How Worker-Owned News Outlets Are Changing the Media Industry |
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The arrival of COVID-19 in the United States kicked off an ongoing period of job insecurity within the media industry. In April 2020, the New York Times reported that about 37,000 news company employees had been laid off, furloughed, or had their salaries reduced since March of that year.
This instability was still evident in 2024, with media outlets like the Los Angeles Times, the Messenger, and HuffPost undergoing major layoffs and closures.
An October 2024 report from the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, Inc. found that 13,279 media jobs had been cut that year. This included 3,520 cuts in the broadcast, digital, and print news industry—the most since 2020. Companies cited cost-cutting, business closures, and poor market and economic conditions as the main reasons for this downsizing.
According to Andy Challenger, a senior vice president at Challenger, Gray and Christmas. “[T]he news business… [has] changed with ad revenue being captured by Google and Facebook at such a high percentage. Now, artificial intelligence could potentially affect jobs in the news industry as well, particularly for reporting that is based on data, like sports reporting or certain financial reporting,” states a 2024 Columbia Journalism Review article.
Job insecurity has helped spur the rise of worker-owned journalism cooperatives like Flaming Hydra, Aftermath, Racket, and RANGE. According to the Poynter Institute, “[a]t least six worker-centered [news] outlets launched in 2024 alone.”
Emanuel Maiberg is a worker-owner at 404 Media, a “journalist-founded digital media company exploring the ways technology is shaping—and is shaped by—our world.” Before co-founding the company, he was the executive editor at VICE Magazine’s technoscience publication, Motherboard. He and three other former Motherboard employees launched 404 Media in August of 2023—three months after VICE filed for bankruptcy.
“We didn’t like how the company was operating at that point, and we decided to make a go of it on our own,” Maiberg says. “Given our experience at VICE and........