They built a newsroom without an employer

In April 2026, at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference, Kyle Pope of Covering Climate Now asked two journalists to get coffee.

Both journalists had been let go by a network the previous year. What came out of that coffee is the most interesting structural experiment in independent journalism I have seen this year, and I'm writing about it not because it worked. It is that the people who built it will tell you precisely where it broke.

They called it Betting the House. Five months later, four independent journalists published stories on the same subject in the same week, from four states, for four different platforms.

Tracy Wholf ran it. She has spent 15 years as a climate journalist across a string of organizations, including building the climate reporting teams at ABC News and CBS News, and now runs WereWHOLF Media as its founder and executive producer. Her title on this project, as she gave it to me, was project manager, executive producer, and editor, and one of those three turned out to be a problem.

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The reason is not the one you would guess. It is not money, and it is not distribution.

“As you know, when you’re independent, you feel very lonely.”

Five people who had run beats inside large newsrooms were now running one-person operations. Covering Climate Now, which connects about 500 newsrooms worldwide, was asking a related question. Kyle Pope put it to the group this way: how is climate journalism going to be paid for, how are we going to find audiences, and what are these models going to look like?

Cain supplied the mechanism. Swarm the topic. Everyone reports the same subject and publishes at the same time, the way competing outlets accidentally do when a story breaks, except on purpose.

“When major publications all report on the same thing, it elevates a topic, and it gets more attention. So we decided to do the same thing and swarm-report on housing.”

This is the part nobody talks about, and it is where a collaboration like this actually lives or dies.

They tried three topics before housing. The midterms. Affordability, the buzzword of the year. Advertising and marketing, which was the one Atkin wanted. Each died the same way: somebody said it didn't work for their model, and they couldn't take part. Ben Tracy is funded by Climate Central, which is nonpartisan, so anything overtly political was out for him. Sammy Roth, formerly of the Los Angeles Times and now writing the newsletter Climate-Colored Goggles, was on the founding call and dropped out altogether: the topic didn’t fit his brand.

Housing was the only subject four different businesses could all say yes to. Atkin came to the second meeting with a title, and Wholf says the room knew immediately.

Understand what that process really is. In a newsroom, an editor or manager assigns a topic. In a federation of independents, the topic has to clear every participant’s business model, funding rules, and audience expectations before anyone reports a word. That is not a scheduling problem. It is a design constraint, and it is why these groups will always be small and why the topic will always be the slowest decision.

Not a shared byline. Not a shared publication. Three things:

They talked about taking the obvious shortcut and decided against it. The group discussed going after a large traditional outlet as a distribution partner, and ruled it out.

“No, we don’t want The Guardian to take all of our credit. We want to keep it in this independent space.”

That was a choice about ownership, not reach, and it was not unanimous in spirit. Ramirez opposed a major partner but was open to republication by small outlets, and she believes Mariana Press, her home newspaper in the Northern Marianas, picked up her Hawaii story. Refusing the big partner did not mean refusing distribution. It meant refusing the byline tax.

Atkin’s Miami story drew about 86,000 views against her usual 65,000 to 70,000, a gain of roughly 20,000. Her open rate didn't move at all, as she expected. With almost 145,000 subscribers built over seven years, she runs 35 to 40 percent, and the people who open her email were always going to. What changed was everything outside the list. Normally about 95 percent of her views come from the email itself. This time 14 percent arrived from what Substack files as direct traffic, the bucket it uses when it cannot see where a reader came from.

Tracy saw an immediate bump on YouTube in the first day or two, which he attributed to the cross-promotion, and then the piece went unexpectedly viral on Instagram. His video sits at about 7,600 views about two weeks out, on a Climate Central channel with 8,700 subscribers. YouTube is only part of his distribution because Climate Central places his packages with broadcast partners.

Cain has the cleanest data on where traffic came from. About a quarter of his views arrived from external links rather than YouTube’s own recommendations, and he ranked the sources: first the Covering Climate Now landing page, second HEATED, third LinkedIn.

Two things follow from that, and the second one is uncomfortable.

The first: shared infrastructure, not the journalist with 145,000 subscribers, drove the most outside traffic. The landing page beat the biggest following. So the real bottleneck here is not finding a star. It is finding someone to build and run the shared layer.

The second is scale, and it is the part nobody wants to talk about. Cain’s video pulled about 1,600 views on a channel with 1,850 subscribers. A quarter came from outside links. The landing page and HEATED together sent him a few hundred people. Atkin, meanwhile, picked up about 20,000 views over her baseline. Ramirez did not share a number. Stack those up, and the traffic flowed to the biggest list, not the smallest.

That is not a knock on anyone. A few hundred new viewers matters at that scale, and everyone said the fellowship and the edit were worth it. But if you are thinking about building one of these, know the math. Cross-promotion moves attention around in proportion to what people already have. It does not level the field.

Somebody ran this. Four journalists, four business models, no shared employer. They do not all publish in the same week by accident. Wholf kept the calendar, the calls, and the drafts moving for five months.

"It was massive. It never would have gotten done if one person wasn't there keeping time, right? And so that was really, really critical."

So I asked whether she was paid for it.

"No. So this was a volunteer experiment."

Covering Climate Now covered hotel and airfare for reporters who traveled. Tracy declined his share because Climate Central already covered him. Cain and Ramirez took theirs. Atkin declined hers because HEATED has been entirely reader-funded since 2019 and she wants no donor anyone can point at, and then wrote to her readers explaining why she had turned it down and asking them to subscribe.

That was the budget. Nobody paid for the coordinator.

The gap is not where you would expect. Wholf named it exactly:

"One of the things that I have missed the most since leaving a traditional newsroom is you never really fully understood or appreciated the infrastructure of the newsroom. As an independent journalist, you are now the business manager. You are HR. You are..."

Editorial standards, I said.

"Editorial, standards, legal. You are all of those things."

"The thing we underestimated the most was we knew we would do the journalism fine. That wasn't the problem. The thing we underestimated the most was more the business side, the marketing side, the advertising, trying to get our story out there."

The clearest illustration came at the end of the group's public debrief. Ramirez said what she would do differently: more graphics, more social assets, more multimedia. She did not have time. Atkin's answer was immediate. "I would have somebody else do that. I would use our funding." Wholf jumped in: use the funding to hire a social media team. And then Ramirez, flatly: "I can't afford to pay them."

Five accomplished journalists, a project with national reach, and they end up unable to pay a freelancer to cut social video. That is the ceiling on independent journalism right now. The limit is not talent or appetite.

Wholf is unusually direct about what went wrong. That is what makes this worth writing about.

First: the timeline. She started the pitch deck at the end of August, two or three weeks before launch. A month earlier might have raised more. The publication date slipped two days anyway. Her verdict: “The rollout strategy was very haphazard.” Even so, they got those numbers. Imagine what a competent rollout could have done.

Second: nobody was named editor. Wholf volunteered to project manage and produce. The word editor never got said out loud. The most experienced editor in the group spent five months not giving notes.

"I didn't feel like I was empowered to give that type of feedback or criticism because we didn't really say, "Okay, Tracy's going to project manage. She's also going to edit."

It got fixed by accident. Ramirez asked Wholf and Atkin to read her Hawaii piece, the longest she had published in The Confluence, and they gave her the notes she needed. In her words, it was “something that I wouldn’t have otherwise had if I was solely independent.” Wholf’s take on why it does not happen more: “We become so siloed as independent journalists that we forget. We forget to ask for that.”

Third: no agreement. Someone at the debrief asked if they had signed a memorandum of understanding. They had not. Wholf now thinks they should have.

"I think everybody needs to be on board with, "Are we going to go after funding? Where can that funding come from? Are we going to have an editorial guideline? Who's going to function as that role? And are we all on board with it?"

There is a fourth thing she wishes they had done, and it is the one a television producer would spot. With more time, they could have threaded the stories together. Atkin, standing in a Miami open house she expects to be underwater, could have pointed at the coastal homeowners in Tracy’s video who are paying to lift theirs out of the tide. Four stories that referenced each other in the copy, not just linked underneath.

The experiment is not finished. Covering Climate Now wants to run a bigger version. Wholf is talking to several people about what a second round would look like and hopes to do it next year.

"Now that we have a little bit of proof of concept, now it's about having these conversations with organizations that might be willing to fund this kind of thing."

Another funding door, and she raised it herself, with a flag attached. Large environmental groups with hundreds of millions of dollars came to her when she was laid off, asking what they could do.

"I mean, this may be cynical, but they could say, "We really want to fund stories on plastic pollution. And we're going to put out a call, basically. We're looking for four storytellers that want to do storytelling on plastic pollution."

That is an RFP for journalism written by an advocacy group, and she said the cynical part out loud before I could. Somebody will build it. The difference between it working and it blowing up is exactly the infrastructure this round lacked: a named editor, written standards, and an agreement signed before anyone reports a word.

The route she likes best costs the least. Professional associations already have members, mailing lists, and convening power. Her group went to the Society of Environmental Journalists for help, and it was too late. She reels off the others: SABEW for the business journalists, the Association of Health Care Journalists, any of them.

"You could go to any of those organizations and show them this model and say, 'You guys should put something together and put a call out and organize this.'"

This is the sharpest thing she said all hour, and it has nothing to do with climate.

"Maybe we do a collaboration where you've got two traditional journalists, and you have two content creators, people that have figured out the way to get the audience but don't necessarily have the original reporting."

"They've figured out the audience, but they haven't figured out the content, and then marry those things. It could be a win-win for everyone."

Two people who can report, two who can reach. Each side teaches the other what it is missing. This is not about climate, and it is not about journalism purity. It is a structure. It settles the creator-versus-journalist argument by refusing to have it.

The rest is portable.

"This is not unique or specific to climate journalism. You could be a group of sports reporters that wants to do this. This translates to any beat."

Five people, five months, four stories. As a replacement for what big newsrooms have cut, it is not close. As a working prototype, with its failures documented by the person who ran it, it is the most useful thing on the table. The hard parts to copy are the ones everyone thinks matter most: the reporting talent and the big audience. The easy parts to copy are the ones no one funds.

If your beat has lost half its reporters, you already know three people who could do this with you. Who runs the clock, and who pays them?

Press reply and tell me. I read every one.