It is nothing short of gobsmacking to us that Hell Gate is now embarked on its fifth year of existence. When five journalists launched the site 2022, we had hopes and hunches that if we built a Hell Gate people would come, but the odds were stacked against us. The 21st century, any journalist will tell you, is no place to try to launch a news business. We agreed we'd try it for a month, fully prepared for the likelihood that we'd have to pack it in at the end of the run.
That we are still here, three and a half thousand blog posts later, employing 10 people, publishing three newsletters and a weekly video podcast, cranking out major investigative projects, cultural criticism, restaurant reviews, election night livestreams, and events, is incredibly exciting for us—both personally as journalists who get to do the kind of work we enjoy, and also as people who, believing that journalism is a necessary prerequisite of a functioning democracy, are alarmed and dismayed at the accelerating collapse of news media.
Every year we publish a report that gives a glimpse of how Hell Gate is doing. We do this because we think we owe it to the nearly eleven thousand paying subscribers helping us to do this work, because we hope a frank discussion of how we're doing and what we're doing will inspire more people to help us do more work, and because we think in these dark days for journalism it only makes sense for publications to share their notes about what's working and what isn't. We hope what follows is useful. If you have questions that aren't answered in this report, please get in touch.
Okay, let's get into it:
How Much Hell Gate Makes
Between our various revenue streams, Hell Gate expects to take in something in the neighborhood of $1.5 million in 2026. Breaking that down:
Subscriptions
As ever, and very much by design, the backbone of Hell Gate's business model is subscription revenue. This is important to us both because we mistrust alternative anchor revenue sources—advertising just doesn't pay the bills in 2026 and philanthropy is fickle—and because we believe the subscription model has affirmative virtues: It binds us directly to our readers, who are literally invested in our work. We have said for many years that subscriptions are also more stable than other revenue sources, because, barring a national economic crisis, subscribers are unlikely to desert us all at once. That qualifier feels a bit less hypothetical and remote these days, but our philosophy is unchanged.
We currently have 11,000 paying subscribers, a 22 percent increase from where we were last year. This summer, our subscriptions crossed the line of $1 million in Annual Recurring Revenue, which felt cool. We bought a $40 bottle of prosecco from a Chinatown liquor store that day and drank it on the roof of our office.
Hell Gate made $660,000 in subscription revenue in the first three quarters of this year—20 percent ahead of what we made over the same interval last year. But, not unpredictably, our growth is slowing down from our first few years of wild expansion. Our churn rate—the share of paying subscribers who let their subscriptions lapse—remains below average, but as we grow, the dollar value of that percentage grows too, and the task of replacing the lost revenue with new subscriptions gets harder. Our periodic sales are still extremely effective at getting new subscribers in the door, but recently, in months when we don't run a sale, our recurring revenue growth has sometimes been negative.
Meanwhile the number of people who consume Hell Gate's work without supporting it has grown even faster than our paid subscriber base. We currently have nearly 64,000 free members receiving one or more of our three newsletters. Our free weekly podcast generally racks up 4,000 to 5,000 downloads across the major audio platforms, and since we started posting our podcasts (now with video!—more on that further down) on YouTube, episodes have added another 4,000 to 5,000 views.
It's exciting to see Hell Gate's reach permeating beyond our core group of paying subscribers, but at the end of the day, our business model is premised on eventually persuading some significant portion of these Hell-Gate-curious freeloaders that what they're reading or listening to or watching is worth paying for. Indeed, if even three percent of our free newsletter recipients became subscribers, it would pay for another staff member!
We're thinking through strategies to turn more of our non-paying fans into paying subscribers. One experiment that appears to be working: randomly withholding our Morning Spew newsletter from freeloaders, and gently suggesting that Hell Gate is worth $6.99 a month.
The bottom line is that Hell Gate's subscription revenue keeps growing, but we'd like it to grow faster so that we can keep hiring more journalists to cover this enormous city even better.
Philanthropy
We are building Hell Gate on the (relatively) solid foundation of subscription revenue, but we have, from the beginning, welcomed donations from foundations and generous individuals as the jet fuel we pour on the Hell Gate fire. We anticipate that a quarter of our revenue this year will come from donations and grants.
We list everyone who's ever given us more than $5,000 on our website. We'd like to thank Ruth Ann Harnisch and Critical Minded, among others, for their donations in the past year. We're also exceedingly grateful to everybody who has given us smaller donations and tips. One of the advantages of not relying primarily on philanthropic funding for our operations is that it's easy for us to adhere to our firewall policies that preclude donors from influencing editorial content. In conversations with potential donors, we are always painfully explicit that the whole point of Hell Gate is that the journalists dictate the journalism, and that while we would love their support, they should not expect to have any role in shaping our coverage.
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
As we wrote last year, the world has changed since the days when advertising sales funded teeming newsrooms. We don't expect advertising to ever make up a significant piece of our revenue. But that doesn't mean it can't provide an extra margin, allowing us to pay more freelancers, take more risks, try more things. We've made more than $20,000 from advertising so far this year, overwhelmingly from spots in our daily and weekly newsletters, and we expect that number to increase in the coming year.
State Funding
There's one other revenue source worth mentioning in this report: To our mild astonishment, the state legislation we mentioned in last year's annual report actually did result in a new tax credit for New York-based news media companies. The size of the tax credit is determined by the number of qualifying employees a company has, and how many new positions it has hired in the last calendar year. As a result of the program, Hell Gate received a $157,000 tax credit for the 2025 tax year. That's great news, and it is heartening to see the government exploring ways to address the crisis in journalism. (Lest you worry this represents a state-media take over, rest assured that we are still going hard on the hand that just fed us.)
Less great are the hoops we have to jump through to put this money to work funding journalism. Since the credit wasn't awarded until July, long after the 2025 tax filing deadline, we now need to refile our corporate taxes and then each of the Hell Gate owners need to refile our personal taxes, at which point we should theoretically be issued refund checks, which we can then put back into the company through a capital contribution agreement, possibly (we need to double check this with our accountants) after paying personal federal taxes on the state tax refund. There has to be a better way to do this, but we're not going to look this gift horse in the mouth.
In any case, this tax credit is part of a state trial program slated to run three years (or until the allocated money runs out), so there's hope we'll be seeing more state support next year.
How Much Hell Gate Costs
Salaries and Benefits
We built Hell Gate as a machine that efficiently turns money into journalism, so it comes as no surprise that our biggest expense by far continues to be paying journalists. Staff salaries and benefits cost us $77,605 in August. This number keeps going up, year after year, for several reasons: One is that as our revenue grows, we keep bringing more people on board. Hell Gate currently employs three full-time editors, five full-time reporters, a part-time podcast producer, and a part-time marketing and external relations manager.
Another is that we gave ourselves raises in January. Hell Gate salaries now range between $83,000 and $100,000, according to a slightly complicated formula intended to reflect both longevity with the company and the extra work and responsibility carried by editors. Compensation and how to structure it has reliably been the single most difficult conversation for Hell Gate owners, and we expect to tinker with it further in the coming year. The wise words of one of Hell Gate's advisory board members continue to be borne out: In setting compensation, the best you can hope for is to minimize the inevitable dissatisfaction.
All of us have decent health insurance (procured through our Professional Employer Organization, Justworks) for which the company pays 100 percent of the premium because, as we keep saying, this is the very least any solvent employer can do until our country is forced to concede that health care is a human right. In the meantime, of course—hastening that day—health insurance continues to get ever more expensive, so the cost of keeping our journalists alive to do the journalism does too.
Freelancers
But for much of the past year, Hell Gate had an editorial bandwidth problem—five staff reporters filing copy and only two editors to catch it, with one of those editors frequently tied up with work on our investigative project. As a result, we actually paid for less freelance journalism this year than we did the previous year—between $4,000 and $5,000 a month to freelance writers and photographers.
Everything Else
And then there are the one zillion other things we pay for to keep the Hell Gate engine purring: Libel insurance ($10,000), miscellaneous taxes and workers compensation insurance ($70,000 so far this year), and fees to our payment processor, Stripe ($19,000 so far this year and counting). Hell Gate is, first and foremost, a website, and so we pay our CMS platform Ghost, as well as Outpost, a company that optimizes Ghost for publications like ours, and Partner & Partners, the (worker-owned!) design firm that makes our website beautiful, oversees its smooth operation, and periodically refreshes and improves it, as well as designing our most eye-catching graphics. All told, that costs us about $5,000 a month.
The merch we give to subscribers is extremely well made by fairly paid and unionized adults, and for this reason, it is expensive. This year, we spent about $15,000 on T-shirts for our subscribers, and another $7,000 mailing them out.
They don't show up in our balance sheets, but one of the most valuable services we receive comes from our lawyers at Ballard Spahr, who help us pro bono, reading our stories before we publish to make sure we're not libelling anyone, putting muscle behind our Freedom of Information requests, and showing up in Brooklyn superior court when bullies make frivolous threats to sue us, as they had to do at one point last winter. Knowing a gang of killer lawyers has our backs gives us the confidence to write hard stories about powerful people, and we feel extraordinarily lucky to have them.
Subscriptions to publications, subscriptions to software, tax accountants, contract lawyers, office supplies, venue rentals and other costs related to putting on our subscriber events, taxes—hear the plaint of the small-business owner: Running an operation like this involves paying a lot of bills! All told, we expect to spend around $1.5 million making Hell Gate in 2026.
Some Notable Happenings of the Past Year
A Home of Our Own
Thanks in part, to the great generosity of one of our donors, Ruth Ann Harnisch, this year we secured a two-year lease on a space on the Bowery in Manhattan's Chinatown to build out our podcast studio, significantly increasing the quality of our podcast, and because apparently this is where podcasts are going, introducing cameras so we can post video podcasts to YouTube.
The space housing the studio also functions as the first honest-to-God office Hell Gate has ever had. (When we first started, the Reverend Billy Talen had the keys to a decommissioned bank branch on Avenue C and he generously let us use it when the Stop Shopping Choir wasn't practicing. After that, our friends at Defector allowed us to sublet their work-share space for a couple days a week.)
Comings and Goings
Hell Gate has lived long enough now that, inevitably, some long-time Hell Gaters are now moving on to other endeavors. Founding member, editor, and all-around legend Esther Wang stepped away this summer, as did our inaugural operations manager Nadia Tykulsker. Both were instrumental in getting Hell Gate to where it is today, and we'll forever be grateful to them for that. Look for them both to continue kicking ass at everything they set their minds to.
Hell Gate brought on two new editors in 2026. Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, a legend in her time, joined us full-time in March and, among many other accomplishments already, helped to launch Cultural Capital, our new arts and culture newsletter. (Subscribe here.) Holly Pretsky came on in July, bringing with her a deep knowledge of City and state politics as well as a sophisticated and heterodox assessment of Macklemore.
The new studio is a big part of our investment in the quality and ambition of our podcast, but an even bigger part is Nic Neves. Nic has been producing our podcast for more than a year on a contract basis, but this year we brought him on as a part-time employee with full benefits to oversee the buildout of the studio and the new and improved audio and video podcasts that we make in there. Rick Paulas, our part-time marketing manager who joined us last year, rounds out our ten-person roster.
Shared Media Services
We have long been pretty skeptical of philanthropists' enthusiasm for throwing money into non-profit infrastructure adjacent to journalism—Conferences! Toolkits! Sustainability audits!—rather than just paying the damn journalists to do some journalism. But we have to hand it to them on this one: Our friends at Defector and Start.coop won a grant to spin up something truly, vitally useful—a Shared Media Services operation that connects newsrooms like ours to a bevy of back-office contractors, offering everything from legal support to Human Resources and payroll processing. Many of the things they offer we already have locked down, but some of them—bookkeeping, business analysis, general operational support—we are extremely excited to avail ourselves of.
We're all journalists over here, driven to become entrepreneurs and People of Business by necessity, and to the extent we can hand off some of the more technical, tedious, and time-consuming parts of the job to other people and free ourselves up to do more journalism, we're thrilled. As members of the project's initial cohort, we're also very happy to be helping Shared Media Services hammer out the kinks of an ambitious concept that could significantly lower the bar of entry for future Hell-Gate-like publications.
New Editorial Initiatives
Back in 2024, we partnered up with Type Investigations to produce the celebrated and award-winning 2024 project The Table of Success. This year, we followed it up with another Type partnership, Courts of Contempt, a deep investigation into how judges are selected in New York City, the troubling shortcomings of this system, and some of the judges it has produced.
Projects like this are a heavy lift for Hell Gate. They require enormous commitments of time from our reporters and editors even as we still need to populate the site and do everything else we do each day. The value of these projects isn't easy to translate into dollars and sense for Hell Gate—they live outside our paywall, and while they probably put some marginal shine on our reputation, there's no way for us to know if anyone is becoming a paying subscriber because they love The Table of Success or Courts of Contempt. But we keep biting off these projects, not because we're certain they're good for the business's bottom line, but because doing things like this is the whole point. The only reason we care about the business's bottom line in the first place is because it pays us to do journalism. God help us, we'll probably undertake another big investigative package at some point, after we catch up on a little sleep.
After dipping our toes into live video news last summer with our livestream covering Zohran Mamdani's victory in the Democratic Primary, we ran it all back in November with an even more polished and compelling (this is not just us saying this! Ask around!) livestream covering the general election. Carried live in dozens of bars, with 30,000 views, we brought our viewers into the room when Mamdani won and introduced them to the grim urinals of defeat at Cuomo headquarters. Then we did it a third time this past June for the 2026 primary election. "The effect is delightful," the Columbia Journalism Review declared. "The team has managed to turn one of the most staid forms of news into something lively and fun that also offers some of the smartest political coverage in the city." We'll take it! These livestreams—made possible by a crack production team—are a great way to leverage our expertise and get Hell Gate in front of new audiences who may never have heard of us. They are also simply tons of fun.
As we alluded to above, we have doubled down on our podcast production, building a studio, devoting more time to preparation and production, and reimagining the weekly show as a video podcast. Here too, a significant motivation is that we are having fun. But we're also hopeful that, with a little time, the podcast can generate enough advertising revenue that it at least pays for itself. We're not there yet—stay tuned.
Yeah, We Party
We put on a lot of events in the past year. We still think of these less as revenue drivers and more as a perk for our subscribers and a way of deepening our connection with readers, and we think they serve pretty well in that role. Last fall we hosted a live podcast taping at the Museum of Moving Image with then-Democratic-mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, where we questioned him on everything from the Elizabeth Street Garden to his controversial alliance with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch. This past spring we presented our Courts of Contempt project at a live event that was like a civic-education TED-talk, only more fun. We hosted the inaugural NYC-news-media-adjacent Battle of the Bands. We resurrected the golden age of media holiday parties. We were out in the Rockaways this summer putting on a musical beach party at Rippers with Shea Stadium and helping to present the Rockaway Film Festival.
Looking Ahead
For any number of reasons, we have entered a new era of Hell Gate. We have new members on our team. We aren't brand-new exciting babies anymore, we are increasingly well-established, exciting juveniles.
For the first time in our existence, we no longer have the daily shenanigans of Eric Adams and his team to inspire our blogging. Media business watchers have described the "Trump Bump" enjoyed by national news outlets during the first Donald presidency—how will Hell Gate fare without our Adams Bump? The answer so far this year appears to be "just fine, thanks." The Mamdani administration may be less theatrically entertaining than its predecessor, but it's also more ambitious and more complicated, its successes and failures of greater relevance to national and global political tectonics. As the Mamdani experiment unfolds, we, as a local New York City news site, have the best seats in the house.
In our annual report last year, we wrote that under a new mayor, "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."
That mandate continues to drive our coverage of city politics.
(Besides. Eric Adams still pops up now and then. The Table is eternal.)
Nevertheless, as we enter our fifth year, we are exiting the first phase of our development where the revenue line went dizzyingly up seemingly whatever we did. It's clear that our growth in this next phase will be more modest, and we'll have to work harder for it, paying more attention to converting non-paying readers and listeners and watchers and followers into paying subscribers.
We still want to grow—not for growth's sake, but because this is an enormous, dynamic city with 8.5 million stories to tell and far too few journalists getting paid to cover them. As ever, just how much we're able to grow—how many blogs and podcasts and livestreams and investigative microsites and viral street interviews we're able to publish—will be determined by you guys. If you're already a subscriber, thanks from the bottom of our hot little hearts for sustaining this work. If you're not yet a subscriber, there's no better time to get on board than now.
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