Independent journalism and the one person business

Independent media once implied separation. You left the newspaper, television network or magazine and operated somewhere outside it.

That distinction is becoming much less useful.

Taylor Lorenz can build User Mag after working at The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post, while still publishing through established institutions when it makes sense. Casey Newton built Platformer after years in technology journalism without withdrawing from the larger media world. Emily Sundberg turned Feed Me into its own recognizable business-and-culture publication while continuing to write elsewhere.

The important thing is not that these people rejected established media. Established media simply stopped being the container for their entire careers.

How Long Gone may be one of the clearest examples outside conventional journalism. Chris Black and Jason Stewart started the podcast independently in 2020, developing a deliberately informal interview show around fashion, music, media and whatever else interested them. It has since become large enough to tour, sell partnerships and collaborate directly with major institutions and brands. They have worked with GQ, participated in projects around companies like Meta, and interviewed an enormous range of musicians, writers, designers, actors and other cultural figures.

Yet How Long Gone is still How Long Gone. It has not transformed into GQ or Meta. Those institutions enter the world of the publication rather than absorbing it.

That distinction matters.

Throwing Fits has constructed something similar around fashion, turning an independent podcast into subscriptions, interviews, events and collaborations with brands including Adidas, Our Legacy, Clarks and C.P. Company. Who? Weekly created an independent entertainment publication through podcasts, newsletters, live shows and its audience. Hasan Piker built an enormous political broadcast through HasanAbi on Twitch without needing a television network. Artist and internet-culture writer Joshua Citarella moves between art, research, universities, books and independent publishing.

Some projects take the idea closer to a conventional newsroom. Hell Gate is a subscriber-funded, worker-owned New York publication. 404 Media was created and owned by journalists who previously worked at Vice’s Motherboard. Defector emerged from former Deadspin writers deciding they could own the publication themselves.

There are earlier versions of this story. Perez Hilton demonstrated that a person with a website could become a recognizable media institution. Gawker showed that internet publishing could influence the New York media establishment from outside it. TMZ showed that web-native media could break stories newspapers and television networks would subsequently chase. DeuxMoi later pushed the boundary between publishing, audience participation and gossip even further.

The boundaries between journalist, critic, broadcaster, researcher and creator have become porous.

What matters increasingly is whether the creator retains something of their own.

An independent career can be a portfolio of work owned and organized by the person who made it: a publication, archive, audience and body of work that persists across jobs and collaborations. The professional tools once largely reserved for media companies — publishing, broadcasting, distribution, subscriptions, advertising and analytics — are now available directly to individuals.

You can work with the newspaper without needing the newspaper to contain you. You can collaborate with a magazine, a university, a fashion house, a technology company or a television network without making any of them the permanent owner of your creative identity.

Independence does not require refusing institutions.

It means building a body of work that remains yours — using tools open to the entire industry — and allowing institutions to become collaborators, clients and places that work can travel, rather than the gatekeepers of whether the work exists at all.