• Some journalists are leaving their jobs and starting one-person subscription businesses.
• Jason Koebler and three other veterans of Vice Media wanted to build something bigger: an actual news site.
• They launched 404 Media in the summer of 2023. Today, it looks like a sustainable success story.

Lots of people dream of quitting their jobs and going into business for themselves. Jason Koebler and three co-workers actually did it. It looks like it's working.

In the summer of 2023, Koebler, who used to edit Vice Media's Motherboard tech section, and three former Vice co-workers launched 404 Media, a tech news site they co-own. Each of them kicked in $1,000 to get it off the ground.

Fast-forward to today, and Koebler says the company is already generating something in the $900,000-a-year range, funded almost entirely with subscriptions. Even after tech and legal costs, that's enough to call 404 a success. And that allows them to write whatever they want: Like this recent piece looking at Elon Musk and Twitter/X's involvement in the Alex Jones bankruptcy case.

This self-funded business model isn't going to work for everyone and everything. But in a grim climate for media in general and journalism specifically, it's great to hear about things that work. You can hear the entire conversation I had with Koebler on my Channels podcast; what follows are edited excerpts from our chat.

It seems like you guys are making a real business here: You can pay the four of yourselves grown-up journalism salaries.

We are. It's going better than I could have ever imagined. We're also at a point where I think we'll be able to bring new employees on.

When you launched, what did you think you'd need to do, at minimum, to keep this afloat? Did you think about a scenario where it's working, but you needed to have side gigs?

When we decided to do this, we launched in August 2023, and we told ourselves that we would do it until January.

And right after we launched, in the first couple of days, we got like 600 subscribers. We fell into this kind of middle ground — enough people signed up that there was clearly an audience, but not enough signed up where [we knew this was] definitely going to work.

It was unclear whether it was going to survive, even though the response was amazing.

But then the really cool thing was every time we had a big scoop or a big story, we got new subscribers.

Your structure is egalitarian. I'm assuming you're all getting paid equally.

We're all the same. We're all 25% owners. The management of the company has been easier than I thought that it would be. I think that if we were to grow, we would probably have to figure out how to manage new hires, and what ownership would look like then.

What happens when you guys have a throw-down and then the vote is two vs. two?

There are no votes. We told each other from the outset that anyone can veto anything. So, if any one person is like "I hate this idea," then we just don't do it.

I wanted to ask you about this great piece you wrote recently: "The Billionaire Is the Threat, not the Solution." It's a personal story about your dad who worked on the printing presses of The Washington Post for decades. And about Jeff Bezos and the non-endorsement story. Your argument is that you're going to continue to have these problems as long as you're looking for billionaires to own your media.

I agree with you. I don't think we can rely on billionaires to fund our media. And this model that you've built works for you and your three coworkers and co-owners. But it can't work for everything. What kind of journalism does your model support? What does it not support?

This sort of subscription, independent model works for us. We've created four journalism jobs. Other independent media companies have created a few dozen more. But it's still like a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket.

My theory is that there can be a lot of them. I really do think that. 7,000 people have subscribed to us. The market can support a lot more of these.

But what are the kinds of stories and projects you can't do because you don't have apparatus, staff, whatever?

I think that there's the "spend three, six, 12 months on an investigative story and then publish it and maybe it wins an award and tons of people read it — or maybe no one reads it" is a model we're not even trying to do. I think that's an important model and maybe one better suited for nonprofits and The New York Times and Washington Post.

I think the reason that it's working for us is we are breaking stories, we are telling stories, that you can't find elsewhere.