It wouldn’t be Inside Baseball Week without a whole lot of navel gazing, but we cannot, in good conscience, keep this golden opportunity to self-importantly bloviate to ourselves. That’s why, this time around, we brought friends. On the latest, very special episode of Aftermath Hours, we discuss the good, the bad, and the unprecedented of worker-owned media with pals from Defector, 404 Media, and Hell Gate.
Our roundtable consists of Aftermath’s Nathan Grayson (that’s me!) and Riley MacLeod, Defector’s David Roth, 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg, and Hell Gate’s Max Rivlin-Nadler. We go deep on all sorts of topics: What was the hardest part of starting a publication in this mold? How did you know when you’d found your site’s voice? How do you collectively make decisions when everyone’s an owner? Who handles business stuff when everyone’s a writer (and, in Aftermath’s case, definitely NOT a businessperson)?
You think that’s all the questions we ask and answer? Much like that one Jonathan Frakes meme, we’re just getting started: How do you promote the written word to a video-obsessed internet? And at what point do you, somebody who got into this business to be a journalist, have to transform yourself into at least a bit of an influencer? And perhaps most importantly, how can sites like ours work together to create a scene that provides opportunities to new voices as opposed to just cashing in on preexisting clout?
Finally, we get to the topic everyone’s really listening for: the awkward truth underlying podcast ad reads about people’s guts not working right.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can buy that shared video studio Roth mentioned and fulfill our destiny of creating The 1UP Show 2.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: From [the mailbag]: “As writers for independent journalism outlets, and given infinity budget, what things would you want to have or support on your individual websites/outlets (Writers, writing, types of events, etc)?” So yeah, if you had infinite budget, what would you do?
Max: We have wonderful lawyers who work for us pro bono, but I would file ten million FOIAs, and then the second the statutory limit hits, just unleash hell on the city. That would be really fun. I think it would yield some tremendous stuff.
Better equipment is always good. I’d hire people. It goes more toward journalism. Just fill out that newsroom. Hire a bunch of people.
Emanuel: [I’d] definitely hire people. We want to and I think will eventually end up doing a zine or a magazine or some kind of physical format for 404 Media. And then also, I think we will do this, but if we had infinite money, we could do it today: At Vice we worked on a lot of documentaries. I think that work is really good. It’s very expensive, but we’d love to get back into making high-production-value video.
David: That is a great way to spend money. Though I don’t think video is the future of the internet, or at least, like–
Nathan: Do you maybe mean it’s not the all-encompassing future? Like, there are multiple futures for the internet, and video will only be part of it?
David: Yeah, but if unlimited money means unlimited money, that shit’s fun to do. Doing fun, hard, high-production-value stuff would be amazing. Hiring more people would be amazing to be able to do. And then, if I personally had $100 million, I would love to have a studio space for use by people to do professional-quality stuff. The idea of trying to do it seat of the pants, we’ve done great with ours; we’ve worked with really awesome people and put out some great videos. It’s just so much harder to do that. So the idea of there being an actual, physical plant for indie journalism, I think, would be really meaningful. I feel like it would make a big difference.
Nathan: I think that would also lend itself naturally to collaboration between publications, because you’d have multiple people using it, they’d be around, they’d talk, they’d come up with ideas, and then you’d have more people doing little projects together – which I think would benefit sites in general.
David: Also, the idea of zero-interest loans to places. Basically, if you had $100 million and you could loan it out $1 million at a time to 100 different websites and basically be like “Tell us what you’re going to use it for, use it for that, pay us back.” No one’s getting rich off it, but that’s basically there to help take those big steps forward we were talking about that are hard to take when you’re living within your means. I would love that, but I don’t know who’s got that kind of money to spend who wants to spend it on blogs.
Nathan: If any viewers or listeners [or readers] have that kind of money and have been on the fence until now, now’s the time!
David: Should I buy the Pittsburgh Pirates, or should I get into the blog business?
Inside Baseball Week is our annual week of stories about the lesser-known parts of game development, the ins and outs of games journalism, and a peek behind the curtain at Aftermath. It's part of our second, even more ambitious subscription drive, which you can learn more about here. If you like what you see, please consider subscribing!
