Nieman Lab, the Harvard-based publication that covers the future of journalism, circulated a newsletter on February 6 that took up the question of whether worker-owned cooperatives offer a viable model for the news business or simply add labor to an already strained industry.
The edition, sent to subscribers under the headline “How f***ing hard can it be to just make the news?”, framed the debate as a choice between cooperative ownership as a “utopia” and the practical burdens such structures place on the journalists who run them, according to the newsletter’s own framing. The newsletter pointed readers to a fuller Nieman Lab piece, “Journalism coops seem utopian. What’s it like working in one?” by Neel Dhanesha, which draws on interviews with journalists at worker-owned outlets including Hell Gate and Aftermath.
In that piece, the people running co-ops describe the trade-off in plain terms: “running an organization is a lot of work,” one tells Nieman Lab, calling it “time that we could be spending doing journalism.” The newsletter’s own subject line and online prompt did not spell out those details, but the linked reporting names the operations examined and the journalists who spoke for it.
