Diana Moskovitz

Diana Moskovitz is investigations editor and a co-owner at Defector Media, a subscription-based, employee-owned sports and culture website launched in September 2020. 

The Florida native spent seven-plus years building her reporting chops covering crime and breaking news at the Miami Herald. Her career then pivoted to sports: She worked at NFL Media before getting hired by the popular sports blog Deadspin.com.

After five years at Deadspin, Moskovitz decided it was time for a change. She gave her two weeks’ notice in October 2019. At that same time, in what Moskovitz calls “a weird coincidence,” the entire Deadspin staff quit in protest over what they said were new management orders to “stick to sports.” This turn of events led Moskovitz and her former colleagues to create Defector Media, which they like to bill as a new kind of sports website. 

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By Tiffany Corr

It was late October because I remember all of the Halloween decorations were up. I was talking to people saying, “Yes, the new management does think you’re just gonna roll over. That’s what they’re counting on.”

At any media company, you realize you are left to the whim of a random executive and the random stock market and shareholders. You can feel really powerless. You can do good journalism, yet it’s still, “Well, the revenue was this, the shareholders wanted that, and something’s gotta go and that’s you, kid.” At Deadspin, we had so little control over our fate, and our future was so divorced from the quality of our work. 

The private-equity people who bought Deadspin in April of 2019 vastly underestimated who worked there. The staff deeply believed in the Deadspin mission: Sports news without access, favor, or discretion. They would quit rather than see it violated. 

A lot of places have slogans or mottos, and you’re like, what does that mean? The part Deadspin got right, and what really changed sports journalism and maybe even had some ripple effects into the rest of journalism as well, is the part that asked, What if you don’t care about losing your press pass because you didn’t have one to lose to begin with?  

At any media company, you realize you are left to the whim of a random executive and the random stock market and shareholders. You can feel really powerless.

We famously had a lot of freedom there. But when Barry Petchesky, a Deadspin interim editor and one of the longest-serving employees, got fired for not sticking to sports, everyone quit.

The takeaway was, if we can’t be true to that, why bother? We could be dull and boring anywhere. 

I will say, no one was thinking, “We’re gonna quit and start our own thing.” No one was thinking that far ahead when they quit Deadspin. 

The Origins of Defector

After we left, people started reaching out to us saying they still wanted our writing to exist. They wanted the articles, the comments, and the podcast “Deadcast” all to come back. 

Then investors started reaching out to us. That was when people thought, “Oh, maybe we could do this!” We talked to the investors, and those talks got pretty serious, but it never came together.  

In those early conversations, the goal was really, “Can we build a website like Deadspin?” Could we do it in a way without being beholden to another private equity company or another guy or gal who just happened to be super duper rich? 

Could we do it on our own? What would it look like? Was it possible? 

Another thing that helped was the fact that we had previously all worked at a unionized newsroom. We had some experience thinking about the business side of it and thinking about how we got paid and what we deserved, because that’s part of union bargaining.

I remember when we were getting ready to launch Defector. We had nothing to show other than saying that we would launch a new site in early September, and will you give us your credit card? And thousands of people did! We started out with various annual subscription tiers: $79 for “Readers,” $119 for “Pals,” and a $1,000 tier called “Accomplice.” The vast majority of people subscribe at the Reader or Pal level. It’s scary to ask people to pay, but if you feel like this is a fair and reasonable price for your labor, don’t be afraid to ask. 

So many people took a blind leap of faith with us. I still feel overwhelmed when I think about the outpouring of support people gave us. Of course, it helped that we had this huge proof of concept. 

At the time, I thought it would be a cool part-time job. We’d get the band back together, I’d do some freelancing on the side, and put feelers out for other types of work. 

Honestly, our initial goal was, can we give ourselves health insurance? And then we’ll pay out some money too, people can freelance and make up the difference. That was the plan. 

We didn’t build Defector to sell it and get a big payday. We felt like we’ve got all the parts here, what if we just put this out into the universe and see how many people pay us? We’ll see what we get and we’ll figure it out.

It ended up becoming much more than that.

When Journalists Own Their Company

One of the most important things when founding this company was that if you work here, you get a vote. Every employee gets a piece of ownership and gets full voting rights on everything. 

We’re an employee-owned, subscription-based business. We have a “soft paywall,” so you get a few articles for free and different tiers for subscriptions. 

We also launched more podcasts; the biggest hit has been “Normal Gossip.” We’ve been working on how to monetize that with a similar setup. We had been doing live events and always wanted to do more, but then the whole global pandemic thing happened. So live events haven’t been as big a part of the business as we thought they would be.

We didn’t build Defector to sell it and get a big payday. We felt like we’ve got all the parts here, what if we just put this out into the universe and see how many people pay us?

You could see how this might go wrong. I mean, I’m the investigations editor. It’s literally my job to think about how things will go wrong.

I didn’t think Defector would fail. I definitely thought people were gonna read it. I didn’t think it was crazy. But I didn’t think we would get to the level we reached so quickly. I thought I was going to end up with a part-time job, honestly.

But now, for better or worse, if we fuck it up at Defector, that’s on us.

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