"It's honestly a miracle that we're still around" — the Xylom's Alex Ip on indie newsroom realities
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It's been a tumultuous summer for science media. Scientific American and a major German science magazine were sold, Research Professional News is being shut down, BioGraphic lost its main funder, and National Geographic laid off dozens of staff. This quote from science journalist Michael Greshko sums it up well:
“Ask any working science journalist about the state of the discipline, and they’ll tell you the mood is grim ... with alarming frequency, legacy and digital-first publications alike are showing that they can’t provide these journalists with stability. So who will?”
Except that quote is three years old. It's from a 2023 post for Nieman Lab in which Greshko predicted (or maybe hoped for) a "Defector moment" for science media — the rise of independent newsrooms in the mold of sites like Defector and 404 Media. Things have been grim for a while, but there's still not really a Defector for science. Independent science media — newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, you name it — is still largely the domain of science communicators, not science journalists.
The relative dearth of indie science newsrooms makes the Xylom stand out. Founded in 2018 by Alex Ip, it's an award-winning nonprofit independent newsroom dedicated to global health and environmental disparities. So, given the the ongoing turmoil in legacy science media, I invited Alex to open up about the realities of running a small independent newsroom.
The Xylom is both a success story and a cautionary tale. Alex says it claws by on about $9,000 per month for its 3 full-time staff and network of freelancers — math that only works out because all three staffers live in low cost-of-living countries on wages that’d be below the poverty line in the US. The Xylom's rates for contributors start at $250 for reported stories. I think I speak for everyone in science journalism when I say that is not what we imagine when we fantasize about a sustainable model for our profession. But despite substantial challenges with everything from funding to the US immigration system, the Xylom has hung on for 8 years now even as bigger, better-funded media enterprises have come and go. One reason for this, Alex says, is that the Xylom staff knows what’s worth spending their shoestring budget on. Great journalism doesn’t require fancy office space or business-class tickets. It requires dedicated people with important stories to tell (and money to pay them).
The following conversation has been edited for length and readability.
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