A Media Pioneer Tries Again With a New Journalism Cooperative

Brick House follows the recent start of Defector, a digital media company owned and operated by 18 of the writers and editors who quit the sports blog Deadspin last year in protest over management decisions. Like Defector, Brick House will be controlled by its writers and supported by subscriptions.

Ms. Bustillos said the corporate structure of Brick House was inspired by the worker-owned Arizmendi Bakery in San Francisco. Each publication can own a single share in the larger company, which is priced at $1 and can be sold back only to the company. The individual publications will split revenue, but will not build equity, Ms. Bustillos said.

“This is a moment in journalism to experiment,” said Kyle Pope, the editor in chief and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, who is also a member of Brick House’s advisory council. “The status quo is buckling. And while that’s daunting, it also opens up enormous opportunities for people to try new and creative approaches.”

Harry Siegel, a co-host of the political podcast “FAQ NYC,” a Civil project that is moving to Brick House, and a senior editor at The Daily Beast, said the project reflected a view of journalism as a solid, unglamorous endeavor, “like the grocery business, before the tech companies moved fast and broke things while hedge funds pretended they could turn local news into a scalable commodity.”

Another project moving from Civil to Brick House is the Hmm Weekly newsletter. Its founder, Tom Scocca, who is also the politics editor at Slate, said he hoped the new network would revive the conversations and debates among online voices that might have been hushed by the popular subscription newsletters, which emphasize one-on-one relationships between journalists and their readers.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/business/media/brick-house-journalism-cooperative.html