It has been an eventful year for Hell Gate since we issued our last annual report, and it's time to update you on how things are going for Hell Gate as a worker-owned local news outlet. It's been an eventful and tumultuous year for New York City, the country, and the world as well, and before we dive into the details of our progress, we want to take a second to talk more generally about Hell Gate in this broader moment of political crisis, a crisis in which the state of American journalism is exceedingly relevant.
When we started Hell Gate in early 2022, we reasoned that a worker-owned publication would be more nimble, smarter, more connected to its audience, and altogether better adapted to survive and thrive at a time when the business models that underwrote journalism in the last century have been exploded into smithereens.
We still believe all of that. But the last year has underscored that tied deeply to journalism's financial crisis is a civic and political crisis: the unwillingness or inability (or both) of large swaths of the media landscape to fulfill our industry's collective mandate in the face of pressure from an autocratic regime. The Washington Post, owned by one of the richest men alive, has gutted itself to avoid any critique of power. CBS News is engaged in a similar performance of self-mutilation. Gajillionaire owners are reaching down to muzzle late-night hosts. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is literally extinct, and many of the newsrooms that depended on it for support seem soon to follow.
We're even more convinced that we need news publications that are resilient in the face of an industry collapse and, not unrelatedly, are willing and able to report critically on the powerful in the face of a rising authoritarian tide—and that worker-owned, subscriber-supported journalism is necessary to build that independent free press.
To that end, we hope this year's annual report not only helps us continue to cultivate a relationship of trust with our subscribers, but that it offers something useful (and maybe even inspiring!) to other journalists trying to find their way through the wracked and blasted landscape of the news business in these times.
Four years ago, Hell Gate was just a twinkle in our eyes. Three years ago, it was still a tentative experiment and we were trying to see if anyone liked it. More than 2,600 posts, some awards, and nearly $1.4 million in subscription revenue later, we're still here, we've hired a bunch of people, and we're continuing to grow.
If you're wondering if you could do the same thing, we'd love to talk. If you have questions about anything in this report, please get in touch.
How Much Hell Gate Makes
Subscriptions
A foundational principle of Hell Gate is that our journalism should be primarily funded by our readers. This creates structural accountability to our audience, and it creates a modicum of stability—while millions of dollars of foundation funding might dry up all at once on the whim of a grant officer, barring a deep national economic crisis (deep breath as we whistle at piercing volume past the graveyard) or some grievously offensive editorial pivot on our part (possible!), our subscribers are unlikely to desert us suddenly and en masse. Subscription revenue is about as steady a thing as you can build on in the shifting dunes of 21st-century journalism.
The good news for Hell Gate is that our subscription numbers and revenue continue to grow at a healthy clip.
As of the end of September, we have more than 9,000 paid subscribers, a 69 percent increase from the previous annual report. At the end of September 2024, our monthly recurring revenue was around $42,000 a month. As this report goes live, it's nearly $70,000 a month, a 66 percent increase in one year. If recent growth trends continue, we'll hit a million dollars in annual subscription revenue some time in the first half of 2026.
You can see our MRR growth here:
Monthly recurring revenue is a handy metric because it smooths out the lumpiness of how our subscription revenue is distributed through the year (it's always higher in the latter half of each year, as that's when many of our annual subscribers signed up and when their subscriptions renew). But a more concrete way of measuring our growth is with the actual cash from subscriptions that hits our bank account. The numbers there are encouraging as well: We made more than $490,000 from subscriptions in 2024. In 2025, we're on track for something north of $850,000.
We're incredibly heartened by the ongoing subscriber growth. Somewhere out there is the ceiling for how many people want to read Hell Gate's particular flavor of local New York City news. We keep waiting to bump our heads on it, and maybe one day, we will. But to our ongoing joy and astonishment, we haven't hit it yet.
We also have free offerings, in the form of our newsletters and our podcast. The number of people receiving our newsletters has more than doubled since our last report. As of the end of September, 33,535 readers subscribe to our semiweekly Inbox Hell newsletter; 29,442 to our daily Morning Spew newsletter, and 40,420 to Mayoral Spew, our limited-run weekly round-up of all things related to this year's mayoral race. (More on the podcast later on in the annual report.)
Philanthropy
Subscriptions aren't our only source of revenue, though. This past year, subscriptions accounted for two-thirds of our revenue. Most of the rest came from donations, either from foundations or generous individuals.
We list everyone who’s given us more than $5,000 on our website. (We're also grateful to the many donors who have supported us with smaller donations and tips to Hell Gate!) We subscribe to the standard editorial firewall policies that prevent donors from influencing editorial content, and we are clear—bluntly clear—with prospective donors that we are a journalist-led operation that jealously guards our independence and they're probably going to hate some of what we do but that's what independent journalism is all about.
We’d like to thank Critical Minded, Paul Ford, Ruth Ann Harnisch and the Harnisch Foundation, the Charles H. Revson Foundation, and the Vital Projects Fund, for their generous donations in the period since our last annual report. Hell Gate is also grateful to Investigative Reporters and Editors for acting as our fiscal sponsor for these donations, allowing donors to make their donations tax-deductible. In exchange for handling these gifts for us, IRE receives 3 percent of donations.
Advertising
Advertising used to be the 10-cylinder engine that underwrote sprawling newsrooms, painstakingly reported investigations, and three-martini editor's lunches. For reasons long established, that's not true anymore. In 2025, there's no way that advertising is going to fully backstop the operations of a local news outlet like Hell Gate.
But as we've learned this year, with a little hustle, advertising can make a real difference at the margins. We've sold about $20,000 worth in ads over the past 12 months, enough to pay for a whole bunch of commissioned freelance stories. The ads are almost exclusively featured in our three newsletters, which, though small by general interest national audience standards, have what we're told are extremely high open and click-through rates.
The big-dollar "Uber is good, actually" advertising campaigns are not knocking on our door, and, being principled business idiots, we'd probably turn them down if they were. So far, our ads have been mostly for local businesses (as well as, among others, an off-Broadway play, a cheeky dating app, and a cleaning service where workers are compensated fairly).
We feel good about that mix. We also think there's room to grow here, selling (a few) more ads for (a bit) more money. Ads will never be valuable enough to us to be worth alienating our subscribers, but if ads can become a steady revenue stream that makes it possible for us to run a few more stories and pay a few more journalists to write them, we'll be happy.
Public Funding
State legislators successfully included a bill mandating significant public funding for local news outlets (in the form of a tax credit) in 2024's state budget. This was huge news for Hell Gate, and for other local news outlets across the state.
But more than a year later, there's been crickets on that tax credit. We've been told that even though it's literally the law, the state has no immediate plans to actually make it real. Perhaps this will materialize next year? The next decade? We are not building an assumption of the state's ability to follow through on its own commitments into our budget planning.
How Much Hell Gate Costs
Over the last year, it has cost on average about $81,000 each month to run Hell Gate.
Oh, you'd like to know more?
OK, let's dig in.
Here's a snapshot of a more or less representative month from the past year:
Staff Salaries and Benefits
As always, most of the cost of making journalism has to do with keeping the journalists who make it alive. Artificial intelligence is making great headway on eliminating this nettlesome cost driver (rest assured that Hell Gate is at the forefront of that innovation), but in the meantime, yeah: We've gotta pay the people who make the journalism.
We gave ourselves much-needed raises at the beginning of 2025, after another year of dramatic growth made it clear that Hell Gate was on its way to being a going concern. Our reporters make $75,000 a year now, while our two editors make $85,000. That's more than a lot of people make, and it's also less than we'd like to be making in the inhumanely expensive metropolis where we reside. In April, we also brought on another staff writer and a part-time marketing and external relations manager, which meant that our spending on salaries, our single biggest expense, went up considerably, to nearly $52,000 a month.
Another big expense: health insurance. Hell Gate pays 100 percent of our staff's health insurance premiums and also covers 50 percent of the cost of insuring family members (partners and dependents). Is this extravagant? We don't think so. We think every employer should do this, at least until the healthcare-is-a-human-right utopia finally takes root in this country. Throw in vision and dental, and over the last 12 months, health care costs have been about $4,170 a month.
Freelancers
Five reporters and two editors, the current make-up of our editorial team, cannot cover New York City the way we want to. Until we're a thrumming 100-person newsroom, we're doing our best to expand our reach, expertise, and perspectives by commissioning as much freelance work as we have the bandwidth to edit. This past year, that's been about $5,500 worth of freelance stories a month. We generally spend another $1,500 or so each month on freelance photographers, and on average, another $1,600 per month for production work on our podcast and video projects.
Everything Else
Compensating and caring for the people doing the work makes up the bulk of our expenses, but there are a zillion peripheral costs as well. Here's an extremely incomprehensive list: libel insurance (about $10,000 each year); rent on our shared office (around $9,000 every year); payroll taxes (roughly $4,250 each month); and fees to Stripe, the company that processes our online payments, ($35,000 over the last year).
There are also the costs of running the literal website, which includes payments to Ghost, our CMS platform; Outpost, the outfit that customizes Ghost so that it works even better for us; and Partner & Partners, the design firm that makes the whole thing beautiful and makes sure it's all running the way it should. All of that costs us an average of about $1,700 a month.
The extremely stylish, well-constructed, union-made merch we give our top-tier Believer-level subscribers is not cheap! This past year, we spent about $32,000 on our hats (and limited-edition beach towels). We spent another $7,400 on postage to mail out our swag.
And then there's just a ton of other incidental stuff that really adds up: Software subscriptions, the expenses related to putting on our subscriber events, the lawyers who help us with contracts, our accountant, the list goes on.
One line item that costs us nothing but is invaluable: We have a crack team of lawyers at Ballard Spahr who help us pro bono, reading over delicate stories prepublication and cracking their knuckles when (as is often the case) public agencies respond to our record requests by effectively daring us to sue them to get the documents to which we are legally entitled. Having some scary (though actually very nice when you hang out with them in person) lawyers standing behind us when that happens, and even going to bat for us in court when we have had to sue, is an enormous boon. We could not be more grateful to them.
Some Notable Happenings of the Past Year
We made two big hires this year. Reporter extraordinaire Jessy Edwards, who came to us from Gothamist/WNYC, is now our seventh worker-owner. Not long after joining us, Jessy's work was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist, which made us feel like we probably made the right call in bringing her on board. We also hired Rick Paulas as our part-time marketing and external relations manager. Rick has brought a zillion fresh ideas about how to get Hell Gate's work under more people's noses, and has also led our advertising sales effort. With Nadia Tykulsker, our part-time operations and finance manager, this brings the core Hell Gate team to nine people.
Since the beginning of Hell Gate, the inimitable Scott Lynch has been giving Hell Gate readers weekly recommendations for cheap places to eat delicious food with his column $20 Dinner. This year, we decided to put that growing library at our subscribers' fingertips with an interactive $20 Dinner map. Now, no matter where you are in the city, you can find the nearest spot to get Uyghur noodles, CDMX-style tacos, or the perfect slice.
Last fall, we brought back the Hell Gate Podcast on an emergency basis to cover the federal prosecution of our mayor, and realized that there was no reason to stop. We've brought on producer Nic Nieves to make us sound coherent and smart every week, and our listenership is growing. Lately, 3,000 and sometimes 4,000 people have been downloading each episode. Those aren't Rogan numbers. But they put us in the top 5 percent of podcasts, the numbers are going up, and we're confident that the podcast offers us another way to introduce people to Hell Gate and eventually ensorcel them into giving us $7 a month. We're exceedingly grateful to Ruth Ann Harnisch and the Harnisch Foundation for underwriting the podcast.
We waded deeper into live events this year, with the stand-out event being the mayoral forum we hosted with our friends at New York Focus in May at the Public Theater. Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander, and Scott Stringer came through and answered hard questions before an audience of 250 people. We also livestreamed the forum, which was viewed by more than 20,000 people.
We took our foray into live video even further with our primary night livestream, which was viewed more than 20,000 times on YouTube and was carried live by more than a dozen bars around the city. We had in-studio anchors, we had reporters embedded with the major campaigns, and we had expert, on-the-fly analysis of the returns, including an early (and correct!) calling of the race for Mamdani. This kind of production would have required half a dozen satellite vans and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment not so long ago. Now we can do it with our phones (and a good deal of back-end support from livestreaming professionals).
Looking Ahead
We've got a lot of plans for the coming year. For one thing, for the first time in Hell Gate's existence, Eric Adams won't be the mayor, and there will be a new administration in City Hall. We intend to cover the hell out of this historic transition. Our mandate remains unchanged: We will hold the mayor's feet to the fire, ask him hard questions, and make merciless fun of him if he lies or tries to weasel out of commitments or does New Yorkers dirty. And if the city's oligarchic potentates try to strangle the (very likely) Mamdani administration in its cradle, it will be our job to cover that too.
We also have our eye on expansion, both in terms of our staff and our editorial ambition. As we've hired several reporters in the past couple of years, we'd really like to hire an additional editor in the coming year.
We're once again working with Type Investigations, who helped us with our award-winning Table of Success, on another big exciting project that we'll be unveiling next year. Stay tuned for more details!
We're looking to expand the scope of our podcast, in both the frequency and the sophistication of our episodes. We're trying something new later this year, with a podcast taping in front of a live audience with a high-profile guest. (Again: Stay tuned for more details!)
And after the success of our mayoral forum and our primary night livestream, we also want to keep experimenting with livestreamed events and news coverage. It's a great way to get Hell Gate in front of new audiences, and as we learned during our primary night livestream, it's also fun as hell.
We feel incredibly fortunate to have made it this point, one where we're less preoccupied with survival and can start to dream big. The extremely fun questions facing us now are about how much more Hell Gate can do—and we want to do a lot! We want a big, bustling newsroom that sends reporters out to every corner of the city each morning like a swarm of pesky fire ants. How much we're able to grow, and how fast, will, as ever, be up to our readers. As always, we want to thank our subscribers, whose support is the bedrock that allows us to do what we love.
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Want to support Hell Gate in other ways? Get in touch:
Advertising: info@hellgatenyc.com
Donations: info@hellgatenyc.com
News tips: tips@hellgatenyc.com