of note:
The 404 team DIYs as much as possible. They pay for hosting through Ghost and set up litigation insurance, for example, but everyone makes their own art for stories instead of paying for agency photos. (The reporters are also the merch models). Everyone works from home, so they don’t have an office and don’t plan on getting one anytime soon. The team communicates through a free Slack channel. Koebler mails out merchandise from his garage in Los Angeles. Every month, the team meets (virtually) to decide how much they can pay themselves. (The number changes each month, but everyone gets paid the same amount.)
I love to see this, it’s nice seeing independent media do well!
@alyaza I helped them out with a paid subscription. Hopefully more people will.
While I love that they are profitable, this sounds like a massive private investment from all involved which is not a good model as a whole
To me it sounds like a journalism co-op, how is this not a good model? Everyone contributes to getting it going, and then everyone gets an even slice of the pie. They keep their overhead minimal to keep costs down, and everyone has incentive to put out their best work. Sounds solid to me.
Well, the line between a minimal overhead, self employed lifestyle and an abusive workplace are fuzzy in those kinds of arrangements
Scaling can bring those issues to a serious head too. Can often kill a group/company pretty quickly. Saw it in the film/video production world constantly. Partners and small production companies just collapsing like a dying star every 8-12mo where I am. Almost always fighting about money, rates, types of jobs, roles, etc. because the loose arrangement worked when it was a handful tight knit people making modest money. Collapsed when real dollars showed up and they wouldn’t stop hiring people for cheap like they were all still scraping by in the beginning.
How does it compare to a regular journalist workplace? I’m not a journalist.
I believe Ars Technica also has no office. All of their web presence is on AWS as well.
The team of 404 had to hide their content so it isn’t easily used by content mills. The AI content mills are starting to become a very big thing. There is a podcast called Gadget Lab by WIRED, and last episode was about an interview made to a guy that owns several of these content mills. The guy claims he understands that what he is doing is bad, since he is churning out this kind of content that is likely to be full of mistakes and false information, and also claims that a team of people review the content before actually publishing it.
This is also being done via domain squatting, in which people buy old domains of blogs that were known, and start a new blog full of AI generated content in it.
England’s Private Eye magazine has been going for decades. They sell subscriptions to the paper magazine, put on events, and sell a small amount of print advertising. They’ve completely gone against going digital and by all accounts are profitable.
The future of journalism may well be going back to the origin of small publications.
This almost makes me want to give them my email address, or at least a throwaway, but I really don’t want to encourage that behavior.
If a couple of decades and some change on the internet has taught me anything, it’s that toxic, abuseable change is insidious. Subscription models for games seemed pretty harmless when it was just a handful of MMOs. Consolidating more user-directed social interactions into an algorithmic feed seemed like a pretty good idea in 2009.
But now, in 2024, when a company tries to get me to play along with something I try to think of what the wider implications would be of other companies adopting the same model. How many websites would start asking for email addresses? How long until they start doing shady things with them?
I know that I can send something off to a junk address that will expire or that I’ll just never check, but for most users it’s just a massive spam vector for what is likely to be their only email address. It’s not really something I’d like to encourage.
Goofy name aside, they sound like a pretty alright company other than that. Love the idea of a journalist-owned outlet, but I’d be even more into the idea of a journalist-owned outlet that’s more concerned with setting an example for the future health of the internet than with self-protectionism.
For what it’s worth they are aware that some of their readers do not like the email subscription model. They acknowledge it isn’t a perfect solution but they also don’t have many alternatives currently as a small, independent media company trying to survive and grow.
Remember when Substack, the home of many excellent journalists, started to defend fascist and white supremacist content on their platform?
Oh, wait, that’s happening right now.
