404 Media Shows Online Journalism Can Be Profitable When You Remove Overpaid, Fail-Upward Brunchlords From The Equation

There was a long period where journalists writing about failing media ventures loved to imply that these collapses meant online journalism was no longer profitable. In reality, the industry had simply become overly infected by waste and mismanagement at the hands of unqualified, affluent incompetents. Smaller worker-owned outlets are now trying to reverse the trend — with some promising early results.

In the wake of the recent collapse of Vice at the hands of incompetent trust fund failson brunchlords, several of the editors and journalists at Motherboard (which I frequently wrote for) decided to build their own tech news outlet: 404 Media. Included in 404 Media’s small stable of employees is Joseph Cox, arguably one of the best cybersecurity reporters currently working.

“We propose a simple alternative,” the outlet wrote when it launched last year. “Pay journalists to do journalism. We believe it is possible to create a sustainable, profitable media company simply by doing good work, making common-sense decisions about costs, and asking our readers to support us.”

While Vice is now off once again pivoting to video — or whatever remaining executives think they’re doing — their former employees are doing the kind of popular, impactful tech journalism Motherboard used to be broadly known for. And in a one-year anniversary post, they once again note that the outlet has proven that worker-owned online news is still perfectly profitable if done correctly:

“We and our colleagues at other journalist-owned publications have shown that small businesses owned by the people doing the work can be successful not just editorially, but can also be financially sustainable.”

Journalism is never going to be the industry to get into if wealth is your primary aspiration. But if you’re interested in journalism as a public service, as the glue that drives meaningful reform and holds our shared collective reality together for the greater good, it’s certainly possible to still making a living.

The bumbling, fail upward brunchlords that now dominate outlets like Vice (and Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated, and CNN, and CNET, and Gannett, etc.) no longer see journalism as public service. Their interest is in building giant, cheaply built, badly automated mindless engagement monstrosities that effectively shit ad revenue at preposterous, impossible scale.

These kind of folks see AI not as a way to build better journalism or reduce the journalist or editors’ workloads, but as a way to cut corners to create mindless engagement slop while simultaneously undermining labor. For these kinds of executives, worker satisfaction, product quality, or the public welfare never enter into it.

These are the kinds of folks that buy older companies like Newsweek or Sports Illustrated, prop up the brand corpses to exploit long-dead reputations, then integrate badly-built AI to slather the internet with low-quality engagement bait or sell shitty supplements.

They’re the kind of grifters that fire workers and editors en masse while throwing lavish and purposeless parties to pretend they’re cementing a reputation in journalism that doesn’t actually exist. That people often can’t tell the difference doesn’t speak well of the broader culture.

Vice in particular failed because a rotating crop of affluent failsons were pulling down exorbitant salaries and burning significant piles of cash on ridiculous ideas, wasteful brand parties, and quarterly strategic pivots that rarely made sense. All while paying the editors and journalists who were doing the actual work in bread crumbs and pocket lint.

Remove these brunchlords from the economics and staff outlets with responsible editors and journalists and… fancy that… suddenly it’s possible to do journalism sustainably again.

Frustrated by the direction of the industry, there’s a growing number of journalists who are either reaching out directly to consumers via newsletters, or are forming smaller, worker owned collectives that prioritize the writing (see: Defector, Aftermath). While it’s still not clear these alternatives will scale in the billionaire egomaniac lawsuit era, they’re at least giving it a go. And having some early success.

Oh, and if you’d like to support the kind of independent journalism we do here at Techdirt, we have lots of options for that as well.