Have you ever heard the nursery rhyme used to keep track of the fates of Henry VIII’s wives? “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” When I think of the state of American media, I think of how we need one of those for our news sources.
It does’t rhyme but it seems there are four fates:
It’s dispiriting to consider how many trusted news sources find themselves in one of the categories above, and that’s without including social media, where so many people get their news now.
Luckily, with the decline in legacy media has come a rise in independent and worker-owned sites. I think of Defector as one of the originals in this arena, a proof of concept for a lot of sites to follow, and I was really struck by this reflection by their editor-in-chief on the site’s five year anniversary.
“I often tell people that I think about being a co-owner of Defector the same way I would think about being the co-owner of a bar. Nobody opens a bar because they are hoping that one day Viacom will come along and try to purchase it for $250 million, and no bar becomes a fun place to hang out by hiring bartenders who for some reason won’t stop telling customers that starvation is no big deal when it happens to sick kids. Part of what makes Defector work is that it aims to accomplish much of what a good bar aims to accomplish: It welcomes patrons into a place where they might have a few laughs, learn a few things, and pass the time a little more pleasantly than they otherwise would.
I know not everyone can carry a subscription right now but I also continually hear from people who are canceling subscriptions for ethical reasons. If that’s you, maybe you can find something you like on this site.
First, I compiled this list myself. The descriptions are pulled directly from the publication websites and I tried to be as accurate as possible in tags, but it’s certainly possible I made errors. I vetted these sites briefly but I don’t read or subscribe to all of them so I make no warranty about their quality. Consider this list a jumping-off point for your own research instead of the final word.
Second, I don’t include any Substack sites on the list. There are so many writers I admire on Substack but I don’t consider it a fully independent platform. I don’t think it’s content-agnostic to recruit certain writers with big contracts - that strikes me as an editorial decision - and I don’t agree with their editorial direction in that a lot of the writers they recruited are anti-trans and used their newsletters to further that agenda. See also: "Substack has a Nazi Problem" but consider that it predates the incident from a few months ago where Substack sent out "a push alert promoting one of the pro-Nazi blogs on its network."
I also want to point you to some worthy sites that didn’t exactly fit the database.
Wikipedia and Internet Archive have been holding the line on keeping the web independent for decades and are always in need of donations. Internet Archive has been pummeled by copyright lawsuits, while Wikipedia has spoken about the threat AI poses to its existence. The internet owes these sites so much.
When researching sites for my list, I kept seeing the following organizations pop up:
The holiday season is around the corner and donations and subscriptions make great gifts! You may even find some discounts at this time of year.