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This week marks five years since a handful of former staffers of the Gawker Media sports site Deadspin—who’d quit en masse in the aftermath of their new CEO’s demand that the site “stick to sports”—launched Defector as a worker-owned collaborative. Defector promised to sustain the irreverence and expansive remit that made Deadspin one of the most popular sports blogs of the early 2000s, without the intervention of humorless private-equity management. (The football franchise “Why Your Team Sucks,” published annually around this time of year, was an equal-opportunity antagonist, and resurfaced with its chief writer, Drew Magary, on the Defector site.)

Five years on, Tom Ley, the site’s editor in chief, says Defector is doing well. Though still primarily a sports publication, Defector also covers arts and culture, with regular forays into politics. (August 28: “RFK Jr. Is Making His Bid to Become One of American History’s Biggest Killers.”) It’s also become an evangelist for the model of hierarchy-free, worker-owned journalism that it helped pioneer; in July, the company was awarded a Press Forward grant to support local, worker-owned outlets. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

RS: Congratulations on five years! What’s the experience been like so far? 

TL: I don’t know what we really expected when we started the company. We all had an idea that it could work and probably would work. I can only speak for myself, but it’s simply exceeded my expectations in the first five years, just in terms of how nice it’s been to work in a workers’ cooperative and to be making decisions with my colleagues. It’s the first time in my career where it’s like five years went by and nothing got worse; things just kind of got better. So it’s been very refreshing.

When you started out, was the idea to keep the spirit of Gawker Media alive? 

That’s probably too strong a way to put it. I think, you know, we all came from that universe, so we obviously have a lot of that in us already, in the way we go about doing our work. But I think we definitely—from the beginning, and more so every year—want Defector to be its own thing, defined by its own legacy. And now we have a bunch of people who are here who had no connection to the Gawker universe, which is great, because they bring their own expertise and point of view and style to the site that really makes it rich.

Looking back, what’s surprised you most about the process? Were there things you got wrong?

When we started, I had it in my head that we would need to be doing a lot of fast blogging, that people would want to see ten to fifteen to twenty posts on the site every day, and I would kind of get nervous if we weren’t doing that. What I realized is people really do just want good stuff to read—as long as you’re offering them quality, that’s what they really come back for. 

Also, when we made subscription tiers, as a joke we made one that was one thousand dollars a year. And the joke there was that you didn’t actually get anything extra other than that we would send you a video of one of us wishing you a happy birthday, like two days late or something like that. And something like seventy people signed up for it during the first year. We have a number of people who have remained at the one-thousand-dollar tier for all five years, which I’m obviously extremely grateful for, and I think that’s incredible, but also totally insane and surprising.

And now you have to actually make happy-birthday videos for them?

Yes, I have to do them. The bit is being executed.

So what do you think you got right?

I really do think we nailed the way we structured the company. I am really proud of us for doing that at the beginning.

You look at a more classic media company from the 2010s, and there’s just a lot of management and a lot of middle management and a lot of business-side stuff and just a lot of things that money gets spent on. From our perspective, we were like, I don’t know if this money is showing up on the site. Our hypothesis was, you could try to cut all that out and very much lower your overhead, and you could run a good, successful blog for not really a lot of money, but with a lot of writers, and with a lot of interesting stuff on the website that people want to read, and you can do it cooperatively. And I think we were right about that.

But what does success really look like here? We’re not talking peak Condé Nast–level opulence, obviously. 

For me, success is just having a company that can pay a living wage to everybody who works here, and we can all go about our jobs the way that we want to and believe is the correct way to do it. And we’ve definitely been doing that. I can only speak for myself: I make more money here than I did at Deadspin, which is nice. For a lot of us, that’s true. 

And it’s a nice gig. For me, that’s success—I can step back and be like, This is a pretty nice job.

The worker-owned model is fashionable these days, but is it replicable on a broader scale?

The worker-owned model can work in any context. It just depends on what the people doing it would consider success. We honestly set a pretty high bar for ourselves because when we launched, we had nineteen people. That’s a lot of people that you have to feed and make money for so that they can live. And we were able to pull it off. But there are lots of places that have already done something similar to ours, but launched with five to ten people, and that’s much more doable in terms of how many subscribers you need in order to make it worth doing. So I think it’s definitely replicable. 

In this newsletter age, especially with Substack, it is hard for some people—to convince them that it would be a better idea to start a co-op with other people rather than just go alone. Because if you do Substack and you get a decent number of subscribers, you can make a lot of money. 

So I do think that is somewhat of an impediment to this kind of business model. But I think there is real value in not being alone, having people to work with and edit you and bounce ideas off of and just make a publication. I do think that a publication just has things that it can offer that an individual newsletter writer can’t.

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