Defector is one of the clearest test cases of what comes after the scale era. Born out of the Deadspin walkout and structured as a worker cooperative, it has achieved something most digital media operations haven’t: five years of stability with zero staff turnover. I talk with Defector COO Jasper Wang about the upside of that model, the limits it imposes, hitting a subs ceiling, and why Defector is comfortable with the tradeoffs.

Welcome to the Rebooting Show.

I am Brian Morrisey.

I'm joined by Jasper Wang.

Jasper Jasper's official title is the Business Guy at Defector.

At least that's what I, I've decided to

That's fine.

Everyone calls me that.

I'm totally fine with that.

if those of you do not know Defector, it's now five years old and it

is a worker owned media company.

it.

Sprang out of Deadspin.

the dearly departed, if it's not departed, it's basically departed, old Gawker media

property that was then taken over as part of geo media, which is also departed.

There's a lot of, there's a lot of departed in in

Do these media brands ever die?

It's hard to say.

Who knows who owns them at this point?

Well, you know, with seo, that's an interesting point you make.

But like with SEO, being so much less, reliable, there is the possibility

that media brands will go back to dying again because it is nearly

impossible to kill a media brand because there's always, there's always.

Some value to be rung out of it.

And so you find a lot of these, these media brands whose, I like to

say their corpse is being paraded around the town square, the SEO Town

No, that's, that's fair.

Maybe once, AI comes and goes in like 2045, we'll see Gawker 5.0 show back up.

Well, yeah, I mean, look, Gawker got exhumed, by Brian Goldberg

very briefly, but we won't go, we won't go too deep into that.

that's for a different, that's for a different episode.

One of the things that I really like about Def Defector Jasper is that you

guys published these annual reports.

I had you on, after one, last year.

and ask the question about like whether you guys had like kind of hit

a ceiling, because I mean, you're very transparent with this business and this

business is, is structured differently.

So let's start there because what I want to get at is the current state of the

business within the context, obvious obviously of the overall market and the

overall economy, but also the structural.

I don't wanna say abnormalities, but unique aspects of the structure of

Defector where I'm reading through it and I'm like thinking like I'm trying to

play, I'm trying to coplay like financial analysts, and I'm like, Ooh, you've got

a structural problem here that, that might, that is inhibiting your growth.

If, if growth is the actual end goal, maybe it's not.

I don't know.

So let's, let's start there.

For those who are unfamiliar, explain the peculiarities of the Defector model.

Yeah, so Defector, we've been around for five years now.

We were founded with 19 people, 18 writers and editors, all of whom formerly worked

at Deadspin and myself, and we organized the company as a worker cooperative.

So that group of 19 people owned a hundred percent of the company.

We took no outside investment.

We have no outside stakeholders.

each, we're up to 27 people now.

And each additional person that we hire does get some, additional,

equity stake in the company.

And we operate most things with one person, one vote.

In some cases, decisions are simple majority.

In some cases they're super majority with two thirds vote.

In some cases things.

Go out to committees.

some well prescribed, number of decisions sit with me directly

or the editor in chief directly.

But largely we do not make, choices unilaterally and certainly not big

strategic choices unilaterally.

So, you know, Brian, you, you, you are sort of talking about

the trajectory of this company.

You know, we, we have been a subscription first business for this entire time.

the first two years were like growth.

We were, you know, just 2020 to 2022.

It was just growing well, no secret sauce there.

Just blocking and tackling, growing.

Well, year three was a story of still, good.

Acquisition, but much worse retention.

That was a pretty high inflation year in the overall US macroclimate, so,

we, we saw pretty high churn that year.

And then year four and five have been stories of excellent.

Retention.

So the people who are with us are really with us for the long haul,

but acquisition has been a struggle.

and you know, part of that is just stuff that every media company's going through

with, you know, Twitter falling apart and, AI taking over Google searches.

So distribution is just this big question that everybody's going through.

and you know, part of it could be structural.

Like we just might be a company that is 40,000 paid subscribers, give

or take a couple thousand depending on what part of the year we're in.

And, you know, we like sort of build other revenue streams in other directions.

But that just might be, you know, maybe we'll be 45,000 in a couple years.

But, you know, I don't really think there's a version of this company.

Run the way we wanna run it.

That is shooting for, you know, whatever, 60, 80, a hundred thousand dollars.

Not even 50, sorry, a hundred thousand subscribers, probably not even

50,000 subscribers, in the near end.

Like this is sort of what it is in the near term.

Right.

So I mean, year one to year two, I think you had like 19% growth in the

year two to year three, 18% growth.

You're feeling good smelling yourself, you're, you're doing great.

And then like the wall hit, it was like 2.2% and then this, this

last year from year 40 to year five was about 1.1%, which is.

I mean, when, when we're talking about like revenue, that's almost shrinking

really when you think about it.

And, um, the general way of like thinking about these things is, and it like, look,

tech has infected all of business, right?

And particularly you remember the media business when it was

cosplay and tech companies.

and the idea that there would be ho hockey stick growth because the near limitless

tam of the internet, That didn't, that didn't really work out, so much.

And so what I'm, I guess what I'm, what I'm wondering is, is this, is

this sort of one, is it the trajectory that you guys had anticipated or is

this like, you know, you just wanted to get it up and running and get, and

be able to make this into a sustainable business and now this sort of ceiling.

Looks like it's around the 5 million mark, at least for this model, unless

you make major changes and it doesn't seem like there's an appetite for that.

Yeah.

I guess there's a couple ways to answer that.

The, the sort of five year horizon, right?

If you had told me in 2020 that in five years we would be roughly this size, I

would've said, oh, that's incredible.

Like that is, you know, while done in the media environment where you

didn't take outside money, But I would not have guessed that this was, the

trajectory would've been like the first two years were just up and up.

And in fact, you know, we got 10,000 subscribers in

our first basically 24 hours.

And so, that like.

That's not linear, right?

Immediately you're like, oh, okay, great.

We've got, a really safe and stable, level of support.

So I'm, I'm grateful for that.

But, that's not necessarily, you know, the day before we launched,

if you had told me we would end the day with like 500 subscribers,

I would've been like, oh, great.

Like, that's good.

That's good momentum.

So the fact that it was like two years of really high growth and

then sort of leveling off, I guess I would've been surprised in 2020.

If you, you know, the last time we did a, a big forecast, we reforecast basically

every six months, but, you know, sort of in a real meaningful way every 12 months.

And I think we, we plugged in, we were hoping to do something more like, you

know, 5% revenue growth, year over year.

So sort of, we've already built it in such a way that okay, that's like, that's okay.

Like it doesn't change anything really compared to what, where

we were at 12 months ago.

I would say some of that is like.

Some of that is just like a timing matter of the p and l where, for example, we

move the normal gossip is our big podcast.

Our big live tour usually happens this spring.

We moved it into the fall.

So that's something like $150,000 of revenue that, you know, it's,

it's not that it's not there, it's just not reflected in the exact, you

know, revenues that we shared here.

So whatever that hit the, in the spring, we'd be talking about more

like a couple percent of of growth.

But you know, the broader point is still right.

Our retention, you know, we model retention and acquisition separately,

and retention has actually outperformed.

Like, we're just, the people who are into us remain into us month to month.

They come to the website, they come to the homepage day after day.

but new acquisition has just been slower and it's been lumpy.

And, you know, I, I, I think I mentioned this in the annual report a little bit.

like we, we had a bunch of government.

worker subscribers who we had to comp, once they got laid

off during the Doge efforts.

you know, we were just talking off mic before about sort of the vibe of a

recession, even if the economic indicators are not saying it's a recession,

you know, that sort of comes out of, retail spending, first and foremost.

So on the subscriber front, you know, I think what I would say, if

I think about the next year or two, we're still fighting a good fight.

We still wanna reach.

New people who don't know Defectors deal.

We want to convert people who know Defectors deal and maybe might

consider, subscribing, but that business line is just not gonna

be 10% growth year over year.

I think the other stuff, we're still pretty nascent as.

As a matter of, you know, like what is our ad product?

we still have space to be doing more in the podcast space.

you know, we won this grant, so you sort of add a consulting

line item to the work that we do.

So, you know, I think the overall revenue picture is rosier.

but yeah, on the subscription side, we're very, we're very realistic about this.

You know, if I could get three to 5% subscription growth year to year from

this year to next year, I'd be thrilled.

So you, you keep subscribers, right?

But you, but acquiring subscribers has proven to be more difficult, right?

So un unpack that because I mean, obviously you, you had mentioned

in the annual report that.

Defector started with a whole bunch of things in its advantage,

basically in its favor.

Excuse me.

just the reputations, the, the, the sort of pr value of the

walkout, from, from Deadspin Absolutely helped, you know, there.

I think the, that time was one of, A lot of changes going on.

And, we saw like a big increase in, in subscription Substack

is like, you know, taking off.

It became, you know, subscribing to writers who, who you like and

support became a normal thing, right?

you know, those things, those, you know, those things fade over time, right.

For sure.

I think, you know, there's a, there's a piece here that is, I mean, I, I bet every

company wonders this of just like, one of this is just secular trends of like, we.

And you

You never know, right?

You never know.

I'm not the one to say, there's some amount of subscription fatigue.

We've heard about the worst phrase, subscription fatigue for years and

years, and I, I am sure that's true.

but, you know, like defector is a, a particular thing of how we wanna cover

sports and culture from a pretty, you know, progressive labor friendly lens.

It just, it might be the case that this is sort of a moment in the trajectory

of the country, or you know, how people understand sports and understand culture

that like we are pretty much operating at.

more or less the, the ceiling today.

And that might be true too, and like that's, I mean, I don't know.

I, I, I think that's okay.

Like, ideally we would do more, we could create more jobs, we could

bring more people on, we could, you know, do more ambitious reporting.

We could increase the freelance budget and the travel budget and all these things.

but.

If this is what it is for at least the foreseeable future, I think

that's, that's decent enough.

and you know, again, our subscribers are really, really loyal.

And so I think, if this is, if this is what it is that works until.

You know, people on staff say it doesn't work anymore, right?

Like until we, we have too many divergent theories of what this company should be

and what each person's role should be.

but for now, I think people are mostly grateful to just, you know, have a pretty

safe job in, in media where you can be reasonably well read and, you know,

wake up tomorrow knowing that you have a say in the direction of your company

and you're not gonna get laid off, which is more than most people can say.

Yeah, that's true.

when you look back, like, so do you think that the, the unique ownership structure,

I mean, 'cause you're, you're, you're very candid, like in, in the report and,

Look, the unique ownership structure has a ton of benefits to it, right?

Clearly, I mean, you're talking about taking votes on all these kinds of things.

Like I'm just like, oh my God, this must take forever

to make some kind of decision.

And like getting anyone on board.

I don't care if everyone like gets along the best.

Like, is is almost impossible.

I, at least in my experience, maybe I'm like, I, I've had different

experiences with groups of people.

But how much is, is the ownership structure now just a structural impediment

or just a reality to the fact that it, it would be easier, I'm sure, to

grow this business without, without this kind of ownership structure.

Yeah, I mean.

I'm not gonna say it's an impediment, it's a feature, not a

bug of, uh, how we've been set up.

is there a version of this company that is not set up this way

that has an easier growth path?

Maybe, but you know, like risk equals reward.

That's the first thing you learn in corporate finance 1 0 1.

And so, it'd be if it were higher growth, you'd also be taking on a

certain more, amount of risk, right?

And so.

It's just kind of like what is the first principles of what a company is for?

And a worker-owned cooperative, the company is for keeping

jobs for the workers, right?

And so, these 27 people like keeping their jobs stable is sort of the most important

thing for me as the business leader here.

and I work around the margins there.

and, you know, that is additional revenue streams and, doing the best with

what we can on the subscription side.

And, you know, I, I should say for us, it is not just a labor side.

Principle of, you know, how we want to organize it is also marketing.

Like if tomorrow we announced, hey, we are, you know, taking outside

shareholder money and you know, we're gonna streamline this organization.

So we stop making it so everyone is a worker owner and

has a vote, we'd lose a bunch

our new partners at TPG,

exactly.

We, you know, we'd lose a big chunk of people who are giving us money,

in part because they, they like the, the cut of our jib, even if they're

not reading the site every day.

So, you know, I don't take that, I don't take that lightly.

The idea that, you know, this is like, this is what it is.

Like, I am not sitting here dreaming about, what if I ran a different sort

of company, like, yeah, you know, what's the thing, you know, if my

grandma had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.

Like this is just the company I run.

That's a great point.

well deployed line.

so subscriptions is, you know, like, look, when you hit, when you hit a wall

with subscriptions, you can optimize and you can like eke out some, some more.

And, and obviously paid acquisition is an area that reading through

the port, I mean, you guys are just under, I guess they would

call it under leveraged in that.

for a bunch of different reasons.

I mean, some of which are, are simply, I mean, I, I would call them ideological.

Like, I mean, you don't use like Facebook meta as like a acquisition platform.

I mean, it's pretty effective.

Yeah.

Right.

You could call that ideological.

You know, we've, we've explored here and there of like, how do we plug into.

it's making, business decision is not based on business.

That to me is

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I mean, I don't, I don't shy away from that at all.

You know, being organized as a worker cooperative is, is ideological.

And we have plenty of other things that are, you know, some, some

amount of ideological and some amount of, you know, marketing.

yeah, we, we, we are under, under invested in paid, I think there

is, there is an argument that even if we were, did not want to plug

into the meta ecosystem, there were ways to, do more paid acquisition.

The other piece of this is we are just very, we are.

Very lightly staffed on the business side of things, right?

So part of it is just like, what is my personal capacity to do

that and expertise at doing that?

you know, I think there is a version of this that says, Hey, next year we

are, contracting with some sort of a firm that knows how to do this and we

are dedicating real budget to doing it.

And, you know, trying to see if that is a, a, a thing that is worthwhile.

you know, if I had to describe how.

My time is being allocated going forward.

It is more on other revenue streams and, you know, making sure those

have a, a fair chance here, whether that's the ads or, or the podcast or

the consulting side of the business.

so yeah, you know, it's all about bandwidth.

I like don't, I can't, I can't deny that like we're under, under

resourced or under invested there.

right?

So talk to me about then the other, business.

Lines are much more likely for, for growth, right?

Like, and ads, obviously we talked about ads like, like last year, but again, it's

like one of those chicken and egg thing.

It's like you need, you need to, you need to be out there in the markets.

I mean, ads are not bought, they're sold.

That was something that I was told early on that I've always remembered and.

You don't have like an ad sales team.

Right.

So you've got, so tell me about like where you see the growth prospects between, you

know, ads you're gonna be putting them in for, I think logged out users, right.

but like there's also, the podcast.

Right.

Like, so normal gossip has, you know, you've, you've got a franchise there

on your hands and I'm sure that there are, there are a lot of different

growth opportunities when you have, when you have those kinds of franchises.

But tell me where you see the growth,

Yeah, so on the, on the ad side, onsite ad side, we, are,

are working with buy sell ads.

I will be totally honest that our first year of direct sold with them

has not been particularly strong.

you know, we, we've like picked up sponsors here and there, but,

it's not a repeatable pipeline.

Now, we are.

in a non-exclusive relationship with buy sell ads.

So if anybody's hearing this and wants to, you know, pitch me on doing,

more direct ad sales, I would be gladly, you know, give you the market

chunk of whatever you, you bring

Yeah, and it's just a 10% finder's fee to the rebooting

that's right.

Yes.

Make sure you're CCing Brian there too.

it took us a while to get the programmatic, solution on buy,

sell ads running on the site.

Part of that is technical.

Part of it is just like experimenting to make sure the quality of the ads

aren't so low that you know, it, it's, it's, you know, hard to defend.

So, you know, we do have programmatic

That's holding you back right there

in the marketplace.

Japer.

so I think, you know, right now our monthly run on, on that combined

does add up to a six digit number over the course of the year.

Although we haven't, didn't have programmatic running

until, fully until June.

So it's not really reflected in the annual report.

So I think there's just part of that, of just like better monetizing the couple

of million page views of, you know, not logged in or not subscribed users.

you know, also by the way, we, we made the choice not to show.

Ads to subscribers.

We have had subscribers be like, show me some ads.

It's fine.

So, or you know, you can imagine a world in which, hey, we rethink our subscription

tiers and like one of the lower tiers is yes, you get unlimited access and x

and y benefits, but you are seeing ads.

So there's sort of just like fine tuning that balance between ads and

subscriptions, to make that all work.

So.

What is your, what is your conversion rate for to paid?

it's always a tough number to quote because we effectively.

Brought in the first 10,000 subscribers on zero conversion, right?

Like, or like a hundred percent conversion.

So, you know, our email list right now is like 250,000 and

our subscriber list is 40,000.

And then, you know, the month to month of page views is just however

million we can get to, you know, it's sort of a hits business, right?

so whatever you want, your, I think most people quote the numerator to

denominator as unpaid, but people gave you their email address, so the 40 over

to the 25 or the 40 over the two 50.

but even then again, that's a little bit of a, a false comparison.

When the first 10,000 people gave us their email address and

their money at the same time.

Right.

so you, you wrote about all of the, the sort of advantages, that defector

had on, on launching and, and you also.

Mentioned, you know, starting a consulting practice, you've, you've informally,

I'm sure fielded a lot of, inquiries from those who are interested in going

down this path because like, I think anyone who has operated as a journalist

within this insane media ecosystem of the last couple decades, probably pines

for a different model, like, and that.

The idea that the people who were in charge of this industry for the

last 20 years leading it, leading it out of this ditch is, is seems like

maybe not the, the best approach.

So why don't we try something different?

And I think, you know, DEFACTOR has been, has been part of that.

Right.

so what, what do you explain a little bit about what you're gonna be doing

because, and, and also just about worker collectives and whether this model.

Extensible considering all of the advantages that

Defector had out of the gate.

I think the best way to tell this story is starting from shortly after Defector

launched, my colleagues and I would field, requests to have conversations

with groups of other journalists who are like, how do we do what you do?

And that has been consistent over the years.

sort of tied to.

Frankly tied to layoff cycles of, you know, people showing up in our

inboxes and asking for advice on how they might think about doing this.

And, we generally say, yes, we're glad to talk to you.

We generally caveat that with, you know, we had a lot of advantages and

we also caveat it with, we only did it the one way we did it, and that's not.

Necessarily how you should do it.

and that is true on like how you think about your public facing go-to-market

strategy is even true on the basis of like, we are a New York LLC owned by a

Delaware corporation, which is stupid.

And like I wouldn't set it up that way, right?

So, but I don't, it's not like I talked to a bunch of lawyers and

accountants and, you know, worker cooperative experts to tell me, you

know what I should recommend so.

It's been a couple years now where I've been talking to foundations

about, Hey, what if we just, um, built this out a little bit, you know, a

little bit of money to just research it and just say like, here are some

legitimately, Good answers, well researched answers that we can sit behind.

templatize some of the, you know, operating agreements.

Like, hey, here's the logic tree of like the type of business you wanna run and

therefore you should organize like this.

Hey, you don't even have a co-founder that, you know, like, here's the

checklist of like, how to figure out if you guys would work well together.

Because frankly, in the early going of some of these work

cooperatives, it's basically, it's basically like couples therapy.

just, you know, getting people on the same page and, and, there's just a lot

of moving pieces here where there could just be some central infrastructure.

Some of that is worker owned specific.

Some of that is applicable to any emerging journalistic endeavor.

and yeah, you know, we would love to, to be a clearinghouse

for, for some of that work.

And I should say I am new to the idea of looking across all the journal

journalism support organizations.

If anybody is listening to this and saying like, oh, we offer something

like that, and I would say, wonderful.

Reach out.

Would love to partner.

I don't wanna reinvent the wheel.

Even some of these places, it's just like, Hey, here's the resources and

the resources live somewhere else.

That's great.

but I would also say if you're offering these things, you gotta do a better

job of, you know, being out there and being visible because people have been

coming to us for years asking for this.

And so a little bit of this is just us saying, okay, well let's, let's do it.

There's clearly a demand for it, and, and we're gonna, you

know, help out what we can.

But no offense to the, the, these, these organizations, and I'm sure

they're wonderful, but the reason people come to you is because you have

literal experience doing this, right?

Like, it's not some sort of theoretical study where they got a

grant from the Pritzkers or someone to, you know, to come up with these

things in a lab at a J school.

you've been in it, right?

And so when you look back, like what are the, what are, what have

been like, say the three big.

Advantages of the worker collective and what you know in candidness

ha have been the trade-offs.

Yeah, I mean the, the benefits here are I am just a person who believes that, and

this gets back to the first 10 minutes of our conversation of like a strategy

that is a hundred percent correct.

Quote unquote, theoretically correct, but that people are not on board for.

Is a useless strategy.

So in some ways I'm like, okay, look, the, the compromise position that

everybody is on the same page at, on, and all running towards together.

I would pick that strategy every single time.

And so.

Ultimately everyone is bought in and everybody feels ownership

because they in fact have ownership.

And I think that just, creates this virtuous cycle of like, yeah, people

are out there, they're, they're both doing the journalism for themselves

and, and reaping the benefits and they're thinking about the business.

And, it's not so, combative between, oh, the business side and the editorial side.

Not that it is combative at every other.

publication, but you know, it's not them and us and, you know, we're the sort of

like pure journalists and they're the, you know, dirty money people like we,

I mean, it's pretty adversarial.

Have you seen what's going on at Con Nast?

I mean, it's, it, it can get pretty

it can get pretty

the like, post-it wars and, you know, business Insider, they were

putting, the union was putting flyers up around, you know, people's

neighborhoods in Brooklyn Heights and.

Doing, you know, running up on, on their editor in chief, on a city bike

with the cameras out and whatnot, like this is hardly like the recipe

for a collegial working environment.

So at Def Factor, we are, we are all those things.

We wear all of those hats.

We are the employees, we are the owners, we are the, the shareholders.

we are the coworkers, we are the friends.

And so, sometimes it's complicated to wear all those hats, but ultimately it's

actually better to trust each other to be able to balance those hats, you know?

And I think that's reflect.

Not just in the editorial product, but like your internal processes.

Like you, you, everyone is committed to following the, the, you, you

have a disagreement, you go through a restorative justice process

because that's what we've agreed.

That is what we do, and everyone has been trained on it.

And you know, like that is holding up your commitment as a

co-owner in this, in this company.

So, you know, the, like on there, there you go.

Right?

Like, I, I think everything sort of ties into the fact that everybody.

Everybody has that.

And you have the transparency, right?

Like you, you tell me you don't want to take that revenue opportunity.

That's great.

Well, we gotta work together then to plug the hole in the budget,

that, that was supposed to take on.

And so, I, I think our, our journalists are, are just, you know, better

business thinkers about the world of journalism than your average

American journalist right now.

Yeah.

So what did the trade offs spin?

Obviously you move slower.

Yeah.

Uh, you know, we, we do move slow and, there is an element here.

Again, this is a, this is a feature, not a bug.

It is not a command and control leadership.

So if you have an idea, you wanna nudge the direction of the ship,

you have to be out there building a quorum of support for that.

Right?

and I think.

It is a, you have to be a political animal, I think, in a way that you

don't otherwise have to be in your workplace necessarily, and sort of be

okay that these things take a while and you're, you know, like for me adds

the, just to talk about an example for myself, every year I have said, Hey,

we gotta get some ads on the page.

And the first couple years when the subscription business was growing.

You know, buku, well, nobody wanted to listen to me, but I'm like,

all right, I'm biting my time and you know, I get to year three.

I get to year four.

I'm like, Hey, I've been, I've been saying it.

I've been making the case.

Now is my moment, but I have been doing that work of having you hear

that message and now people have, you know, come around to the idea that this

is a, a revenue stream that we need.

And, you know, there's a version of that in just like everything that we do on the

editorial structure side, on the revenue side, on, you know, operational processes.

These things.

Just, they, they just, take a while.

Yeah.

One of the other things that you mentioned, I wanna get into like

the, I think this can be both, like a trade off of good and a bad right?

Is, you know, you have a hundred percent retention of, of, of,

of employee owners, I guess.

I mean that's like the sort of advantage is like, you know, most.

Media companies see like a revolving door of, of people and, it's

really hard to have continuity and you're trying to build a brand.

You're also trying to build like collegiality, as I said.

and so that's great.

Right.

And obviously the people who started Defector really wanted to work together.

It wasn't like they just sort of like randomly ended up there through

responding to a LinkedIn job post.

And, and that I'm sure has a ton of Ben benefits, but you flick that a little bit.

the downside in your, in your annual report in that, you know, when you have,

when you, when you keep a hundred percent, you know, the risk is, and I don't mean

this necessarily in a bad way, it's like.

The product doesn't evolve as much.

I mean, I would always think it's like having new people come in means new

energy and new ideas from the outside.

Yes, it's disruptive to lose people.

You never, you know, love to lose people, et cetera.

But the reality is anyone who's like running an organization knows you kind of

need, you need like new blood sometimes.

And I went to like a Catholic grade school.

We didn't, like, I went to school with people like in the first grade

and it was like seventh grade.

It was the same kids.

It was like weird.

Then some other school closed down and, and their kids, came to and

they were like, that was like, wow, that's a real big change.

Talk to me about how that, about both sides of, of the

a hundred percent retention.

Yeah, I mean, I think you've basically nailed it like a, a

company that is always has turnover.

It just, you're constantly relearning and you're, you're constantly in flux

and you know, I don't think anyone really does their best work when,

there's too much employee turnover.

And then on the other side, it's exactly what you said.

You know, new voices are important and, bringing in new blood, you know, is,

is what keeps organizations lively.

You know, we have grown, so we've grown from 19 people to 27 people.

So, you know, we've, we've whatever added 50% heads and, and that's adjusted

the culture in ways that are, are good.

but yeah, I mean, just like strategically, right?

If tomorrow.

an organization of a similar size but not the same structure, said, Hey,

we're gonna start investing in, I don't know, our WNBA coverage, let's say.

Right?

You would just say, okay, the next time we lose two staff writers, we

will just hire two new people who know how to write about the WNBA.

And for us, like that just doesn't come around that often.

And so what do you do about that?

Well, you have people on staff who are willing to add that to their beats.

But, you know, inevitably they do have to drop something from their

beat in order to, to make that work.

and, you know, you just, you're not moving as fast.

Like we, even if we know where the ball's going, we can't

chase it that aggressively.

so, you know, yeah.

It's, it's two sides of the same coin.

That's just how it goes.

are there other trade offs that we didn't get to?

I think those are, those are just about it.

Yeah.

So, I'm, I'm interested in like, are you surprised there aren't more

examples of many defectors out there?

There are, right.

Like, I mean, there's.

It's like discourse, blog racket, HELLGATE 4 0 4 media.

I mean, so there are, there are people, you know, going down this path.

And to me, like, you know, the, the defining is like, are you

worker, or in this case journalist owned, like, right, to a degree.

to a large degree.

That's my, definition of it.

Yeah.

yeah.

So, you know, part of our, our work right now in winning this grant and

building these shared services is just touching base with a lot of these folks.

So, you know, Hellgate Rack, um, range out in Spokane, coyote Media out in the

Bay Area 4 0 4 media, the 51st in dc.

Aftermath is video game coverage, hearing things as music coverage.

You know, there's, there's a handful more out there.

and so, you know, I, these were, many of these folks I was previously in touch

with were sort of, you know, formally interviewing them and seeing, how they're

doing and, you know, what needs they have.

and yeah, I mean, I think as I said in the, in the, annual report.

Being a worker cooperative is an operating model, and it's a governance

model, but it is not a revenue model.

And so all of these folks have to find that balance, right, of like,

yes, we're, we're work, we're living our ideals as a matter of governing.

But you know, ultimately you just gotta get blogs on the page and

you gotta get, you know, find one way to monetize it or another.

and to some extent what we're saying here is like, let us help you figure out like.

Let us worry about some of those things you've been thinking about and you

try to free up more time to just blog.

Like we, we will offer you the bookkeeping can be help or the,

you know, forecasting help.

We'll offer you the HR support, we'll, we'll do some of the

vetting of tech providers.

you know, some of that is like just general business admin.

Some of that is more worker.

Cooperative.

and you know, hopefully that gives you more time to just blog, which is the

thing that you actually like doing.

Yeah, I feel like this is part of, you know, we talk all the time about

this like shift from institutions to individuals and there's tons of examples

of people who have successful newsletter businesses or podcast businesses or

YouTube businesses, creators, et cetera.

and then there's, you know, obviously legacy business models, right?

And, you know, the question always ends up becoming what does a rebundling look like?

And we see a lot of, We see some like media companies trying to like dabble

in that, but they dabble, right?

It's like I think about Puck, right?

And like Puck makes a big deal about their model being totally different.

And like Matt, Bella's, like their number one star and the New

York Times is like, he owns like.

About 1% of the company.

and that's a different model.

That's, that's, you know, basically just, it's, it's regular compensation

with, with, with, with some upside.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course.

I think, I think what the question ends up being is what does a smart, and it's

not gonna be one thing, but is this, seems like it would be one option for what.

A rebundling sort of looks like, because a lot of the people who I talk to who are,

you know, in that sort of independent cam, you know, it's not just about the money.

Like it's, it's, and a lot of times it's, I think, I feel like the, the money people

always always think it's about the money.

Because they're money.

Right.

go figure and then they like come in contact with people have

like, you know, who optimize, for lack of a better word, to like.

Other things, a broader set and they're like, I do not, I do not compute.

but it's about more than money.

It's like, it's, it's about, it's about autonomy.

I've been watching like pluribus and I think it's a good exploration.

You could kind of like

Yeah.

Yeah.

bit to, to the current media, landscape.

But the question ends up being what does that kind of rebundling look like?

That gets the right balance between the autonomy Yes.

Being, having ownership of your work.

And I think, you know, what happened at Deadspin, and overall really,

I think in the aftermath of, of Gawker to Gawker media left a, a bad

taste in, in a lot of the sort of.

Creators, if you will, for lack of a better word, mouth.

Like it just this model, particularly around like private equity or

private equity, like ownership, ringing, ringing the val, the last

drips of value out of of brands.

Is distasteful to many.

I think.

I think, you know, I celebrate capitalism, but I, I fully recognize,

you know, that it's rough spots and the question ends up being like, what, what

do these models look like that have, everyone wants the best of both worlds.

They want the sort of stability, of a. A more institutional media model.

Right.

At least historically it was, but they want the autonomy of,

you know, to be independent.

Yeah.

I mean, I should say here that.

We won this grant from Press Forward, and by we, I mean

Defector and Start Co-Op Start.

Co-op is a Boston-based nonprofit that focuses on accelerating

worker ownership in the economy, so they are very much about worker

cooperatives as well, however.

The grant is for quote unquote labor friendly independent media, and

there's a specific reason why we didn't say, you know, we're cooperatives.

One is if you were going by strict definition of we're cooperatives, we're

not even getting that much scale in terms of like making the shared services work.

Like you can't have shared, like ideally shared services,

purchasing, co-ops, et cetera.

Like you would have a, a big enough scale where you can say like, Hey, we're.

We actually get some leverage on this and we can, you know, negotiate

prices or, or, or whatever.

And then there's a second piece here that is many, there are people

operating out there who would not describe themselves as a worker, co-op.

Maybe they want to move in that direction.

maybe they're operating effectively as a worker co-op, or, you know,

it could be the case in 24 months.

And they're, they're not using that language.

And, you know, the, the word further reasons I think about are

the, the independent newsletter writers, who, you know, you see

people have this conversation all the time where they're like.

You know, I, I'm grateful that I have paid subscribers.

I also feel trapped that I have to get two newsletter out every single week.

I don't know how to get health insurance and I can't go on vacation.

Right?

Like,

I, it's funny, I had this exact conversation with, with, a guy in

Europe who's considering going down this path and his first question

was very European question.

He was like, can I take two weeks vacation?

Which I loved.

I was like, maybe this path isn't

Yeah.

And you know, there are people who, you know, have, that have the, have the, the

leeway with their audience and, and, you know, are established well enough that

they can say like, yes, I take these couple weeks off around the holidays and a

couple weeks off, around or in the summer.

and, you know, their business is fine, but, you know, people

feel more precarious than that.

And so, you know, what can we do here to make it more attractive to people

to say, Hey, we're gonna join forces.

I I've been joking saying that like some of these things, if they are

profitable, will be figured out by Substack in the next 18 months.

Like, they have to grow into their valuation, right?

So if there's a way to, figure out ad sales for, you know, small, independent

publishers, they're gonna figure it out.

If there's a way to do bundling profitably on a product basis,

like they gotta figure it out.

I mean, I don't know anybody at Substack, I'm just talking outta my ass.

But I'm just sort of saying like, you know, these are just the, the

opportunities out there that, now that we are sort of matured, that

people understand what it means to be a solo, media operator.

you know, what are the next opportunities?

And I think the version that I am working on.

Is, like a little bit more whatever, worker forward ideological

on how to make that work.

But I think there's a capitalism forward version of that.

That also is the same thing, right?

If you can convince more people to take this jump because they feel like they

have the resources to, have a little bit of a safety net, or, you know, they know

that there are the products out there that can help them do this, then, you know,

we're basically saying the same thing.

Yeah.

And I think that there are different, like there's different people who are doing.

It's more like the centralized services, sort of approach.

Like there's like collective media, which to me is like funny 'cause I was telling

the founder, like there was an old ad network called Collective, but I'm the

only person who probably remembers it.

But, you know, and it's like a journalist first.

Centralized services, model that has a, a, a lot of flexibility

around the types of relationship.

I think it's gonna, to me like this is not like a technology challenge, obviously

it's a business model innovation.

Like there has the business model.

That's why I was Web3 curious for like half of

I remember.

Yeah.

because it was not the most becoming phase.

It was like my goth phase.

But mostly because like, you know, when like the precepts,

I'm like, yeah, this is good.

Like there should be some kind of like kibbutz, slight like model in media.

and, you know, but then, you know, you get into the details

and the details, get very messy.

I think one of the challenges that I find with a lot of these shared services

models is they operate from a, and I'm not saying this about collective media

necessarily, but like they operate from a mindset where the centralized like

service comes first and the nodes come.

Second in some ways that like they still haven't gotten the, the right balance.

Where, I mean, like in, in, in this model, the, the power is, you know,

by definition with the journalists, the workers, they own everything.

Right?

When, when you're talking about a shared services model, you know, the

question ends up being who, who ends up being, you know, sort of in control?

Is it the centralized, platform?

And or, or is it the, is it the individuals who operate, on the platform?

And I think that is the, the challenge.

It, it, I think, you know, oftentimes people talk about this from a data

perspective of like who owns the data.

the version of this that I've been wrestling with and our, our working

team has been wrestling with is around revenue of like, if we're offering you

revenue services and we're saying, Hey, leave it, leave it to us, you know,

we will build your subscriber base.

Like that is, I think two things.

One is now you're telling them.

You're gonna do the hardest part of their business is like figuring out how to reach

the audience and then get them to pay.

So are they really the entrepreneurs here that own this business?

And then two is that's the, that is a place where you're

gonna fail more often than not.

And so if you present yourself as the, the person who's offering that

service and then you fail, then your bundle of services has failed.

Versus if what I'm offering you is.

bookkeeping and HR and legal templates, right?

Like there's no failure there like that.

Just like I did the, like, I, I gave it to you and, and you know, you,

you did the best with what you could.

That's, but that's necessary but insufficient, isn't it, Jasper?

I mean, like, ultimately what, what people need is like, media's a simple business.

It's like you make the product, you distribute the product,

and you sell the product.

And like any anybody who's on like the independent path, like

what they, what they always, what they always want is revenue.

And they want, they want audience growth distribution, right.

And I, I'll be honest to say that I think that's a place where

there are lots of people out there trying to sell those services.

So, that may very well be a place where we choose to partner more.

You know, I, I, I don't wanna shout out anybody in particular, but

certainly they're in my inbox, you know, prior to starting this project

of trying to sell those services to me.

and.

it may very well be the case that that's a place where we can partner.

you know, I would, there are lots of, as we've been doing these interviews,

there are lots of places where people need help, where they are.

It's not that they, we would do a better job than what they're doing,

it's that they're not doing it at all.

You know, the version of this is like, if you are doing well enough

that you might hire somebody new.

That is a huge undertaking.

To go from your founding team of worker owners and then

bringing anybody else in, right?

Like when it's just the founding team, that's basically a blood oath.

Like maybe you have worked together previously at a previous place.

You have all, you know, signed the owner agreement and like you just

go and everyone is on the same page.

You know how to work together.

You do everything.

You just go The moment you add somebody else in here, well now you have to

start thinking about onboarding.

You have to start thinking about what happens if there's a disagreement.

You don't have a employee handbook, you don't have, employee insurance.

You don't have any number of things that make it so that you can

actually bolt somebody on and have pretty good confidence that they

know what they're supposed to do.

and that's just the place where, you know, we talked to a bunch of people who

were like, yeah, we'd consider hiring.

We don't know how to hire, we don't even have a, you know, HRIS.

We don't have a PEO, because we just, you know, basically transfer

money from the, checking account into our own bank accounts.

Like, that is how we operate right now.

Like, we don't have any sort of this infrastructure.

and so that's just to give a shout out to the back office stuff, right?

Like

Yeah.

for sure.

most people need help is on the revenue side, but what I'm saying

is there's, there's a class of work cooperatives out there that, you

know, they're not being served, on the, on the true back office side.

Yeah.

Was the, what was the term you used for, like, if someone has like a

dispute or something that, that they have to, it sounded kind of dystopian.

I, I liked it.

well, we use restorative justice at defector.

What is restorative justice?

Sounds like someone really got injured.

It wasn't like, you know, I don't wanna put the auto

play video ad on the page,

although some auto play video ads, you would need restorative

The, the, it's in opposition to like the retributive justice, which is

what our criminal justice system is, which is just like there's

a rule and you broke the rule.

And you know, as part of the rule, we know what the punishment is.

Restorative justice is like.

Much more.

Okay.

Like you have been harmed and what are you looking for?

And maybe all you're looking for is for somebody to say, sorry,

you're looking for somebody to just explain what they were thinking.

You're looking for someone to say, Hey, I'm, it's just not

gonna happen again that way.

and so, you know, the, in sort of lefty orgs, low hierarchy orgs,

we, we, we talk about a lot about restorative justice, but you know.

In addition to restorative justice, we have an outside HR partner.

So if you're saying there's a discrimination complaint or

harassment complaint, there's a place for that to land.

It doesn't just tear apart the company because, you know, we're all

now threatening to sue each other.

So, you know, like you gotta have a little bit of foresight on this.

So especially if you're gonna bring in additional people

beyond the founding team.

Yeah.

Do you remember the like holacracy period?

Yeah.

Yeah.

you're with a few people I could mention holacracy too, that would

actually be like, oh yeah, sure.

yeah, I, I'm like kind of reminded of that where, you know, there's a

lot I, and you know, I want to be like very optimistic about a lot of

these model like newfangled models.

Like as I said, I mean, I even for half a summer was Web3 curious.

But I wonder like, you know, holacracy sort of, you know, in

most cases that I read about, like Zappos and whatnot, it did just did

not, it did not take, take hold.

I think it's really difficult to do those things in larger organizations.

versus, and that's, you know, basically I think anyone who's worked in a company

has, unless they're at the top of it, has completely chafed at the hierarchy of it.

Like it's completely arbitrary and it's like.

It's belittling to like, just to operate as a human being.

Like to ask someone for like permission to like spend a week

with your family is just weird.

what is the, like, what are you, like, what are your thoughts about like how

realistic, just that like wrap it up like these kinds of models are, and then also

like what are some examples out there?

Maybe they're not like, you know, specifically worker owned or

journalist owned that you think are.

In trying to get this balance correct.

Yeah.

so I think I, I wanna be really eyes wide open about this.

Like, I'm not going around saying the worker, the future

of media is worker owned.

Like I am.

I am not.

I don't wanna get too high on my own supply here.

You know, I wrote in the annual report, it's like the extent to which the amount

of jobs that are being lost in journalism every year is thousands and thousands.

And defector is, a 27 person shop here.

you know, a lot of these worker cooperators are like three

or four or five person shops.

You have to.

Add up a lot of five person shops in order to make up for a

thousand, lost jobs in the, you know, corporate media environment.

So I'm not saying this is the future, I'm saying it is one model I think that is

replicable in a lot of different local news deserts, especially, you know, you,

you need a couple of people to figure out how to sustain a couple of jobs

and they gotta figure out how to work together without being, you know, rolled

up by the, the next hedge fund that wants to get into the newspaper business.

So, you know, it is one solution.

I'm hopeful it is a meaningful solution.

It's one of many solutions that could be out there.

again, I am very open about defector.

Had a lot of special advantages.

and people shouldn't just assume they're gonna get subscription revenue.

I, I sit on the board of Hellgate and I always point to them, I always say,

Hey, that's actually the version that people should be talking about because

they were, they started with four.

They're now seven journalists.

They knew each other a little bit from being around in New York, but

it's not like they all got laid off at the same time and, you know, sort

of had some, unifying experience there that they could pull audience for.

but then they launched.

And all it is is just good journalism.

Like those are guys who are just breaking news.

New York City obviously so huge.

You can find news stories everywhere.

You know, found the coverage areas that really resonated with the people

who felt like they couldn't read it.

Anywhere else.

And, you know, three years later they're interviewing the new mayor on stage.

You know, they're running a, a, a live stream, on election nights.

and that's just, that's seven people, mostly subscription driven.

A couple of rich people wrote them some checks at the beginning.

And like that works.

And not every media environment is New York, but you know, not every place

has the cost of living in New York.

not every place has the, you know, sort of like bureaucratic, the

stuff of getting a business off ground that new New York state has.

And so, yeah, I'm always pointing at Hellgate when people ask me, you

know, who they should be talking to.

Yeah, that's a great point.

Awesome.

Jasper, thank you so much.

Really appreciate you

Yeah.

Always, always a pleasure to talk to Brian.