Science journalism has its Defector moment

Ask any working science journalist about the state of the discipline, and they’ll tell you the mood is grim.

The industry-wide layoffs of the past year, numbering more than 20,000 media workers, have dealt body blows to the livelihoods of journalists working on science and environment issues. CNBC dismantled its climate desk. Popular Science ended its magazine after 151 years. WIRED laid off about 20 staffers, including one of the country’s best health reporters. FiveThirtyEight’s science team was gutted. So was Inverse’s. National Geographic laid off nearly all of its writers and reporters (including me), as well as many experienced editors. BuzzFeed News and its science desk went to that great big 404 page in the sky. I can keep going.

These layoffs, as well as coinciding cuts to freelance budgets, ought to raise serious concerns. Many of the world’s biggest, most urgent, and most difficult challenges are fundamentally grounded in science: COVID-19, climate change, the biodiversity crisis. To help citizens understand and navigate these complex issues, we need science journalists now more than ever. But with alarming frequency, legacy and digital-first publications alike are showing that they can’t provide these journalists with stability. So who will?

If the sports and culture website Defector is any model, we can find stability within each other.

Defector was founded in 2020 by the former staff of the sports and culture website Deadspin, which very publicly quit en masse in 2019 after Deadspin’s owners tried to enforce a ham-handed “stick to sports” mandate. The new publication is cooperatively owned by its writers and editors: not by venture capital firms, not by a publicly traded conglomerate, and not by private equity.

Defector’s financial lifeblood is subscriptions, now numbering more than 40,000. And three years on, the company has not only survived but grown, expanding into podcasts including the hit show Normal Gossip—all while adopting one of the industry’s most humane policies for freelance contributors. I’m a big fan, as well as a subscriber.

Defector is arguably a unicorn, formed by a specific staff with a specific following that made a specifically big splash. But increasingly, other journalists are following in Defector’s footsteps. In 2021, local journalists in the Twin Cities founded the co-op publication Racket, with New Yorkers following suit in 2022 with Hell Gate. Former Vice journalists have formed their own tech publication, 404 Media. Ex-Kotaku staffers co-own the new gaming website Aftermath. Last month, most of the staff of the gaming website The Escapist quit en masse and created the Patreon-supported outfit Second Wind.

We’re starting to see flickers of this DIY energy within corners of science media. The Sick Times, a nonprofit newsletter co-founded by Betsy Ladyzhets and Miles Griffis, focuses on documenting the crisis of long covid. The nonprofit Gen-Z newsroom The Xylom, founded by Alex Ip, covers subjects such as climate and COVID-19 through a distinctly global lens; by its measure, it’s the only North American news outlet that regularly publishes science stories in Nepali. And Defector itself has hired rock-star natural history writer Sabrina Imbler to dig deep on all things animal.

Next year, I hope we see even more: a twinkling constellation of new, cooperatively owned and operated publications focused on science and the environment.

For some writers, these new publications will be full-time ventures. Others will surely experiment with loose, part-time collaborations that more closely resemble the upcoming 60-writer newsletter Flaming Hydra. But like Defector and its ilk, many of these upstarts probably will try to build niche communities, supported by subscriptions or donations, that are organized around journalism owned by the people who make it.

Getting these publications off the ground and keeping them alive will be major challenges for those who take them on. That said, the journalists within these new co-ops will get to work for people who prioritize the sustainability of their work: themselves.

For many science journalists, that might be a nice change of pace.