of note:
The 404 team DIYs as much as possible. They pay for hosting through Ghost and set up litigation insurance, for example, but everyone makes their own art for stories instead of paying for agency photos. (The reporters are also the merch models). Everyone works from home, so they don’t have an office and don’t plan on getting one anytime soon. The team communicates through a free Slack channel. Koebler mails out merchandise from his garage in Los Angeles. Every month, the team meets (virtually) to decide how much they can pay themselves. (The number changes each month, but everyone gets paid the same amount.)
England’s Private Eye magazine has been going for decades. They sell subscriptions to the paper magazine, put on events, and sell a small amount of print advertising. They’ve completely gone against going digital and by all accounts are profitable.
The future of journalism may well be going back to the origin of small publications.
Private Eye is so fucking depressing. They say they put the funny stuff in the second half to offset the corruption and scandals in the first half but I can rarely get through one page before I have to put it down.