PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS
SO YOU WANT TO START YOUR OWN MEDIA COMPANY.
This is a bad idea. We are qualified to say this because we have done it. As founding members of two new, worker-owned media companies (Discourse Blog and Defector Media), we are begging you not to do this. Maybe open a bakery, or open a dog sanctuary, or even go back to law school! If it is too late for you—if you (like us) did not heed this warning and stuck by your silly little dreams of making the media ecosystem a healthier, more interesting place—then at least don’t repeat the mistakes others have made before you.
You might have noticed that very few of the upstart publishers of the social media age have survived: Just in the past few years, companies like Bustle Digital Group have either closed entire publications (RIP again, Gawker) or, like HuffPost, merged into the holdings of BuzzFeed (which itself has shuttered its news division). Things aren’t much better in legacy media: The Washington Post is owned by one of the richest men in the world. Yet even though the paper’s operating costs amount to pocket change for Jeff Bezos, reporters at the Post still face near-annual rounds of layoffs and buyouts.
In all likelihood, you’re among the thousands of journalists who have been canned in the past couple of decades as the Googles, Apples, and Facebooks of the world ate everyone’s lunch (and then some). The insane idea of starting, running, and, God help you, living off the money you make from the media company you built yourself has its own appeal