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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media's Midweek podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger. Last summer, I reported a piece about Hell Gate, a local New York publication, and Defector, a national outlet focused on sports and culture, two sites that are co-managed and co-owned by their respective writers.

Danny Funt: They don't have anyone on a publishing, or business, or corporate side calling shots.

Micah: I spoke with this guy, Danny Funt, who wrote about the worker-owned model for the Columbia Journalism Review. The journalists are the ones steering the ship. They view the corporate side of media as just fat that could be trimmed, and as the editor-in-chief of Defector told me, "When you aren't determined to grow at a rapid pace, and you aren't beholden to those kind of corporate bosses, running a media company really isn't that complicated."

Inspired by Hell Gate and Defector, more worker-owned outlets have come on the scene, including 404 Media, an especially industrious site known for its mix of fun Internet coverage, and hard-nosed investigations. The four co-founders of 404 come from Motherboard, Vice's science and tech vertical, Jason Koebler, the former Editor-in-Chief of Motherboard, Samantha Cole, and Emmanuel Mayberg, who are both editors there, and Joseph Cox, an investigative reporter.

Now, a year in, I called up Samantha Cole to discuss the challenges she and her team have faced since they started their own outlet, and what their success can teach us about the future of news. Sam, welcome to the show.

Samantha Cole: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Micah: Vice Media, your former employer, went bankrupt early last summer, and a few months later, you and three other reporters from Motherboard created 404 Media. Where did you get the idea?

Samantha: We really don't know what else to do, [laughs] so as journalists, it's like, we love doing this work, we love doing this job, so let's try to do it, and see if we can do it in a way that really serves readers more directly than Vice was allowing us to do.

Micah: Just give me a tiny peek under the hood. Did you have outside funding? Had you ever run a business before? Had you ever worked at a cooperatively run organization of any kind?

Samantha: The answer to all the above is, no. [chuckles] Obviously, Jason and Emmanuel have lots of experience being managers, and getting the side of the journalism business that involves advertising, and dealing with the money side of things a little more, but Joseph and I were just journalists. We stuck with the journalism, so, yes, we weren't taking any outside investment very intentionally.

We saw what happened with investment, and how it can go wrong in the industry. Especially, at places like Vice, where they had all this overhead. They were beholden to investors.

Micah: They had a bunch of VC money that was cushy and great while it was good, but then they came knocking, and they said, "Where is our value?"

Samantha: Right. Yes. We really didn't want to fall into what feels like a trap in journalism. Obviously, you need money to get started, but we just said, "Well, all we really need is to set up the website, buy things like defamation insurance, and also our own health insurance, and set up the logistics of running a website like this. Those things aren't super, super expensive.

Also, not that difficult to do when it's just a really lean four-person team that can make decisions quickly, and can learn on the fly. We all work from home, we don't have an office, things like that. We just kind of cut down to the basics.

Micah: Let's talk a little bit about the journalism part of it. A year ago, you published a blog post introducing your new venture, 404 Media, writing, "We will report and publish stories that you will not find anywhere else that we believe only we can do. We hope these stories will take over the Internet, impact public policy, and expose bad actors. We will point out the absurd. We will be irreverent, and have fun. We will also do very serious work." A year later, do you think you've succeeded so far?

Samantha: I think so. We're profitable now. We can run this as our full time jobs, and at the same time, we are producing work that we're incredibly proud of. I mean, we're nailing scoops and going viral constantly. [chuckles] Not to brag too much, but just to give you a sense of what we've been doing in the last year, as far as, like, the journalism, I wrote a story about the inclusion of child sexual abuse material in a very popular large language model, which then resulted in that getting taken down.

Micah: You're talking about Stable Diffusion, a really popular AI model.

Samantha: Yes. The LION large language model, which Stable Diffusion uses was found to have CSAM in it.

Micah: Which is child porn?

Samantha: Yes. A couple weeks ago, I wrote a story about Nvidia scraping from the web, and using people's content to create their own AI models, which resulted directly in a lawsuit against Nvidia. Joseph wrote a story about the MTA having a loophole in it, where you could track people's rides, which the MTA closed as a result of that investigation.

Micah: We're talking about Omni. This is like, if you take the subway in New York, and you don't want to use a subway card. You can pay with your phone. Put your phone down, it dings your digital wallet. Your co-founder, Joseph Cox, found that he could track people with just their credit card number. How did he do that reporting?

Samantha: We all get tips all the time, but he got this tip that the Omni had left exposed this data that anyone could basically access, so you could track someone's starting point without hacking them or anything. It was just kind of out there in the open web, and then the MTA was like, "Oh, shit, this is bad. [chuckles] We should probably close this loophole."

Then, they did. That's representative of a lot of the work that we do, is it's real world stuff. It's stuff that affects people in the everyday. I think that's really a driving force of why we do this journalism.

Micah: Yes, it's great impact, especially coming from such a small team. I want to talk about another impactful story. Earlier this year, your Co-founder, Emanuel Mayberg, reported on Microsoft's AI text to image generation tool that allowed people to make AI generated porn of Taylor Swift, and really anyone else. Can you tell us about that reporting, and what impact that story had?

Samantha: Everyone was talking about these deepfakes of Taylor Swift. Everyone was very much appalled and concerned about the implications of such a thing going crazy viral on Twitter. Emmanuel basically, Emmanuel's a genius about this stuff, so he basically saw the images and said, "Oh, I know exactly where those are coming from, and what tool is being used," just by looking at it, and found that it was Microsoft's Designer, which is an AI text to image generation tool, is what folks in this, I hate to call it a community, but this group on Telegram, and then also on 4chan were using to create these images en masse. Then, they were breaking out into Twitter, and then at that point, they were going viral from there in the mainstream.

Micah: The Verge reported that one of the most viral examples of these Taylor swift porn tweets were getting as much as 45 million views and 24,000 reposts. That was just in the 17 hours that X allowed the stuff to be on their platform.

Samantha: The scale of it is really, really wild. We've, of course, asked Microsoft for comments. We said, "They're using this tool to create these images. Can you tell us what's going on there?" They said that they were going to take action. They instilled some new filtering tools and systems in that particular AI text to image tool, so it made it harder to actually create these images, which was a cool outcome of that story, even though the story itself was pretty horrific.

Micah: One 404 story that went viral that some listeners may have read was the Shrimp Jesus piece that your colleague Jason Koebler wrote. Basically, looking at these bizarre images on Facebook, clearly generated by artificial intelligence depicting Jesus as a shrimp, Jesus as a collection of Fanta bottles, Jesus as a sand sculpture, Jesus as a series of Ramen noodles, Jesus as a shrimp mixed with Sprite bottles and Ramen noodles, Jesus made of plastic bottles and posing with large breasted AI-generated female soldiers.

Samantha: [laughs] Yes, so people have been talking about Shrimp Jesus and the influx, and the flooding of the stuff you just described on Facebook since at least the spring. It's been months, but Jason has been really fascinated by Facebook in general as a platform, and also, Facebook as this factory for churning out these images, and making them go viral. Basically, what he found out is, there's a whole cottage industry, it's a whole community of people who are creating these images with very easy to use text to image creators like Bing, which is made by Microsoft, Bing's image creator, and following tutorials and sharing tutorials about how to make them go viral on Facebook. The reason that they're doing that is, Facebook incentivizes and monetizes when you go viral, you can make a decent amount of money. A lot of the people who are creating these things are abroad, they're in India.

Micah: In addition to people making money directly from Facebook and its creator program, he found that YouTubers were making thousands of videos, in some cases with hundreds of thousands and millions of views showing other people how to do it, making money off of YouTube's Creator Program, that way people were selling courses. This thing has just metastasized into a giant cottage industry.

Samantha: A lot of it was in Hindi, which is impressive in itself, that Jason went through, [laughs] and listened to all these YouTube videos, and went through, and translated a lot of them, so, yes, it was a big undertaking.

Micah: Here's the part where it gets kind of Meta for your company, 404. Last December, you noticed that some AI-generated sites with names like World Nation News and Nation World News were reposting some of this deep, original investigative work that you and your colleagues have been producing using AI tools to crudely reword them into that kind of classic AI gobbledygook way.

Joseph Cox's 404 piece about this kind of AI-generated plagiarism got the AI generated plagiarism treatment when it was republished with the headline "AI produced content is being marketed across Google News, and the company is aware of it." How did it feel to see your work ripped off so shamelessly, and then see it get all this traffic on Google News, a platform where you're trying to get your work out?

Samantha: Yes, it feels awful. It feels really disorienting, and sometimes a little bit hopeless, especially when we first started seeing this start happening was December or January, so we were still really new. We had just launched in late August, and our biggest hurdle has been discoverability, because we're a new outlet. We don't have the same kind of search ranking authority.

We didn't come with a pre-built audience. We would write these stories, and we would put a lot of effort into them, sometimes a lot of legal effort, and make sure that they are the best they can be, and we publish them, and then they would immediately get ripped off. Yes, it was really disheartening, but it was also like, "Okay, this proves our point," kind of.

This is what we're writing about every day, the fact that AI is chipping away at the way we use the Internet, and making it harder to find authentic content, so we changed our strategy to implement more subscriber walls. We have a free wall, and also a paywall, and that helps keep the bots out to some degree. It doesn't help entirely, but people want to read stuff created by humans, and I think it's been really heartening in that way.

We had this major problem, and then immediately people were like, "We're with you. We like what you're doing. We support you. We want you to keep the lights on, so we're going to put our support behind that."

Micah: Speaking of keeping the lights on, it's just four people. How do you manage to do all of this original reporting, while running a business? I mean, a lot of media companies have many departments, [chuckles] marketing, HR, you know, interfacing with advertisers, big editorial structures, so how do you do it?

Samantha: We do a lot of that ourselves. When we got started, we had the help of some very kind and generous people, who are very talented in our industry, were like, "Okay, we want to help you get this started," so connected us with things like our advertising agency, or helped us build the website, helped us design the site. It wasn't just us. I don't want to say, we can take all the credit for everything we've done.

It's been a real community effort, but at the same time, the day to day, we do it all, and it's a lot. [chuckles] I'm not going to lie. It's like we're working a lot of the time, but at the same time, it hits way different when you're working 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day or something, but you own the company, you own the content, you know what's going to happen with it.

You're making these decisions every day, because you care so much about it, I think is definitely a much better vibe than we've ever experienced in another company where someone else is taking the value.

Micah: Your business is built on advertising and subscriptions, right? That's where the bulk of the money is coming from.

Samantha: Yes.

Micah: How many paid subscribers do you have a year in?

Samantha: I think as of today we have around 6,000 paid, and then we have lots more free, because you can sign up, and get past the wall for free in a lot of our stories.

Micah: How much does the subscription cost, or are there tiers?

Samantha: There are tiers, so you can join for free, and you get access to members-only stories that are free-walled. Then, there's the supporter tier, which is $10 a month, and that gets ads, and you get a bunch of other perks. You get RSS feed, which people really, really wanted access to, all of our behind-the-blog contents. You don't see any ads. You get a bonus podcast segment every week.

You get access to things like events. We just had our big 404 anniversary party, which subscribers got access to. Then, there's a superfan tier, which is $100 a month. That's-- You get a shout out, and we give you a quarterly meeting where we talk about the business, and you get a shirt.

Micah: Can you talk about how much money you brought in, in your first year, and what that looked like for the four of you in terms of your wages?

Samantha: The first year, the first few months, especially, we were pulling a lot out of our savings, so we are privileged enough to be able to do that, obviously, and we invested. It was like around $1,000 each just upfront cash for developing the site and buying things that we needed for the site. Then, the beauty and the frustrating thing about supporter models is month-to-month, your finances change.

It's been tracking up, obviously, but we don't have a specific salary that we pay ourselves every month, or every two weeks. It just is looking at the books and saying, "Okay, what can we afford? What do we want to invest back into the company? What do we want to pay for this month? Then, what can we pay ourselves out of that?" We've been really conservative, I think, as far as what we've been taking home.

We definitely want to invest more in year two into things like commissioning stories, commissioning art, things like that, and just making things like the RSS, which cost money. Yes, it changes. It's so in flux all the time, but at the end of the day, we're paying ourselves enough to keep doing this as our full time job. We're able to pour everything we have into this company, because we're supported by subscribers who want to see it happen.

Micah: Do you have health insurance through 404?

Samantha: We don't, and that's something that we definitely want to set up before we bring more people on. I'm on Cobra from Vice, [chuckles] Jason's on like, the California health Exchange, so we're still figuring that out. Everything else has come before healthcare, I guess. [chuckles]

Micah: In the past few years, we've seen mass layoffs at media companies, including your employer, Vice, my employer WNYC. In our case, it's because of cutbacks in advertising dollars and corporate sponsorships. All of these kind of legacy models, including digital media, are under strain. What do you think a healthy, or more sustainable media landscape looks like, and where do you see 404 fitting in?

Samantha: I do think that the subscriber-led type of journalism, it's just getting started. It's really in its early days, even though some of these other outlets have been doing it for years. It's like we're really seeing some momentum now with this being something that people are hungry for. That said, you still have to diversify your revenue. We're very much cognizant of money could dry up in any one direction at any time.

We have ads on our sites. Let's try to spread it around a little bit. It's a model that I think is going to work into the future. I mean, it's like the one thing that I'm optimistic about in this industry in the last 10 years of being in it.

Micah: It makes me optimistic, too, but it also makes me think a little bit about the conversation around streaming services, which is when, at first, it was like Netflix was this cool thing, and you got so much content for $15 a month or whatever it was, but then it was HBO Max, then it was Paramount Plus, and Apple TV, and all of a sudden, if you want to consume the good stuff, you're faced with paying 10 different subscription fees.

Do you worry about a similar trend in the news? You have, Oliver Darcy just left CNN to start his new media company. You have Mehdi Hasan, he started Zeteo. You have everyone jumping ships, starting their own thing. It's great to see ambitious, talented journalists set free from a burning business model. Are you at all concerned that you'll be fighting with a billion of other people who are charging $10 to $15 a month for their awesome independent venture?

Samantha: Subscription fatigue is real, and it is something that we think about. At the same time, it's like, "We got to try something, if we can just keep putting out stuff that's really high quality, and really worth subscribing for, and making it worth people's $10 a month, or whatever it is." I think that's really a benefit of this particular model.

It's something that I've really enjoyed personally, is having that very direct feedback from readers to us about what we need to be doing to keep them around. We really want to keep offering things that people really like.

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Micah: Samantha, thanks so much.

Samantha: Yes, thank you so much for having me. This has been super fun.

Micah: Samantha Cole is a Co-founder of 404 Media, and a former editor for Motherboard. Thanks for listening to this week's Midweek podcast. Remember to tune into the big show on Friday. We'll be talking about the presidential debate. We'll share a guide to help you parse election polls. We'll be answering the question, "Should Kamala Harris be talking to the press more?"

Oh, and by the way, follow us on Threads, and Bluesky, and Instagram, search On the Media. We're posting more and more these days. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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