Outlet profile

404 Media

U.S. left-leaning

Owned byWorker-owned cooperative; equally owned by its four co-founders — Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox. No external corporate investors or parent company.

FundingPrimarily paid reader subscriptions ($10/month or $100/year), supplemented by display advertising, podcast sponsorships, and merchandise. Reached profitability within six months of launch.

On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

404 Media was founded on August 22, 2023, by Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox — all senior editors or writers at Vice Media's Motherboard technology vertical, which had built a reputation for aggressive investigative tech journalism. The founding followed Vice Media's bankruptcy filing and was structured as a worker-owned cooperative, with each founder contributing $1,000 in startup capital. The outlet quickly attracted a paying subscriber base and announced it had reached profitability by February 2024, roughly six months after launch — an unusual milestone for an independent journalism startup. The four co-founders hold equal ownership stakes and there are no outside investors, giving the outlet full editorial independence. In 2024, the Electronic Frontier Foundation recognized 404 Media with its Pioneer Award for public-interest technology journalism. Media-bias rating services including Media Bias/Fact Check and Ground News classify it as left-center to lean-left, citing its investigative focus on corporate and government surveillance, right-to-repair advocacy, and civil-liberties framing. Since January 2025, its coverage of the Trump administration has emphasized technology-policy rollbacks, immigration surveillance infrastructure, and government security failures, consistent with a critically oriented newsroom.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-09-23; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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