Flaming Hydra: An Idiosyncratic Writing Community That’s Built to Last

January of 2024 was a “bloodbath” for the media industry. Hundreds of journalists were laid off, outlets like The Messenger and Vice.com stopped publishing, and others like Pitchfork went through existential transitions. Successful worker-owned outlets like Defector, Hell Gate and 404 Media have shown that there are ways out of this mess. Inspired by those outlets’ successes, a new media project is creating space for idiosyncratic culture writing. On January 30, Flaming Hydra, a daily newsletter and soon-to-be print publication owned and run by 60 writers, officially launched. 

Building on the inventions of previous worker-owned outlets, Flaming Hydra offers a model for journalism in which writers call the shots in both content and business. Each contributor-owner is tasked with putting out one piece of writing—fiction, comics, nonfiction, or journalism—per month.  All 60 writers will split subscription revenue and as co-owners, can vote on how the business will operate. 

The spirit of Flaming Hydra can be traced back to 2016, when co-founder Maria Bustillos, who started freelancing in 2009, was reporting for the now-defunct entertainment outlet Death and Taxes from the Florida courtroom where Peter Thiel was pouring millions into Hulk Hogan’s defamation lawsuit against Gawker. What happened next is legend: Gawker ran out of cash and went bankrupt. Describing this trial as a “catalytic moment,” Bustillos felt inspired to create more equitable and durable online spaces for journalists.  

“I was able to see how one person with a thin skin could shut down the reading of millions of people [and] damage hundreds of livelihoods,” she recalls. Naturally, after Death and Taxes shuttered in 2018 her coverage disappeared from the internet. 

This coverage lives on thanks to journalist-owned media. Bustillos republished it on Popula, the first publication she helped found in 2018 with a grant from Civil, a now-defunct blockchain journalism startup. In 2020, alongside the leaders of eight other independent publications, she founded the media collective Brick House Cooperative, bringing Popula under its umbrella. 

Brick House is running Flaming Hydra for the first year. Bustillos, who is the chair of Brick House and will be overseeing day-to-day editing, says that in the coming months, Flaming Hydra’s writer-owners will vote on whether to formally merge with Brick House “under a new amended operating agreement.”

After seeing firsthand at Brick House how much labor it takes to run a publication, Bustillos concluded that it was more viable to get a “bunch of people to put in a little work, instead of getting a few people to put in a ton of work.” As such, Flaming Hydra isn’t set up to provide a primary livelihood for its contributors. Rather, all 60 contributors receive an equal cut of their subscriber revenue. For most, this serves as  supplemental income to day jobs or freelance work.

Subscription-based, journalist-owned media outlets tend to start with shoestring budgets and tiny teams. 404 Media was launched in 2023 by four former Motherboard journalists who invested $1,000 each to launch the website and payment processing system. The founders of Defector, which was founded by former Deadspin journalists, and Hell Gate similarly didn’t rely on VC investors and instead self-funded until subscriber revenue grew.

Flaming Hydra, which unlike Defector or Hell Gate won’t employ contributors full time, took a slightly different approach to getting off the ground. Last fall, Bustillos launched a Kickstarter campaign for Flaming Hydra with an initial goal of $25,000 to build the website. (The campaign ended up raising nearly $41,000. Bustillos says extra money is being distributed amongst contributors). In the coming months, Flaming Hydra will send out its first print issue, packaging a selection of its pieces (a digital preview issue was released in December). 

When assembling the team of writers, Bustillos says her focus was on diversity of forms, styles and genres, pointing out that contributors span humor writing, hard reporting and academia. Some, like Tom Scocca, John Herrman, Matt Buchanan, are former colleagues from when she worked at The Awl. Others, like Osita Nwanevu, Arwa Mahdawi, and Kim Kelly, are simply writers she long admired.

“We know that all the other things have not worked and instinctively as journalists and writers, we know why they haven’t worked,” says Emily Bell, a contributor and founding director of the Tow Center of Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. “This is a new chapter.” 

According to Bustillos, Flaming Hydra already has “thousands” subscribers paying $3 a month to get a newsletter that comes out every weekday with two new pieces of writing. She describes the editorial ethos as “freedom,” a sentiment echoed by contributors. 

Back in 2017, when I first started freelancing full-time after quitting a content marketing job, I was ecstatic that The Awl published a silly essay I wrote using Yiddish folklore to analyze Kim Kardashian’s professional BFF, Jonathan Cheban. I had read The Awl for years, admiring its hilarious daily column reviewing the weather and absurd deep-dives, like an exposé on Elite Daily. Along with The Awl, now-defunct websites like Gawker and The Outline also created space for oddball polemics and reporting. Dirt, a culture newsletter, regularly publishes the type of esoteric essay that doesn’t adhere to the demands of SEO. But generally, like with other spheres of independent media, the market for the esoteric is vanishing. Flaming Hydra is helping fill that void. In 2023, Daniel Lavery and Jo Livingstone launched The Stopgap, a general-interest blog with the slogan “it’s better than nothing,” that publishes stories such as “Christopher Nolan’s 5 Most Emotionally Manipulative Assertions” and “Best Portraits in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commissions.” 

Some notable stories from Flaming Hydra’s first few weeks include: Terry Nguyen’s musings on Playboy, Fahad Shah’s reflection on prison life, Harry Siegel’s analysis of a 1970s children’s book about AI, and Julianne Escobedo Shepherd’s essay on HGTV. 

“[Flaming Hydra is] especially optimistic for culture writers and those of us who aren’t hard news reporters, but who are part of the overall media ecosystem that’s been decimated over the past couple of years and especially the past few months,” Nguyen says. 

“It’s important to me that Flaming Hydra works,” says David Roth, a contributor and co-founder of Defector. “I need to believe that there’s another way that things can be instead of just endless layoffs and retrenchment that you see everywhere else in the industry.”

Moments before speaking to Roth, I was frantically converting my Vice clips into PDFs because of a plausible rumor that the C-Suite was nuking the entire website (as of now, this hasn’t happened). Roth told me how, before starting Defector, while working a series of staff writer jobs, he noticed that around a year into each gig, his body would tense up, as he became preemptively anxious about the prospect of getting laid off. 

Roth recalled how, during his time at traditional media outlets, he was puzzled that there was a tier of vastly better-paid employees devoted to business analytics and advertising. Flaming Hydra, on the other hand, is solely writers working for writers. 

Vice, which officially ended operations for its website in February, is a cautionary tale of what happens when executives overhype a brand in order to chase new investment and spend much of that cash paying themselves. According to Semafor, Vice co-founder Shane Smith made $100 million from selling his shares in 2014. Bankruptcy filings from 2023 show the C-Suite receiving salaries upwards of $700,000, including bonuses. 

Roth says that Flaming Hydra—and Defector—aren’t chasing subscribers for the purpose of getting purchased by a bigger company. Their goal is to experiment with writing and provide great work to readers who are interested. 

“We’re not trying to convince anybody with money that we’re anything other than what we are,” he says. “The people that we’re trying to reach are people that want to read the stuff that we put out.” 

Luke O’Neil, a contributor and writer of the newsletter Welcome to Hellworld, says that rather than feeling like a blog or news site, Flaming Hydra reminds him of “an age where you could pick up a magazine that you trusted and know it was going to run the gamut of topics.” 

“I came up in the alternative weeklies in the 2000s and I always miss that sort of sense of camaraderie,” he says. “It just feels good to be a part of something working together with other people, as opposed to just being solo.”  

Tom Scocca, a contributor and founder of INDIGNITY, the Substack successor of the blog Hmm Daily, says that with the advent of newsletters, writers have become “dispersed and atomized.”