CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

A Worker-Led Alternative to Billionaire-Owned News in DC

The Washington Post’s decision — at the behest of billionaire Jeff Bezos — to fire, according to some estimates, over 40 percent of the newsroom is devastating for journalism and the DC area.

Despite its storied history and name recognition, the Post had been struggling when the billionaire Amazon founder purchased the outlet for $250 million in 2013. It might be laughable in hindsight, but it’s not surprising that pundits and even workersin the newsroom viewed Bezos as a “savior” at the time.

And for some years the situation worked well — during the first Trump administration, the Post recorded record revenues. The outlet has been operating at a loss for the last few years and Bezos has not seemed interested in covering the costs of good journalism, instituting several rounds of staff reductions.

The waves of layoffs culminating in this week’s bloodbath have further cemented what we should have known all along: benevolent billionaires are not going to save journalism.

Their goals are misaligned with those of journalism, and they often try to curry favor with the same political figures that their newsrooms should be challenging.

Even setting aside the decimation of the Post’s metro desk, the suite of local news options available to Washington, DC residents has shrunk dramatically in last decade as the portion of the digital ad-share pie not gobbled up by tech monopolies has grown smaller.

Washington City Paper ended its print circulation in 2022 and, in February of 2024, DCist was shut down by its owner, the NPR-affiliate station WAMU.

Luckily for DC residents, several of the staffers laid off in the closure of DCist decided that the service they provided to the community was too important to abandon. Just months after DCist was shuttered, the worker-led nonprofit news organization the 51st was born.

Inequality.org recently hopped on a Zoom call with Abigail Higgins and Maddie Poore, two of the outlet’s founders, to talk about what they’ve learned from the 51st and how the erosion of the Post has changed local news needs.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity. An additional disclosure: this piece’s author is an infrequent contributor to the 51st.)

Chris Mills Rodrigo: We’re coming up on two years since the 51st launched, what are your biggest takeaways about running a worker-led local news organization so far?

Abigail Higgins: One thing that we have though a lot about is the importance of slow and steady growth that is controlled by workers and backed by the community. I think we’re seeing in so many different sectors, but particularly in news right now, the dangers of institutions being controlled by the powerful and institutions that don’t directly respond to community needs. It’s been really important for us from the beginning of starting the 51st to ensure that we were upholding those two tenets: that we were creating a newsroom that DC residents wanted and felt represented by and that workers had a direct say in the structure and future of.

Another really important takeaway is that it’s a myth that people won’t pay for and support news. The growth that we’ve had at the 51st is remarkable for a lot of reasons, among them that we don’t have a paywall. (The outlet has 4,216 paid members across three tiers — $10, $24, and $51 a month — as of this week). The vast majority of our funding comes directly from readers, from DC residents. At the same time, it is very challenging to power a newsroom on small individual donations alone. A thing we caution to other outlets and try to underscore to our supporters is........

© CounterPunch