accelerated that trend by disrupting many car commutes, where half of AM/FM listening in the U.S. takes place.

“For some stations, moving into a digital-focused strategy is a shift. Many of them still live in the broadcast world, uh, very firmly,” Marritz said. “There’s just a real variety — you get some for whom this feels like a really comfortable program to opt into, and you get some for whom this feels like a much bigger shift from how they’re operating in the day-to-day.”

What does NPR stand for? pic.twitter.com/tJMEDMzfTo

— nprextra (@NPRextra) October 4, 2022

Asking a national podcast audience to become donors to their local radio stations might seem like a convoluted way to generate subscription revenue. But NPR — for reasons institutional, journalistic, and financial — wants to prioritize local support.

Dues and fees paid by the more than 1,000 NPR member stations are one of NPR’s largest portions of revenue. Currently, member stations are drawing on a donor base that is older and less diverse than America at large. NPR’s own CEO has described the public radio system as “stagnant on new membership” and overly reliant on twice-yearly pledge drives.

Meanwhile, NPR estimates that less than 1% of its 20 million weekly digital users give to their local stations.

“Podcast listeners may or may not be listening to the traditional appeals on the radio,” Sucherman said. “They may not have a favorite radio station — or understand that a public radio station is connected to NPR and connected to the podcasts that NPR creates.”

The NPR+ podcast bundle is just one part of a broader strategy called NPR Network that was approved by the company’s board over the summer. The NPR Network initiative also includes creating a cross-promotional podcast network, launching a digital audio ad exchange, and changing the organization’s bylaws to allow NPR Network to seek individual contributions directly.

With NPR Network, NPR aims to double the number of people who support their local member stations directly and double the total annual revenue in the public radio system by 2030.

“As strong as Marfa, Texas is, that’s how strong NPR is, ultimately,” Sucherman said. “We want to make sure that we have more boots on the ground, more journalists in the field, more regional hubs. How can we think about supporting those in new ways? This is one of those ways.”

1. As of Nov. 1st, participating local member stations are CapRadio – Sacramento, CA; Cincinnati Public Radio / WVXU – Cincinnati, OH; Colorado Public Radio – Denver, CO; Georgia Public Broadcasting – Atlanta, GA; Houston Public Media – Houston, TX; Iowa Public Radio – Des Moines, IA; KALW – San Francisco, CA; KENW – Portales, NM; KNKX – Tacoma, WA; KPBS Public Media – San Diego, CA; KUOW – Seattle, WA; KVCR – San Bernardino, CA; Louisville Public Media – Louisville, KY; North Carolina Public Radio – Chapel Hill, NC; North State Public Radio – Chico, CA; KOSU – Stillwater, OK; Prairie Public Broadcasting – Fargo, ND; South Dakota Public Radio – Vermillion, SD; Texas Public Radio – San Antonio, TX; WABE – Atlanta, GA; WCBU – Peoria, IL; WEKU – Richmond, KY; WFYI – Indianapolis, IN; WGLT – Normal, IL; WJCT Public Media – Jacksonville, FL; WKAR Radio – East Lansing, MI; WLVR – Bethlehem, PA; WMFE – Orlando, FL; WNIN Tri-States Public Media – Evansville, IN; WRKF – Baton Rouge, LA; WSKG Public Radio – Vestal, NY; WUSF Public Media – Tampa, FL; WYPR – Baltimore, MD; and WYSO – Yellow Springs, OH

Ranges have to include a minimum and maximum — employers can’t say something like “$15/hour and up.” So some — cough, New York Post, cough — are finding wiggle room with useless ranges like “$15/hour to $125,000.” Some CNN positions included pay ranges of nearly $100,000.

We went searching through the job boards to find what media companies, both those based in New York City and those that have offices or some positions there, are paying — and whether they’re adhering to the, um, spirit of the law. (By the way, is it fair to expect companies to be complying already? Yes, they’ve had months to prepare and the rule was already delayed once.)

This list is up-to-date as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

ABC

Examples:

• Producer (consumer investigative) – GMA, ABC News: $99,400–$136,730
• Digital editor, hard news – ABC News: $75,200–$103,400

AP

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

The Atlantic

The Atlantic appears to be providing salary ranges for all positions, including those with the option of working remote. Examples:

• Senior photo editor: “Salary Minimum: $100,000, Salary Maximum: $120,000.”
• Staff writer, The Daily: “Salary Minimum: $60,000, Salary Maximum: $70,000.”
• Product manager: “Salary Minimum: $60,000, Salary Maximum: $130,000.”

Axios

Axios is providing salary ranges for jobs listed under its “NYC Office,” even if they are remote. Salary information is not given for jobs based out of other offices. Examples:

• Associated director, integrated marketing: “On target earnings for this role is in the range of $90,000-$110,000 and is dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills.”
• Senior software engineer (backend): “Base salary ranges for this role are listed below and are dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills. This range does not include other compensation benefits.
  L6: $160k – $210k
  L5: $160k – $200k
  L4: $130k – $190k”

Bloomberg

Examples:

• Newsletter producer (contract): “35 – 45 USD Hourly”
• News automation content engineer: $105,000–160,000
• Senior video producer: $110,000–$115,000

Bustle Digital Group

Examples:

• Deputy features director: $85,000–$105,000
• Writer and director, branded video: $72,500–$78,000
• Entertainment editor, Nylon: $63,500–$70,000

BuzzFeed

• News editor, BuzzFeed News: “Salary band: $72,500-$87,000”
• Business analyst, BuzzFeed News: “Salary band: $73,000-$82,000”
• Features editor, Complex: $83,000–$100,000

CBS News

Examples:

• Editor: $110,000-$120,000
• Senior editor, CBSNews.com: $100,000–$109,000

CNN

Examples:

• Producer, Snapchat, CNN Digital Video: “In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles that will be performed in New York City. Actual salaries will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $85,540.00 – $158,860.00 salary per year.”
• Senior section editor, social: “In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles that will be performed in New York City. Actual salaries will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $113,890.00 – $211,510.00 salary per year.”

Chalkbeat

Example:

• People operations assistant: $50,000–$60,000

The City

Examples:

• Investigations editor: $140,000–$150,000
• Associate director of development, individual giving: $110,000–$120,000

Condé Nast

Examples:

• Executive director, brand marketing, Vanity Fair: $145,000–$180,000
• SEO writer and producer, Glamour: $60,000–$78,000
• Executive editor, news, Wired: $170,000–$225,000

The Daily Beast

Example:

• Entertainment critic: $90,000–$100,000

FT

Examples:

• Associate editor: $95,000–$110,000
• Reporter, FundFire: $65,000–$72,000

Dotdash Meredith

Examples:

• Methodology writer, beauty: “This is a contract role at 40 hours per week and would be hybrid. The rate for this position is $27/hour.”
• General manager, Verywell Health: $146,000–$219,000

First Look Media

Examples:

• Designer: “Compensation (NYC Only): Full Time salary range between 65K – 75K”
• Senior analyst, Topic streaming service: “Compensation (NYC Only): Full Time salary range between 90K – 100K”

Forbes

Forbes appears to be posting salary ranges for all jobs. Examples:

• Senior editor, newsletters: “The annual base salary range for this role is: $115,000 – $140,000.”
• Breaking news politics reporter: “This is a contract position with potential for full time employment…Hourly Rate Range: $28.85 – $28.85.”

Fortune

Example:

• VP, newsletters: $175,000–$200,000.

G/O Media

Examples:

• Staff writer, Quartz: “This is a position covered under the collective bargaining agreement with the WGA-East which establishes the minimum salary for this position at $62,000. This position is set at a range of $62,000 to $68,000.”
• Editorial director, New York, NY: “The salary for this position ranges from $300,000.00 to $350,000.00.”

The Guardian

Examples:

• Deputy editor, race and equity: $180,000–$190,000
• Reporter, fossil fuels and climate: $88,000–$100,000

The Information

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

Insider Inc.

Examples:

• Business features editor: $150,000–$220,000
• Politics correspondent: $100,000–$140,000

NBC

Examples:

• Reporter, Select: $75,000–$125,000
• Updates editor, Select: $75,000–$90,000

New York Post

• Decider digital project manager: “$50,000–$145,000”
• SEO manager: $50,000- $145,000
• Deputy photo editor, Sunday (Tues–Sat): “$50,000- $145,000”
• Sports digital reporter/producer: “$15/hour – $125,000”
• Tech reporter: “$50,000- $145,000”
• Politics reporter: “$15/hour – $125,000”

New York Times

The Times is providing base pay salary ranges, including for jobs that can be done remotely. Examples:

• Senior designer: $76,500–$105,000
• Reporting fellowship: $76,168.04
• Legal affairs correspondent in Washington, D.C.: $115,506.56–$170,000.00
• Director, story and audience analytics: $152,000–$185,000.00
• Senior art director, games: $140,000–$165,000
• Supervising editor, style, Wirecutter, in New York, NY or remote: $92,650–$109,000

Penske Media Corporation

Examples:

• Associate director, paid social: $100,000–$110,000
• Vibe music editor: $75,000–$85,000
• Rolling Stone photo coordinator: $52,000–$62,000

Puck

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, Nov. 4 at 11:00 AM ET.

Reuters

Examples:

• Product manager – video: $122,500–$227,500
• Reader revenue analytics: $60,200–$111,800

Slate

Examples:

• News editor: “The annual base pay range for this job is between $82,000 and $100,000.”
• Podcast host – ICYMI: “The annual base pay range for this job is between $100,000 and $115,000.”

Substack

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, Nov. 4 at 11:00 AM ET.

Time

Examples:

• Manager of product design: $85,000–$125,000
• Newsletter operations manager: $75,000–$105,000

Vice

Examples:

• Editor, shopping and reviews: “New York/California: 64,000 – 75,000 USD. Outside New York/California: 54,000 – 64,000 USD”
• Associate writer, affiliate: “New York/California: 55,000 – 60,000 USD”
• VP, audio: “New York/California: 190,000 – 230,000 USD”

Vox Media

Vox is providing salary ranges for all positions, including for jobs that can be done remotely. Examples:

• NowThis director of analytics: “The minimum and maximum salary for this position is $125,000.”
• Cities manager, Eater (temporary while manager is on maternity leave): “The annual base pay range for this job is $77,000 to $108,000.”

Wall Street Journal

Examples:

• Executive producer, news podcasts: $50,000 to $180,000
• Audio reporter, The Journal podcast: $40,000 to $160,000
• Reporter, careers and workplace: $50,000 to $180,000

Washington Post

Examples:

• Sales sector director: $200,500–$334,100
• Graphic designer: $59,167.16–$125,600

WNYC

Examples:

• Major gifts officer: $82,000-$100,000.
• Housing reporter, WNYC/Gothamist: $84,413-$86,000.

Their second annual report shows the news site brought in $3.8 million and nearly every dollar came from readers. Just as in its first year, 95% of revenue came from subscriptions and the rest from site sponsorships, podcast advertising, live event ticketing, monetization of their Twitch, Amp, and YouTube channels, and merch like their “Quit Your Job” hoodie and “Defecator” one-piece for infants. With operating expenses totaling $3.7 million, Defector was profitable in its second year.

During year two, Defector experimented with promotional pricing for the first time — $0.99 for the first month — and said more than 60% of the 2,000 people who subscribed to the promo rate converted to full-price subscriptions.

Defector promoted the deal with pop-ups on their website, tweets, and emails to a list of about 150,000 non-paying readers. Their most successful email “generated ~1.5x the normal open rate and ~2x the normal clickthrough rate of our subscription appeal emails,” according to the report.

But the email from editor-in-chief Tom Ley also generated “several complaints” that the subject line (“I see what you’re up to”) was somewhere between “creepy” and “alarming.”

Here’s the lightly menacing email in question:

“Despite that email’s effectiveness, we have since tried to stay away from creepy subject lines,” the report reads.

Total subscription revenue rose from about $3 million in year one to $3.6 million in year two and Defector ended its second year with roughly 2,000 more active subscribers than it had the year before. (That’s 36,000 active subscribers at the end of year one to 38,000 at the end of year two.) At one point, in September 2022, Defector reached “a high-water mark” of 41,000 active subscribers.

Defector is trying to address the churn and reached out to former subscribers with a short survey over the summer. More than 60% of ex-subscribers said they felt they weren’t reading enough to justify the subscription cost and 40% cited financial hardship as a reason they canceled. (Respondents could pick multiple reasons.) Other explanations included seasonality in the sports calendar (e.g. readers who only wanted to read about the NFL), article quantity, article quality, and user experience issues.

We’ve gotten helpful feedback by reaching out to people who have cancelled their subscriptions, and also this comment from our own Ray Ratto. https://t.co/ejmU9a697I pic.twitter.com/qPIdkdCDeu

— Defector (@DefectorMedia) October 27, 2022

A major bright spot in Defector’s annual report is their hit podcast Normal Gossip. When I wrote about the show in June, a little more than 500 people had signed up as paid subscribers. That number has jumped to more than 2,500 — accounting for roughly 5% of all Defector subscribers.

In its outlook for year three, Defector said it expects the podcast to be “the major driver of growth in non-subscription revenue” as well. (The podcast’s first live events have sold out quickly, and more are planned.)

Here’s Normal Gossip host Kelsey McKinney, sounding proud as all heck:

You can see that in the year two annual report, which is out today. We are taking (calculated!) risks that no other media company is making despite having LESS money and LESS of a safety net. And people WANT to pay for that because the product is good. https://t.co/sxc6fsiBw9

— kelsey mckinney (@mckinneykelsey) October 27, 2022

Other tidbits from Defector’s annual report:

— Currently, the cheapest subscription tier costs $8/month or $79/year. Approximately 62% subscribe at that level, another 32% at $12/month or $119/year, and 5% via Normal Gossip podcast subscriptions (starting at $5/month). And 70 people subscribe at the $1,000/year “Accomplice” level.

— Defector considered raising subscription prices before 20,000 annual subscriptions were set to renew last month, but ultimately decided against it. (They get pretty technical about the why in footnote no. 7.)

— For small teams, some things just aren’t worth the effort. For Defector, those things include actively seeking out site sponsorships (“As currently constituted, our operations team is inexperienced and/or bad at sales. We will very much still consider inbound requests from brands”), a holiday subscription gifting campaign (Defector sold about 300 in 2021, half of what a similar campaign yielded the year before), and paid digital advertising (“We realized we did not have the expertise nor the bandwidth each week to really learn from and optimize our campaigns”).

— Their goals for year three? To run it back, with a larger “top of the funnel.”

Overall, our goals for Year 3 are 1) Making enough money to keep making Defector what we want it to be; and 2) Reaching more people with our work. We remain very proud of this business we’ve built and the community around it. https://t.co/ejmU9aoilQ

— Defector (@DefectorMedia) October 27, 2022

You can read the full, admirably candid report here.

Co-founders Ana Ormachea, Luis Quevedo, Pablo Juanarena, and Angel Jimenez launched Cuonda, a podcasting platform to help Spanish-language podcasts get standardized metrics for their shows to secure sponsorship and cross-promotion deals.

Seven years later, Ormachea is the chief digital officer for Prisa Radio, in charge of the audio-first strategy for the world’s biggest Spanish-language audio production company. Prisa Radio is one wing of Prisa, a Spanish media conglomerate that also owns daily newspaper El País, sports daily AS, news radio station Cadena SER, El HuffPost, and Podium, a platform that, like Cuonda, supports podcasts by helping them find advertising deals and revenue.

These investments in Spanish-language audio are starting to pay off. Daily news podcasts in Spain are gaining momentum, according to a new analysis of the country’s audio landscape.

Researchers from Spain’s Miguel Hernández University of Elche in Spain looked at the 14 top daily original news podcasts on the Spanish podcast discovery platform iVoox and on Apple Podcasts. Of the 14, 10 are produced by Spanish news outlets like El País, El Mundo, El Diario, and Cadena SER. The remaining four are produced by independent podcasters.

In Spain, 41% of the population reported listening to a podcast at least once a month in 2021. Spanish media companies first started getting into daily news podcasts in 2018, releasing short news bulletins for smart speakers, the report’s authors — Miguel Carvajal, Cristian-Ramón Marín-Sanchiz, and Carlos J. Navas — write. Over the last couple of years, the country’s legacy news outlets have launched more in-depth news podcasts, following in the footsteps of shows like The New York Times’ The Daily and The Guardian’s Today in Focus. The researchers interviewed the founders, creators, or hosts for each podcast and asked them about their business models.

“Finding the product/market fit is more important than creating a big production in terms of sound design and script,” Marín Sanchiz told me in an email, adding, “When trying to make users build a habit, it is vital to intertwine the podcast with their routines…it’s a format that rewards a bit of journalistic intuition, as it’s almost impossible to build podcasts to just fit searches and platform algorithms.”

The report doesn’t formally compare Spanish news podcasts to those from other countries, but Carvajal said that half of the podcasts — including ones produced by legacy news organizations — had just one person working on them. El País’ podcast team is the largest and an outlier in the sample, with 10 people working on its daily podcast Hoy en El País. Eight of the 14 podcasts in the study launched between 2021 and 2022, mostly from mainstream outlets that were either launching or revamping their subscription businesses.

“The podcast sphere in Spain has been [historically] characterized by pioneers from outside the media industry, mostly entrepreneurs focused on niches, and monetization was always [an afterthought],” Carvajal told me in an email. “On the distribution side, Apple Podcasts never had the weight that it did in places like the United States due to low usage of Apple products…It wasn’t until Podium and Cuonda launched that there was an explosion of journalistic, narrative podcasts. The Serial phenomenon, the [success of] daily news podcasts in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the increase in podcast consumption in Spain woke up journalistic producers.”

Listenership varies widely among the 14 podcasts, and the researchers noted that the survey respondents had a “negative view” of the tools and data available to understand podcast audiences (though this isn’t a problem unique to Spain). The producers of the independent podcasts, however, reported their listenership as being largely on par with that of the podcasts from major news outlets.

“The daily news podcasts in international media tend to deal with immediate, current events, but they also delve into long-term or evergreen issues,” Carvajal said. “In that sense, they are similar to the niche podcasts we chose that deal with topics relevant to their communities.”

Marketing Online, a niche podcast about the marketing industry launched in 2014 by Joan Boluda, reported 65,000 listens per episode, while Hoy en El País by El País (launched in 2022) and La ContraCrónica by independent journalist and creator Fernando Díaz Villanueva (launched in 2016) each reported 50,000 listens per episode.

The study shows that podcasters have different goals in getting into the audio industry: major media outlets are focused on building trust and personal relationships with listeners and reaching new audiences, while independent creators tend to focus on carving out space for themselves in their niche in a sustainable way.

All are interested and focused on audience and business growth and sustainability, though revenue data was not included in the study. So far, podcasts have been helpful to national newspapers as they bolster their subscription offerings and create new revenue streams, mainly through sponsorship and advertising. Independent podcasts have more diversified revenue streams, which include sponsorships, programmatic advertising, corporate services, among others. Mixx.io, a daily newsletter and podcast about tech that works with Cuonda, for example, reported €45,000 in annual revenue from sponsorships, while La ContraCrónica has 3,000 patrons on Patreon in addition to revenue from advertising, affiliate linking, and selling merchandise.

You can read the full study here.

Seven years later, “indefinitely” seems to be over: Post-subscribing Amazon Prime members who were paying that $3.99/month rate have been informed over the past couple of days that their monthly price will triple to $12. That’s the normal rate currently offered through the Post’s site. (Separately, and confusingly, you can also still buy a Washington Post Kindle subscription, which “includes unlimited access to all content from The Washington Post Company website and The Washington Post Company mobile apps,” for $7.99 per month via Amazon’s site. That price is up from $5.99 per month a year ago.)

The price increase comes as the Post’s digital business appears to have stalled: The New York Times recently reported that the Post has lost paying digital subscribers since 2020 and that its digital ad revenue has fallen. I’ve asked the Post for comment and will update this if I hear back. The change implies, though, that the Post no longer sees enough of a strategic advantage in introducing Prime members to the paper that it’s willing to subsidize them. (It still runs plenty of general pricing specials, though.)

Prime members might have let a $3.99 monthly charge slide even if they weren’t reading the Post much. Will that change when the price goes up to $12 a month, entering Spotify and Netflix territory? We’ll see. (Or maybe we won’t, since the Post doesn’t publicly release subscription numbers.)

Meanwhile, the price of an Amazon Prime subscription rose to $139 per year last spring.

Luke Baumgarten, who was culture editor at the local alt weekly before founding Range Media in April 2020, told me the mid-size city remains a quasi-industrial agricultural hub that often sits in the long shadow, culturally, of Seattle and Portland. He mentioned Spokane’s history of labor militancy (the first edition of the Little Red Songbook was printed there), the locally-owned newspaper, and how the city serves as a cultural and literal watershed for the area known as the Inland Northwest.

And, he continued, Spokane is home to the largest tent encampment in Washington State.

It was Range’s extensive, close-up coverage of that unhoused community, known as Camp Hope, that has given the worker-owned media organization its biggest membership boost since launch, said Valerie Osier, the outlet’s audience and membership editor.

Range doesn’t strive for breaking news or a daily publication schedule. “We’re not chasing cops and rewriting press releases,” according to its site. Instead, it focuses on explaining how policy impacts normal people and aims to help residents “understand their community in order to participate in civic life.” The team saw its coverage of Camp Hope, for example, as distinctive from that by other local outlets because Range’s only full-time reporter, Carl Segerstrom, spoke directly to dozens of residents about their needs.

Segerstrom reported from the camp for a week during a lethal mid-summer heatwave this year, and found the city was not providing accessible heat relief for the more than 600 people living at the camp. (At least 20 people died when the region was hit with “a heat dome” in 2021.)

Range also dropped off supplies and publicized requests from residents and organizers on site for water, ice, sports drinks, toilet paper, and prepackaged snacks.

“As an organization built on community engagement, we weren’t sheepish about participating in mutual aid for this vulnerable population,” Segerstrom wrote in Indiegraf.

In a Reddit AMA recently, the Range team was asked about its ability to be impartial.

“I don’t want you to think we’re impartial. I want you to think we’re fair,” Baumgarten responded. “Ultimately that is a primary part of what we want to do here: bring the needs and perspectives of normal people into conversation with our city’s elites, and then let you decide if those elites are doing enough to help the rest of us.”

Osier added Range’s reliance on grants and membership dollars — rather than money from “shady hedge funds or developers” — was another reason to trust the site.

“To be honest, no news outlet is completely impartial and the ones that claim they are are lying,” she said.

Range Media does have an unusual business structure for a local news organization. It’s one of several small businesses — including a brewery, a bakery, and a podcast studio — operated by the Spokane Workers Coop in a limited cooperative association model that only became legal through a state statute in July 2019.

Profits are shared by employee-owners and there is an oversight board with limited power, chiefly over decisions like acquiring new businesses and applications for loans large enough to impact every business in the group. When Range wants to apply for a new grant or make a minor investment, for example, it can do so without needing to consult the board.

That’s in contrast to other cooperatively owned local news orgs you may have heard of. Baumgarten said he and his fellow owners were well-versed in some of the ways co-ops can go awry, like when 356 people need to agree for a single business decision to be made. (“I would love to have been in the meetings for The Devil’s Strip — direct democracy like that for every single decision,” he mused. “I love a utopia as much as the next guy, but you can see the potential problems with that from a mile away.”)

Range is part of a LION revenue fellowship — sponsored by the company fka Facebook — that is giving the young news organization a two-year runway to build its audience, revenue, and membership program. Osier estimated that Range needs about 2,000 members (at $10/month or $100/year) to sustain its three-person newsroom, and said it’s on track to meet that goal.

Still, the team members say they’re hoping to exceed those figures in order to expand the newsroom and hire more reporters, starting with a journalist who would focus on the area’s large Latinx population and translate other Range work into Spanish. They also hope to hire reporters to cover healthcare, labor, housing, and education beats.

“Are we moving fast enough for the length of runway we have to lift off? Or do we need to, you know, keep paving and quickly build more runway?” Baumgarten said. “That’s the real question.”

Range currently offers readers the ability to make one-time donations and plans to add additional, more expensive tiers of membership. It’s sworn off paywalls as antithetical to its mission of boosting civic engagement but is slightly less optimistic about its ability to continue avoiding advertising and sponsorships.

For now, though, Range is focused on growing membership revenue. Osier described her main responsibilities as “getting people to read our stuff, getting people to subscribe, getting people to become paid members, and keeping those members.”

To that end, Osier has been encouraged by the response to the outlet’s public “Office Hours” so far. Unlike “tabling” events at events like markets or fairs — which Range also does — Osier sees Range’s office hours as “a relationship-building tool with people who already have at least a little bit of awareness” of the site.

A sizable chunk of the attendees heard about the office hours from one social media site in particular. Osier said that Reddit is responsible for 21% of Range’s traffic from social media — “nothing to sniff at!” — and about half of their office hours attendance.

So far, the office hours have yielded a partnership with the local library after a librarian attended, a forthcoming panel on ranked-choice voting (which may appear on the ballot in Washington next year) based on attendee interest, and a weekly digest written by Osier on public meetings. Osier said the office hours lead to more “hanging out” and lengthier conversations than the stand-and-grab-some-merch interactions that tend to unfold during tabling.

Maybe most encouraging, Osier said, is that Range feels that the events are helping the staff forge stronger relationships with their neighbors. After the most recent office hours, Osier sent an update: “One of our skeptical local Redditors even showed up,” she wrote. “I think we’re building trust with him.”

I’m not, nor will I ever be, an MCU — that is, the Marvel Cinematic Universe — fanatic. I typically engage with the canon on a nine-month delay, long after the films leave the box office and migrate to Disney+, where they can be consumed on cross-country flights or in hotel rooms. But as a reporter, and someone who never wants to be left behind in the discourse, the spectacle of a major Marvel casting twist — like, say, Charlize Theron appearing in the waning seconds of a Dr. Strange movie — is enough to pique my interest. And so, after the screen faded to black, I typed the words “Multiverse Of Madness post-credits scene Theron explained” into the laptop resting on my coffee table. To my surprise, the first result brought me to GoodHousekeeping.com.

You can read that recap here, if you’d like. In about 800 words, Good Housekeeping illuminates the eldritch wrinkles of deep Marvel lore — knowledge that would once have been reserved for the sweatiest comic-shop habitués, long before even the most inauspicious superheroes became household names. Theron, I learned, is playing a woman named Clea. She is a “sorcerer,” from the “dark dimension,” and she has a complicated history with the maleficent “Dormammu.” It’s a good article; I asked a question, and Good Housekeeping had the answer, but it was downright psychedelic to see a comprehensive summation of the cosmic forces of the MCU on the website of a women’s magazine that has been in print since 1885. (It was founded with a mission to “to produce and perpetuate perfection — or as near unto perfection as may be attained in the household.”)

Good Housekeeping was obviously not put on this earth to report on the fictional biography of Dr. Strange, but within the homogenizing financial realities of digital media, the publication’s overarching editorial ambitions are irrelevant. Apparently someone needs to be on the Marvel beat, regardless of whatever else you want to accomplish with your website. The clicks are just that good.

“Even now, almost 15 years into the MCU’s existence, Marvel content in general — not just movie and TV trailers and reviews — still consistently overperforms, in terms of traffic, for a lot of the sites I’ve worked at over the past decade or so,” said Charles Pulliam-Moore, who covers film and TV for The Verge. “In the same way that Disney’s really learned how to capitalize on the fan hype that builds up around all of its projects, newsrooms have jumped onto Marvel releases as reliable sources of traffic because the eyeballs are just always there, and people are hungry for that content….[The] traffic’s so consistent, and covering the beat pretty much guarantees that people are going to click on a link just to see what’s up.”

The Verge is a company that focuses on technology, cyberspace, and the whole expanse of geek culture. Its MCU coverage is not a bizarre aberration within the texture of its HTML, which is to say The Verge’s Dr. Strange explainer isn’t awkwardly jutted next to, say, “Warm Up With Our Best Fall Soups” on the homepage. The same cannot be said for The Washington Post, GQ, the LA Times, Esquire, The Independent, or dozens (hundreds?) of other reputable media organizations that, in Pulliam-Moore’s words, scramble to fabricate countless “Easter egg breakdowns, explainers, and recaps” to harvest the ambient queries of those curious to know how Theron fits into this steadily expanding roster of quippy demi-gods.

The post-credits explainer has become the backbone of a nouveau content philosophy, one that nearly every media company on the planet seems to participate in. The vast majority of MCU films end with a mysterious cameo featuring the latest famous person to be fitted for tights, hinting that they’ll soon be saving the world alongside Thor, Hulk, and Captain America. These cameos are often left ambiguous — was that Harry Styles? Who is he supposed to be playing? — and the billions of people who watch the films look to their phones in search of more clarity. You can build a cutthroat SEO empire by catching the results. Media companies are determined to mine every possible traffic opportunity within the Marvel sprawl, sometimes to the point of flat-out deception. Alex Abad-Santos, a senior correspondent at Vox who handles the lion’s share of the site’s MCU reporting, noted that if you search for “Avengers Endgame post-credits scene,” you’ll find a ton of results…despite the fact that Endgame is the first Marvel film without a post-credits coda.

“Like, why? How are there posts about post-credits scenes for a movie with no post-credits scenes?” says Abads-Santos. “That seems pretty brazen.”

The answer, unfortunately, is pretty obvious. One source who works at a major media company told me that a standard, 1,000-words-or-fewer post-credits breakdown article reliably harnesses between 100,000 to 200,000 pageviews. That’s about as efficient as digital media traffic can get, which has made the MCU a paramount fixture of any publisher’s business model. They may not feel that they have a choice. The walls are closing in on entertainment coverage relevant to a mass audience, which Charles Holmes, host of The Ringer’s nerd-culture podcast The Midnight Boys, believes is a symptom of the slow, painful death of the monoculture. Orthodox thinking states that the slew of competing streaming services has partitioned consumer attention into a whole constellation of tiny micro-communities, and when you look at the metrics of, say, “Desperate Housewives” — a network comedy-drama that averaged a now inconceivable 23 million viewers in its first season back in 2005 — that logic seems pretty sound. In 2022, there is few pop-culture brands move the needle, so newspaper blue-bloods and recipe sites alike rally around Marvel content as their last stand.

“[The MCU is a] relic of a time where fandoms were large enough to sustain various media ecosystems,” Holmes said.

Holmes believes that a Devil’s bargain should exist at the heart of any publication in the business of entertainment news. The breathless, frame-by-frame analysis of a Black Panther trailer can satiate traffic goals, which, ideally, can then be used to underwrite coverage of “Reservation Dogs,” or “The Bear,” or the scores of other serials that bloom and die in total anonymity while Thanos blots out the sun.

Holmes’ thinking is indicative, I think, of a creeping exhaustion among those who have chiseled out a living by talking and writing about superhero movies. There is somehow more Marvel to sift through than ever before — a web of Disney+ shows dovetailing into movies, shorts, and now, whole alternative universes, making the release cycle dizzying and inescapable. It’s hard to catch a breath before there’s another She-Hulk episode to recap, another Daredevil cameo to comb over, another post-credits scene to explain. This is underscored by the fact that the critical appraisal of the MCU has swooned over the last two years, while its mainstream popularity — perhaps animated by inertia alone — has chugged along undeterred. Often, it feels as if the tastes of fans and critics are splitting off in opposite directions while still being bound, acrimoniously, by the sheer force of business.

I wondered how that affects someone like Pulliam-Moore, who got in on the ground floor as a humble fan of comic books and then watched Marvel mutate into an unprecedented, omnivorous behemoth — pulling the levers of the entire entertainment press; sustaining entire websites with a single trailer. Pulliam-Moore sometimes needs to reset his polarities. Wouldn’t you?

“A lot of reporters who cover genre entertainment, especially, get into it because it’s stuff we enjoy as consumers and fans, but once you really get into it, your relationship to it all changes quite a bit, because it’s work,” he said. “When critics — myself included — talk about being bored with Marvel projects, I think it usually means that it’s time to take a step back and dip into what other studios are doing more generally with stories that have nothing to do with spandex and capes. A lot of the stories these things are based on have always been derivative and sort of cyclical, in a way that can make binging them an exhausting chore if you’re not switching things up regularly for some variety in what you’re watching.”

That sense of exhaustion becomes more ominous when you consider how desperate the rest of the entertainment industry is to replicate the Marvel zeitgeist. Disney itself is already trying it with Star Wars, which is being mounted with a rolodex of new shows and crossovers that will surely expose every conceivable angle of the Rebel Alliance left unseen in the original trilogy. Warner Bros. has attempted, and failed, to engineer a DC Comics renaissance several times over, and Amazon surely wants to extrapolate its Lord of the Rings license all over the Prime Video imprint.

It’s the brutal reality of an increasingly fallow, top-heavy box office: You either singularly dominate every conversation, or you effectively do not exist. So media companies will continue to ask their reporters to supply oxygen to the MCU, and make sure no post-credits scene is left uncovered. They couldn’t do their job any other way.

“I don’t think you can have a culture or entertainment section of a site and not have a person covering and explaining Marvel. They’re the biggest story in entertainment,” Abad-Santos said. “It’s like having a politics section and not covering the Supreme Court.”

I had the latter, more pleasant experience recently with Tony Stubblebine, who last month became the second CEO in Medium’s history. The publishing platform is no longer as buzzy as it was in the early 2010s, when its clean design and beautiful text editor helped it emerge as a kind of longform cousin to Twitter, with whom it shared a cofounder in Ev Williams.

But it has been an occasional subject of interest for Platformer (where this piece originally appeared) as I report on changes to our information environment. Last year I wrote about the company’s move to hire and then suddenly lay off dozens of journalists for the second time in its history; in July I wrote about the company’s long history of business pivots amid Williams’ decision to step down.

The fate of a blogging platform may have somewhat lower stakes than some of the subjects we usually discuss around here. But a key question at the intersection of tech and democracy is what sort of publishing models the internet will support. How many journalists and other writers will be able to make a living? How will their work find an audience? And will the platforms they operate on ever find long-term stability?

In a phone call phone, the genial Stubblebine projected confidence as he talked me through his plans for the company. (He was funny, too: when I asked what we should expect from Medium over the next few quarters, he deadpanned: “I’m hoping to pivot every three months.”)

Stubblebine may lack the high profile that his predecessor had in Silicon Valley as a cofounder of Blogger and Twitter. But the two men go way back — Stubblebine spent a year as vice president of engineering at Odeo, the company that would later evolve into Twitter. And he was one of Medium’s biggest fans from the start, as an original beta tester who shared office space with the team in its early days.

Around that time, Stubblebine was working on a habit-building app called Lift; later he transitioned to build the online coaching service Coach.me. He began posting self-help content on Medium, which eventually turned into a big publication on the platform called Better Humans. (On his LinkedIn, Stubblebine says that Better Humans and its sister publications are responsible for 1% of all Medium traffic.)

That gives Stubblebine a unique vantage point as he works to build a durable business around a company that raised $132 million. Medium reported last year that it has 725,000 paid subscribers for its $5-a-month, $50-a-year membership program; Stubblebine declined to give me an update on those numbers.

Medium turned 10 this month, and celebrated with a blog post that recaps some of the most famous stories to appear on the platform, along with the product changes and business pivots it made along the way. I asked Stubblebine what he thinks Medium is 10 years later — and what he’d like it to be after he’s finished.

Medium’s first role is a place for subject matter experts to share their knowledge, he told me. Most people don’t want to set up a blog or a newsletter; Medium fills a niche for people who have something to say only once in a while. The value the service provides lies in helping people find a broader audience than they might otherwise on their own, and enhancing the reputations of the people who publish there, Stubblebine said.

“Medium is a place to write if you don’t already have an audience and you’re not trying to build an audience,” he said. Subject matter experts “are more interested in reach than they are in money, because they make their money somewhere else. So distribution is the first pitch.

“But paired with that is ease — simple publishing tools. You don’t need to set up a WordPress hosted account. You don’t have to pay anything to publish here. The editor’s still very good. So it’s an easy way to get something out there.”

The future of Medium lies more in people sharing-first hand experiences, he said — not paying journalists to go interview those people.

“For me, fundamentally, the mistake was thinking that journalism was where Medium was going to shine,” he said. “We have the source material that feeds journalism. In a lot of ways that’s unique and special. And Medium exists to do something unique. It’s not supposed to reinvent the wheel.”

Of course, all those volunteer subject-matter experts have another useful quality for Medium: they write on the platform for free. Stubblebine argues that the exposure can create opportunities — he cited Julie Zhuo, a former Facebook VP of design, who got a book deal after building a following on Medium. But that feels like weak tea in a world where top writers on Substack are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. (See my ethics disclosure about Substack.)

Medium does allow writers to make money through its partner program, which distributes funds from its subscription revenues based on an arcane formula related to how much time they spend reading each writer in relation to other writers in the program. Writers can also earn money by referring readers into the subscription plan. But if any writers are making a full-time living on Medium, they’ve been awfully quiet.

And the current revenue share model means for every new writer that comes in, there’s less money to go around — something that the company has begun to acknowledge.

“Our partners are more in competition with each other,” Stubblebine said. “Each new author comes in and they’re splitting the same pie.”

Stubblebine said the economics of Medium’s offering to writers need to be improved. Specifically, writers who generate subscriptions need to be better compensated for them.

“The issue right now is that we’re not paying enough for the subscribers you bring in yourself,” he said. “That’s basically, fundamentally, why it doesn’t work. And I think that’s crazy, right?”

I do think that in a world where a writer can make $10 a month from thousands of people just by asking for it, Medium’s model does look like a relic. The company also faces a challenge from Twitter, which is testing a longform writing product of its own called Notes. Medium took off in part because Twitter users needed a place to write longer than 140 characters; soon they won’t have to leave the platform at all to do so.

At the same time, it seems inevitable that some digital media upstart will succeed in offering a premium bundle of writers for some relatively low monthly price. The New York Times bought one such effort, sports-focused network The Athletic, for $550 million in January. (Another ethics disclosure: I’m making a podcast with the Times.)

What The Athletic had, though, was premium journalism: some of the country’s top sportswriters, doing original reporting and analysis, on a regular cadence. Medium used to have that, too, and attracted hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers with it.

But those journalists have been gone for more than a year now. And even at $50 a year, Medium’s grab-bag of first-person essays, self-help, and business analysis may struggle to compete against more professional offerings. Stubblebine told me he wants to get clearer on the bundle’s value proposition: right now Medium’s pitch is “unlimited reading,” he noted — not something most people are looking for.

I’d like Medium to figure it out, if only because I like seeing writers get paid. Medium may never again be a destination for original journalism, but there’s no reason the company couldn’t make it easier for independent journalists and other writers to build businesses there, and improve its own prospects along the way.

Stubblebine says he’s determined to take Medium public someday. After laying off another 29 employees this month, the team now numbers 78 people: a lean organization that will focus on quickly shipping changes to the core product, he told me.

My fear, though, is that Medium continues to try to do it all on the cheap. Extracting the maximum amount of value out of the least expensive writers you can find isn’t a new approach in digital publishing, exactly, but it does feel somewhat out of step with the times.

Because for all the hype about the creator economy, it has created avenues for a (too-small) group of independents to earn massive amounts of money by cultivating their niches. If the biggest opportunity Medium can offer its users is getting famous enough to make money in some other way, it’s hard to imagine the company putting together a roster of writers that will sustain hundreds of thousands of annual subscriptions or attract many new ones.

For now, though, Stubblebine gives the company a fresh start — and a leader who, after 10 years actively using the product, sounds as excited about it as ever.

“This is a really persistent company,” he said. “We don’t always make the right decision, but we’ve been really persistent.”

There is no shortage of news in 2022. None of these initiatives are compensating for a dry period in political agitation, international catastrophe, or really, any of the stuff that could compel a customer to read some articles. Instead, it feels as if the opposite is true. As reporters continue to file stories from the frontlines of the great American crackup, as more Covid variants bubble to the surface, as the world continues to unspool at an alarming rate, media managers seem to have come to a humbling realization: Some subscribers would rather game than sift through the wreckage. Can you blame them?

“The first [New York Times] crossword puzzle ran in 1942, not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The tradition of putting games into the paper as a diversion [has been around] from the tough news cycles of the 1940s to the tough news cycles of today,” Jonathan Knight, the man who has been in charge of the Times’ entire games operation since 2020, told me. “When news went digital, we focused more on the news, but now we’re getting back to that Sunday paper experience.”

Knight took an unorthodox path into newspapers. Before he came to the Times, he was a vice president at Zynga — the company responsible for some of the most profitably addictive games ever made (Farmville, Words With Friends, and so on). That DNA is all over the Times’ game section, which today resembles a suite of tasteful, scholastic brain teasers with a guiding hand behind the screen tracking one’s glacial progress like a string of Call of Duty victories. “You’ve solved eight Mondays in a row!” reads a caption currently plastered to my subscription, residue of my girlfriend’s dutiful morning crossword habit.

Knight speaks openly about the Times’ desire to reach 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027, which can only be realistically engineered by investing in terrain outside of the media’s traditional contours. Case in point, the Times’ Games-only subscription option, where you get access to the entire oeuvre of puzzles for $40 a year, has racked up over a million subscribers. Knight is helping the Times escape the boundaries of a news organization, transforming it into this omnivorous, all-consuming platform with fingers in every pot. It’s become a lifestyle brand rather than a paper, which is exactly what’s allowing it to grow.

“Our strategy is to be the essential subscription for curious people looking to engage and understand the world, and that goes beyond finding out what happened in the world and reading the news,” Knight said. “We’re having a lot of success with that strategy. The subscription bundle is about putting that front and center. We’re saying, ‘Hey, we know you’re interested in at least some, if not all, of these products we have to offer.'”

Knight’s conclusions bear out across the industry. Liz Maynes-Aminzade, the puzzles and games editor at The New Yorker, said that “subscribers who play the crossword or quiz every day are more likely to renew,” according to the magazine’s internal research — which she imagines is mirrored in the analytics of every other media company that has invested into a games section. (This gets to a larger point about the puzzle boom. Maynes-Aminzade noted that The New Yorker has a ton of data on the popularity and usage patterns of its digital games, which simply wasn’t possible when the crossword was bound to ink and paper.) That’s important ammunition, given how competitive the word-game wars have become in such a short amount of time.

“The groundswell does mean that people now have more options to choose from. I think this will make it all the more important for outlets to establish distinct identities for their games sections,” Maynes-Aminzade said. “The bar is getting higher, and generic games won’t necessarily be a draw if readers feel like they can do better elsewhere.”

There will be winners and losers in the games-section renaissance, in the same way there are casualties in any of the fiscal schemes that tell the story of digital media. Journalists tend to get cynical about the bailouts and off-ramps devised by upper management to juice flagging traffic numbers or dwindling ad dollars — particularly when those strategies exist outside the work of reporting itself. One of the recurring, unavoidable facts of this line of work is that there is a hard ceiling on how many people want to read the news, and that contradiction, combined with the VC-honed mandate of expansion, has given rise to a wealth of bad ideas. The bloat and then the contraction, the hires and then the layoffs, the pivot to video and then the pivot to oblivion. I mean, The New Yorker’s union earned a contract last year after 31 months of bargaining; I can understand how it might have been frustrating to watch the company fuss over the crossword during those graveyard shifts around the table.

But Maynes-Aminzade also reminded me that we’ve been solving puzzles in the newspaper for 109 years. Today, the games section doesn’t reek of the same rot that has poisoned so many other, grosser attempts to make money in the media (though, 100 years ago, some disagreed). Look around you: The Ringer is currently sheathed in sponsorships from sportsbooks, and Vice partnered with cigarette giant Philip Morris. The Austin Chronicle, the weekly I wrote for while studying at the University of Texas, recently got into hot water after publishing an advertisement for an “Asian mail order bride” service. The prospects are grim, as they always seem to be, and we could do a hell of a lot worse than our wages being underwritten by a crossword.

“More and more media companies do seem to be catching onto the idea that games can help support their publications as a whole. [But] I don’t see the current interest in games as a bubble,” Maynes-Aminzade said. “Game sections are pretty tried and true: Plenty of magazines and newspapers have had them for decades. It’s not a new idea that lots of people like to mix crosswords into their media diets. Puzzles just pair well with reading the news, and that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.”

Enter Canada. In early April, the government introduced the Online News Act, a bill that, similar to the Australian model, would compel large platforms to negotiate with publishers about payment for the use of their content, or be forced into arbitration.

This isn’t the first time the Trudeau government has stepped into the journalism policy domain. In the last three years, it has passed legislation that allows qualified journalism organizations to receive a 25% tax credit toward editorial labor, issued a 15% tax credit on the purchase of digital subscriptions, and created a new charitable status for journalism organizations. The public debate over those measures was heated at times, but the new bargaining code has created a firestorm.

As in Australia, the platforms are lobbying aggressively against the bill. A range of academics, media critics, and journalists, including a network of small publishers, has also emerged in opposition. And Google, in particular, has taken an aggressive stance against the bill.

Why does Google care what Canada does? The answer likely lies in how this bill evolves and builds on the model implemented in Australia, and the fact that other countries around the world are watching this evolution and developing their own similar laws. The Canadian code probably won’t have a material financial impact on these platforms, but countries learning from each other, improving on the model, and it spreading globally very could.

So what does the Online News Act do, what does it get right and wrong, and should it be passed, scrapped or improved?

The reality of the Canadian media market

All things being equal, there should be no need for legislation to regulate the financial negotiations of private publishers. The code is a significant intervention in an industry that we rely on to hold governments and platforms to account. But it’s equally important to ground analysis of the code within the current realities of the Canadian media market, rather than an imagined world where publishers don’t already receive money from platforms, governments, or both.

There are four attributes of the current status quo that should be considered when weighing the merits of this legislation.

First, on the fundamentals, it’s clear that large tech platforms have absorbed journalism’s largest source of revenue (advertising), that this has negatively impacted the state of journalism in Canada, and that a healthy journalism industry is important for democratic societies.

While some believe that the journalism industry in Canada can self-correct and should be left to market forces — a view held strongly by many journalists themselves, and one that is supported by some important innovations particularly from smaller publishers — there is public and industry support for government intervention.

The Canadian government is already in the journalism policy game. The tax credit for journalistic labor, a $500 million program launched in 2019, both polarized the public debate about journalism in Canada and has broadly been a financial success. The subsidy helps the industry but, at the same time, has hurt its credibility with some audiences. This reality is further complicated by declining trust in the media in Canada.

Finally, while many, including ourselves, are uncomfortable with platforms funding journalism at all, the reality is that the platforms are already funding journalism in Canada. But the current status quo is one of opaque and unaccountable money for some journalism organizations. These deals are hidden behind NDAs and are not accountable to the Canadian public. They are also very often programmatic grants, casting legitimate questions about the independence and objectivity of the journalism initiatives they support.

Given these realities, the government is faced with several policy options.

The first is to leave the status quo untouched and continue to allow platforms to strike deals with publishers without oversight, transparency, or accountability. Publishers are faced with unequal bargaining power when they negotiate these deals, and the platforms can pick which publishers to cut deals with.

The second option is to use general revenue to further fund journalism through existing programs. But Canada’s labor tax subsidy is already 25% of editorial labor and only goes to qualifying journalism organizations. Deals between platforms and publishers arguably reach a broader range of organizations.

A third option is to create an alternative to ad-hoc platform deals, and instead force platforms to pay into a central fund that would then administer the funding to publishers via some sort of standard formula. This option standardizes payments, removes platforms from the decision of who gets what, allows money to go directly to journalism, and gives the public a clear sense of how money is supporting journalism.

We have previously argued for this model, but it has some real limitations. Though it might be administered by an arm’s-length organization, it inserts the government even further into the business of journalism. It’s also unclear how the amount of money put into the fund would be determined and what the basis would be for taxing platforms in Canada beyond what they already pay.

A fourth option is to regulate the bargaining process itself. Enter the Online News Act.

What the Act does

The Online News Act compels digital platforms to enter into financial agreements with publishers for news.

News outlets — either singularly or collectively — initiate bargaining. Platforms have to participate in the bargaining process, though if they believe the news outlet doesn’t meet the criteria to be subject to the Act, they can contest it. If an agreement can’t be reached by all parties within “a period that the Commission considers reasonable,” mediation occurs; if an agreement is still not reached, a panel of three arbitrators selected by the Canadian Radio Television and Communications Commission (CRTC) chooses a final offer made by one of the parties.

The bill builds on the Australian model in some important ways, most notably around the exemption criteria. Platforms can only be exempted from being designated for arbitration if the deals they have made with publishers meet the following criteria:

• They provide for fair compensation to the news businesses for the news content.
• They ensure that an appropriate portion of the compensation will be used by the news businesses to support the production of local, regional, and national news content.
• They don’t let corporate influence undermine the freedom of expression and journalistic independence enjoyed by news outlets.
• They contribute to the sustainability of the Canadian news marketplace.
• They ensure that a significant portion of independent local news businesses benefit from them, they contribute to the sustainability of those businesses, and they encourage innovative business models in the Canadian news marketplace.
• They involve a range of news outlets that reflect the diversity of the Canadian news marketplace, including diversity with respect to language, race, Indigenous communities, local news, and business models.

These criteria are immensely important, because they are the primary regulatory mechanism of the Act.

The bill also provides a degree of transparency into the deals that the Australian code lacked. The CRTC must be provided with details of the deals in order to access exemptions and will issue an annual audit of the aggregated deals and their impact on the journalism market in Canada.

Mischaracterizations

While the Act seems to have public support, it has spurred debate among journalists, academics, politicians, publishers, and platforms.

As during the Australia debate, the claim that this bill will “break the internet” is pervasive. Conflating “the internet” with platforms like Google and Facebook propagates a narrative that platform lobbyists have been trying to craft for years. Platforms are intermediaries whose design shapes the way we experience much of the internet, and that is a deviation from the open web.

A related argument against the Act is that it imposes a “link tax” for hyperlinking to news articles. Google said, “This is what’s known as a ‘link tax’ and it fundamentally breaks the way search (and the internet) have always worked.”

But the term “tax” implies that the money will be collected by the government, which is not the case with the Online News Act. Deals are made between private entities.

More fundamentally, the bill doesn’t necessitate that deals between platforms and publishers ascribe value to links at all. It doesn’t specify how value is determined, only that use of news content be compensated.

Others have claimed that the bill threatens journalistic independence. But tech platforms like Google and Facebook have already signed deals with several publishers in Canada, for undisclosed sums of money, with no oversight or accountability.

Another concern, reflected in a recent statement from a coalition of independent Canadian publishers, is that the bill would disproportionately benefit legacy outlets, stifling innovation in Canadian journalism.

It’s true that in Australia, deals were at least initially skewed in favor of legacy media outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. But the Canadian bill has evolved from the Australian model, and allows for small publishers to band together. Organizations can be added to collectives after deals are done. Deal reporting will ensure that they and the regulator know the broad terms of the deals others are getting. Most critically, the exemption criteria specifies that deals must be made with independent publishers.

Again, the status quo is important to consider. Currently, we have left it solely to the whims of the big tech platforms like Facebook and Google to pick the winners and losers in Canadian journalism – The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and Postmedia all have deals, the details of which are hidden from the public. The vast majority of independent publishers do not. Ensuring that smaller outlets are included in a system that they are currently largely left out of arguably evens the playing field.

The oft-repeated claim that this bill won’t fix the crisis facing journalism is, of course, true: There is no one silver policy bullet that will save the entirety of the news industry. The decline of journalism and the hollowing out of newsrooms across the country are multi-faceted in nature. The Act addresses one element of the issue.

What should change

There are indeed legitimate and substantive criticisms of the Act that in our view could be addressed in amendments.

For starters, the Act expressly prohibits platforms from providing undue privilege to or discrimination against certain news content or news businesses and sets out a complaint mechanism for publishers to achieve redress. This is included in order to prevent any platform from responding in a retaliatory manner to a news outlet because of coverage that was deemed unfavorable. The problem, however, is that a strict and literal interpretation of the text could potentially prohibit the ability of a platform from ranking higher-quality content such as fact-based reporting or verified government information over lower-quality content. The legislation would benefit from clearer wording in this section.

Another area of ambiguity is the inclusion criteria. To benefit from the Act, news businesses must be designated as Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations under the Income Tax Act, or must operate in Canada, produce news content, and regularly employ two or more journalists in Canada.

As the coalition of independent publishers has pointed out, this could mean smaller players are left out of deals altogether. In our view, the bill should err on the side of being maximally inclusive. For example, the wording of the section could be amended to include freelance journalists.

However, in order to ensure a measure of quality control on those that are funded, the definition of eligible news business could be amended to ensure that outlets are adhering to basic journalistic standards — such as fact-based analysis and reporting and having a standard procedure for issuing corrections or clarifications — as well as producing original reported pieces.

Given that one of the key concerns with the Australian model was that it was overly opaque by design, the bill in Canada needs to do a better job of being as transparent as legally possible. Transparency requirements are peppered throughout the Act but could be improved upon by ensuring that the broad metrics used by the platforms to determine the value of the deals is made available to the regulator. Also, the act could require aggregated, audited metric and market data be released at more frequent intervals. particularly in the early stages of the act’s enforcement, so that those making initial deals can benefit from knowledge of pre-existing or earlier negotiated terms.

Concerns regarding fairness and clarity over the funding formula for deals are also valid. Recently, the coalition of independent publishers suggested that the act provide a universal funding formula that would be applied consistently to all news outlets that qualify. The challenge with this is that without collective bargaining and the threat of forced arbitration, it is unclear how the terms of compensation would be established.

Perhaps a better model was proposed by the trade association News Media Canada. It would form a collective of qualified Canadian journalism organizations that would each provide their editorial expenses (total salaries and wages paid to eligible newsroom employees) confidentially to a law firm. The collective would negotiate with the platforms, and any settlements from collective negotiation would be shared among publishers on a pro rata basis.

This is a clear example of how collective bargaining can bring the accountability and equity that many critics of both the status quo and the bill rightly seek. 

The Act needs to be explicit in terms of where the extra revenue generated by these deals with the platforms will go. While the Act requires an annual report by the independent auditor to examine the expenditures on newsrooms, it should be explicit in its aims to reallocate revenues such that it results in more and better public service journalism.

More broadly, proponents of the Act need to be mindful of the fact that there is a distinct possibility the Act will result in Canadian news outlets receiving upwards of 50% of their editorial costs from a combination of government and platforms. This is the most concerning aspect of the Act, and is not a sustainable model. It is particularly worrying because platforms and governments are the two of the principle actors in our society that journalism needs to hold to account. However, the status quo must again be considered. Major publishers in Canada already get a good deal of support from a combination of government grants and deals with platforms, but with little democratic oversight and uneven distribution. This Act will at least provide a measure of equity and transparency to the funding from platforms.

A necessary evil?

There is no doubt that this bill is both complicated and controversial. Precisely because journalism is foundational to our democratic society, it is critical that we get it right. One thing is certain, however, the status quo is not serving citizens. We need to have greater accountability and transparency over the deals that are already funding Canadian journalism. While imperfect, an amended version of this bill is in our view necessary.

We saw how far the platforms were willing to go in Australia to avoid frameworks like this. Google publicly threatened to remove its search from Australia and Facebook took down all news from its platform for Australians. In doing so, they received some concessions from the government, but also created a public relations crisis that has spurred other governments, such as Canada to act. And a meaningful consequence of their over-reaction in Australia is that the Canadian bill has evolved considerably. The exemption criteria and the collective bargaining provisions alone will fundamentally change how the platforms can respond. Taking their ball and going home might have been possible in Australia, but it will not be possible if Canada, the UK, and Germany all have codes that each build and learn from each other. And that is the potential here. That democratic governments evolve their digital policy models based on the experiences of each other. This policy snowball effect is likely what worries the platforms most about the Canadian bill.

In our view, a market failure of journalism is not an acceptable risk for democratic societies. This means that journalism may, at least in the short term, need to be subsidized. While there are risks to this particular model, when considered as part of a wider policy package to support journalism in Canada, we think that at least for now, it is a risk worth taking. Perhaps more importantly, by taking many of the concerns of the Australian model seriously, this bill advances a policy approach that other countries can learn from and build on.

The fact that these first-day cancellations are more common among annual subscriptions than monthly ones points to another reason for early churn: New subscribers may be using the cancel button as a way to turn off auto-renewal. They don’t want to forget they’ve signed up for the subscription and — 365 days later — accidentally be charged for a full-price subscription.

Another group flagged as high risk for cancellations? Inactive subscribers. These so-called “sleepers” are paying subscribers who haven’t visited the site in the past 30 days.

Piano found that, for the average subscription website, 40% of subscribers are sleepers. The percent of disengaged subscribers was reduced during the early days of the pandemic when news usage skyrocketed but the portion has risen steadily since the early months of 2020.

It makes sense that sleepers churn: They aren’t getting much value from their subscription. Yet they don’t churn right away. In any given month, 90% of sleepers will simply continue to stay inactive. It’s only when they wake up again and come back that their cancellation rates soar, generally accounting for about 30% of active churn.

This makes re-engaging sleepers difficult. How do you bring them back into the fold and “wake them up” without prompting them to cancel?

Piano recommends not shaking sleepers awake for anything less than a major news event or “especially appealing content.” Better yet, the report advises, “engage subscribers before they become inactive, building habits so that they don’t fall asleep in the first place.” (Their 2021 report found that 60% of sleepers nod off during their first two months as subscribers.)

As in previous years, Piano found that social media referrals generate low conversion rates, especially compared to users who arrive directly from a home page. Lavishing attention on just one channel or referral source won’t improve paid conversion numbers, though.

“The number of channels visitors are referred by — across search, social and direct — is a stronger predictor of likelihood to subscribe than the performance of any single channel,” the report found. The pattern holds true post-conversion, too; the more channels readers use to engage with your content, the more loyal they are as subscribers.

Piano, which offers dynamic paywall options that can test the best time or content to convert users into subscribers, found email registration could be an important step along the way. The conversion rate for anonymous visitors is just .22% but jumps to 9.88% for registered users, according to Piano.

You can read the rest of the report here.

Some of you do, I imagine. Many of your favorite news sites used to be printed on paper and then deposited at local convenience stores for purchase. Others were wrapped in a bag and thrown on your porch by a child.

The conversations in journalism have shifted so completely to digital — rightly so! — that it’s easy to forget that printed newspapers are still a thing. And if you’re a local newspaper, print is still the thing, financially speaking. As Axios put it a few days ago:

The U.S. is expected to make history in 2026 when it becomes the first major media market in the world to see digital newspaper ad revenue eclipse print newspaper ad revenue, according to a new report from PwC.

2026. That’s how long it’ll take for newspapers’ digital ad revenue to “eclipse” print ad revenue. Though as the chart shows, it’ll be that weird kind of “eclipse” where the Moon stays perfectly still for a decade while the Sun goes black dwarf.

Is it really digital ad revenue "surpassing" print if it's really just digital ad revenue staying flat for a decade while print collapses?

"I surpassed Bol Bol in height that one time he took a nap"https://t.co/NAUBdPdYrY pic.twitter.com/Qq1t80yjGS

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) June 22, 2022

So as strange as it sounds to say in 2022, print is still the main money maker for the largest newsrooms in almost every city and town in the United States.

So I was glad to see William Turvill at Press Gazette had pulled together the list of the 25 American newspapers with the highest print circulation. (The data is from the Alliance for Audited Media.)

Let’s start with the good news on the list! (It won’t take long.) The Villages Daily Sun made the Top 25 for the first time, coming in at No. 23. The Villages is “Florida’s Friendliest Active Adult 55+ Retirement Community,” a place filled with the target audience for print newspapers. (You can leave Ohio, but you can’t leave a lifelong reading habit, I guess. Here’s a good profile of the paper from 2018.)

To put it another way: The Villages Daily Sun is located in a metro area of 129,752 people. But it sells more print copies on an average weekday than the:

— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (metro population: 2,053,232),
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2,657,149),
— Charlotte Observer (2,822,352),
— The (Baltimore) Sun (2,844,510),
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch (2,909,003),
— The (Portland) Oregonian (3,280,736), or
— The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer (3,633,962).

Or take an even bigger market: Atlanta, the 10th largest metro area in America, with a metro population of 6,930,423. On an average weekday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sells 49,243 print newspapers. The Villages Daily Sun sells 49,183.

Within the next few months, it’ll pass the New York Daily News, which was the best-selling newspaper in America in the mid 20th century, topping out at 2.4 million copies a day. Somewhere, Weegee is turning over in his grave.

Outside The Villages, though, the outlook for print remains terrible. Average circulation among the largest papers dropped 12% over the past year, and it’s not going to stop dropping.

To show the scale of the damage, I dug into the archives to see how many papers America’s largest dailies were selling way back in 2000. That’s so far back that you could write a research paper on the most popular search engines and include Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, InfoSeek, HotBot, and Altavista — but not Google. Y2K! Bush v. Gore! It was a simpler time, and a pretty damned good one for print newspapers.

Here are the 20 highest-circulation newspapers in 2000, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.1 Next to their 2000 print circulation is their 2022 circulation. Next to that is a depressing number.

Yikes. That’s almost a CD-level collapse. Remember: Despite how much print has cratered, it is still the top source of revenue for the overwhelming majority of local newspapers. And it heads closer to zero every year.

While the direction (down) is consistent everywhere, there are some interesting differences among these newspapers. USA Today’s reliance on bulk sales to hotels has worsened its 91% decline. (The hotel industry was hit hard during the pandemic, and travelers with smartphones don’t have much need for print newspapers.) The quality national papers (the Times, Journal, and Post) had lower-than-average print declines — in large part, I’d say, because their digital subscription success has allowed them to avoid gutting their newsrooms’ quality and quantity.

Among the metros, the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis is the best performer, losing “only” 72% of its print circulation; you can attribute that to a better-than-average market, better-than-average ownership, and better-than-average execution. The two New York tabloids have taken divergent paths, with the Daily News down 92% vs. the Post’s 67% drop. That’s largely about ownership; the Daily News has been absolutely gutted by Tribune (Tronc!) and Alden to hit earnings targets, while Rupert Murdoch has long been willing to run the Post at a loss.

And of course the saddest number here is the zero next to the Rocky Mountain News, which shut down entirely in 2009. (That The Denver Post could still lose 86% of its print circulation despite losing its local rival deserves special notice. Great job, Alden.)

But here’s the thing: All of these numbers are going to zero. As the case of The Villages shows, print has become a niche product, overwhelmingly for senior citizens. Every year, some of them will die, and some others will have a grandchild help them figure out an iPad.

The primary industry goal for the past two decades has been a transition to digital — so that, when the time came, papers could shut down the presses but live on. It was a reasonable goal. The problem is that it’s 2022 and they’re still counting on print to pay the bills. Gannett, the country’s largest chain, still makes $2 in print for every $1 it makes in digital. In circulation revenue, Gannett still makes $9.60 in print for every $1 in digital. Newspapers have made progress in that transition — just not nearly enough.

1. The Audit Bureau of Circulations changed its name to the Alliance for Audited Media in 2012.

By now, most hiring managers know better than to tweet a job listing without pay information, so what stood out was one of the benefits: “workplace democracy.”

Come work with me!@TheJaxTrib is hiring an investigative reporter to cover Jacksonville police.
$70,000/year
‍Workplace democracy means workers develop the budget & policies with the board.
Get the time to work on in-depth investigations.
https://t.co/zQ3GRBVYyb

— Andrew Pantazi is at #IRE22 (@apantazi) June 8, 2022

Pantazi’s vision is that staffers will make collective decisions about the organization, from hiring and compensation to developing the budget, along with their journalistic work.

“I keep joking to my friends that I call this a workplace democracy but right now it’s really an autocracy because it’s just me,” he said. “Once we get to hire people, that’s when we get more of the the challenges to confront. It is a lot simpler to have a top-down hierarchy where somebody tells you the way things are and you have no say in the process. Once you add in democracy, things get difficult and messier, but that’s inherently a good thing. It makes everything more worthwhile.”

Pantazi launched The Tributary in December 2020 after working as an enterprise reporter for his hometown newspaper, The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, for nearly eight years. There, he saw the newsroom shrink and change ownership. That made it hard for the journalists to cover some issues that needed more in-depth attention. Eventually he helped lead staff unionization efforts.

Pantazi’s goal in founding The Tributary was not just to contribute more investigative reporting to Jacksonville’s news landscape, but to create a news nonprofit that’s directed by its workers. He brought his union organizing background to The Tributary, so while the organization is a nonprofit, he’s modeling it after worker-owned cooperatives like Defector and The Appeal, the latter of which is also a nonprofit.

The Tributary’s current structure is simple. There’s Pantazi, the founding editor who has done all of the editorial work so far, and a board of directors made up of Jacksonville community members. The site is funded via grants and donations, with more than 450 donations from “small dollar” donors who contributed $500 or less.

Pantazi has focused on deeply covering one issue at a time. For the past eight months, all of The Tributary’s reporting has focused on redistricting in Jacksonville, where civil rights groups have sued the city for racial gerrymandering and the Florida Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

The lawsuit cited Pantazi’s previous reporting on racial gerrymandering, and he’s been working to reach new audiences. All Tributary stories are free to republish and Pantazi has republishing partnerships with two Black newspapers, a public radio station, and a TV station in town. He also worked with the local chapter of the League of Women Voters to develop brochures about redistricting, based off of his reporting. Then he handed them out to people who wanted to speak during the public comments portion of city council meetings.

“While they were waiting through all these zoning bills or whatever else, they could read,” Pantazi said. “It was actually delivering [information] directly to the people who most needed it in that moment, which are the people who, in this case, wanted to speak out against the redistricting plans. We provided them with some of what we’ve uncovered about racial gerrymandering.”

Once more people are hired, Pantazi envisions that they build out non-hierarchical leadership, an organization with few or no levels of management between the staff and the board. In addition to the workplace democracy policy, The Tributary also has an employee integrity policy, which states that, among other things, employees can turn down assignments that they believe will compromise their integrity, employees have the right to see all substantial edits on their stories before publication, employee bylines won’t be attached to stories without their consent, and corrections won’t be issued on stories before the employees involved are consulted.

“This is not Andrew Pantazi’s The Tributary. This is The Tributary, a worker-directed nonprofit so that everybody has equal say,” Pantazi said. “Whoever we hire, it means we have an added duty to not just find the best journalist we can find, but also to find someone who believes in that type of work, and someone who’s willing to do the extra work that comes with a flat hierarchy.”