One Hellish Night

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Max Rivlin-Nadler—who is thirty-six, with dark, curly hair and a beard—stood under a disco ball in a spiffy gray suit, onstage at Trans Pecos, a bar in Bushwick. “I’m your analyst for the evening,” he said. It was Election Night in America. He and his colleagues—the producer-proprietors of a local site called Hell Gate, established in 2022—were hosting their first event for a crowd of people they didn’t already know. He gestured at a screen behind him, breaking down what was on the ballot in New York City. There were six local measures. He started with Proposition 1, “also known as the good one,” he said.

Katie Way—a twenty-nine-year-old Hell Gate writer-owner, also in a suit—stood beside him. “Wait, why is it written like that?” she asked. “This is a proposition about abortion rights. Why doesn’t it say ‘abortion’?”

“Because this is New York politics,” Rivlin-Nadler replied. “Nothing is easy.”

The pair delved in with background, including on the mayor’s role in Props 2 through 6. “Eric Adams came up with these proposals in less than a month, because he was pissed at City Council,” Rivlin-Nadler said. “Why was he pissed? Because they overrode his vetoes on accountability and housing legislation.” They nerded out in more detail. “Eric Adams couldn’t be here tonight,” he added. “He’s laying low with his son.” 

The crowd booed. Their allegiances were clear. This was a left-leaning, fairly young group, comprising media types, tech types, and other Brooklynites who had signed up (or were about to) for Hell Gate’s punchy fare, its echoes of the alt-weeklies (the Village Voice, for one) where many of the site’s writer-owners spent formative years. “We bring voice to the stories, as well as analysis,” Hell Gate’s Esther Wang—who is forty-two, and contributes a recurring fish column, “OnlyFins”—told me. Other coverage includes transit and police reporting (“The MTA’s Farebeating Crackdown on Buses Is Still a Total Mess”), culture pieces (“Somebody Explain Fran Lebowitz to Me”), and New York ephemera (“We Regret to Inform You That It’s Dead Baby Bird Season”). There is a daily newsletter, the “Morning Spew.” Recent stories are filed under “Fresh Hell.” 

Adams is a frequent, favorite target of robust reporting and ridicule, notably in a collaboration with Type Investigations: an interactive graphic detailing his network of associates—members of his administration, business contacts, cops. The feature—named for a memorable Adams line, “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success”—predated his indictment, by federal prosecutors, on five counts of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations; it continues to be updated. At the election night party, a guest said the “Table of Success” was what prompted him to subscribe. “We’re antagonistic to the view from nowhere,” Nick Pinto, forty-six, who covers Adams and the police department for Hell Gate, told me. “The emperor’s lack of clothes is duly noted.”

At a table piled high with tote bags, Nadia Tykulsker, who is thirty-six and Hell Gate’s business manager, coaxed new subscribers at each of three tiers—the highest being a yearly “believer,” for two hundred dollars; stickers and “virtual hangs” were among the incentives. She also distributed bingo cards in exchange for email addresses. Squares included “someone crying,” “Steve Kornacki wears his disintegrating necktie again,” and an “Adams indictment mention on TV.” The only of the seven Hell Gate owners missing was Adlan Jackson, thirty, a culture writer who had embedded with a group of MAGA crypto frat guys that night, for a scene story.

When the site began, as a free city newsletter run out of the East Village, named for a sturdy bridge connecting the Bronx and Queens, Hell Gate’s startup cash came from their personal coffers—just enough to pay themselves and freelancers during the first months. They considered different organizational models, weighing the virtues and pitfalls of for-profit journalism. “Not-for-profits can be just as bad,” Pinto said. “Boards are not the people doing the work. We wanted the people doing the work to be in control.” The idea was to operate as a cooperative—inspired in part by the people behind Defector, who had recently done the same. (Hell Gate has an advisory board that consults on strategy.) 

After a couple of months, they introduced a paywall. Since then, the site has amassed some 5,300 paying subscribers; projected annual revenue for the coming year is about half a million, to be topped off by more than three hundred thousand dollars in donor support. (They are also hoping to receive funding from a state tax credit in the high five to low six figures.) This year, the team debuted a lively site redesign and managed to give themselves a raise. It wasn’t much: they went from forty-eight thousand dollars a year to sixty thousand plus health insurance—below what most of them had been making at their old jobs. Still, they get to be their own bosses. “It’s a lot of consensus-based decision-making, a lot of meetings,” Tykulsker said. “But when it’s your company, it works.” They are hoping to pull off another wage increase at the beginning of 2025. 

Subscriber revenue falls short of covering Hell Gate’s expenses by about ten thousand dollars a month, but eventually, the team is aiming to rely more on subscribers, and less on philanthropy, per their annual financial report, to “plug the budget hole.” Christopher Robbins, another co-owner, who is thirty-eight, said they hope to attract more sign-ups with coverage of the upcoming mayoral race. “I think a lot of our investigative firepower should go towards vetting these candidates and doing due diligence on their donations and records,” he said. 

At the party, as the hours passed, the festive mood began to dim; guests turned their faces downward to their phones. Rivlin-Nadler and Way took to the stage a second time, to give people a boost: there was an update on the local ballot provisions. “Prop 1 passed!” The crowd cheered. “And most of Eric Adams’s propositions also are passing.” The crowd groaned. “But,” Way said, “it’s good news for bingo!” Later, as the national result became clear, the crowd thinned. Way addressed the room. “We just wanted to say thank you,” she said. “We really hoped that people would come here and choose to be in community.” Behind her, music played: Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.”

The people who stuck around kept drinking. The tote bag stack looked shorter. “People are so disgusted with mainstream media after this election cycle, they are done with the billionaires,” Scott Lynch, who writes a freelance food column for Hell Gate, said. “They are desperate for smart, incisive, independent reporting—especially with humor and by people who really care.”

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Lauren Watson is a Delacorte fellow at CJR.