Projects - Platform coops

Up & Go

Home cleaning in NYC you can feel great about

labor
coop

Platform Cooperatives working group at Civic Hall

The Brick House Cooperative is a publishing platform designed, owned and operated by journalists—ad-free, expandable and subscription-based. Our principal founding editors have many decades of experience between them, and bylines in every major U.S. publication. The platform launched in December 2020 and has been covered by Ben Smith at the New York Times as well as Business Insider, Coindesk, Current Affairs, Joe Wiesenthal at Bloomberg, Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic blog, and the Columbia Journalism Review. Each of our nine member publications operates independently under the cooperative umbrella. Shares in the cooperative are equal and cannot be sold or transferred, with one share allocated to each publication. No publication can own more than one share. On the revenue side, one subscription fee gives readers access to all our publications. This novel business structure keeps editorial control in the hands of working journalists, allowing us to serve no one but our readers. Our goal is to expand The Brick House into a great realm with more and more publishers, writers, artists and editors, all working together to safeguard our editorial independence, and all sharing the costs and proceeds of our work. We believe that a community of journalists whose primary responsibility is to the public trust, and to each other, will be stronger in every way—better at producing stories that matter, better in business, better for journalists and readers. Our cooperative is working not only to provide a stable livelihood for our members, but to redefine the role of media in society as a public good.

Ours to hack and own: the ride of platform cooperativism

Edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider: Ours to Hack and to Own, the rise of platform cooperativism, a new vision for the future of work and a fairer Internet.