Hello and welcome to Hell Gate. We are a website about New York City, named for the city's sturdiest bridge that sits between Randall's Island and Astoria, Queens.

We'll be publishing a mix of blog posts, features, columns, and investigations starting today.

The goal? To be trenchant, playful, outraged, irreverent, and useful to our readers; deeply skeptical of power but stubbornly idealistic. Never a chore to read.

And we, the journalists, own the website. We are building on a movement of worker-owned news outlets like Defector Media, Discourse Blog, Racket, or the Colorado Sun.

In New York and around the country, we've seen publications sputter and blink out because investors wanted to squeeze more profit from journalism, or because a hedge fund saw less value in a functioning newsroom than its hollowed-out carcass, or because a billionaire owner simply ceased to be amused.

For now, you can enjoy our work for free. Sometime this summer, you'll have to buy a subscription. If there's a way to build sustainable journalism, we think it lies in a model like this one, where journalists answer only to our readers.

If you like what we're doing, you can support us by signing up for our newsletter or dropping a few bucks into the tip jar to keep the lights on.