Our aim is true.

Journalism is a public trust

The Brick House Cooperative is a publishing platform designed, owned and operated by journalists—ad-free, expandable and subscription-based. Our founding editors have many decades of experience between them, and bylines in every major U.S. publication. The platform launched in December 2020 and has been covered by The New York Times as well as Business Insider, Coindesk, Current Affairs, Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg, Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic blog, and the Columbia Journalism Review.

One subscription fee gives readers access to all nine of our member publications, each of which operates independently under the cooperative umbrella. Shares in the cooperative are equal and cannot be sold or transferred, with one share allocated to each publication. No publication can own more than one share. This novel business structure keeps editorial control in the hands of working journalists, allowing us to serve no one but our readers.

Our goal is to expand The Brick House into a great realm with more and more publishers, writers, artists and editors, all working together to safeguard our editorial independence, and all sharing the costs and proceeds of our work. We believe that a community of journalists whose primary responsibility is to the public trust, and to each other, will be stronger in every way—better at producing stories that matter, better in business, better for journalists and readers. Our cooperative is working not only to provide a stable livelihood for our members, but to redefine the role of media in society as a public good.

Please subscribe to help us build a future for independent media; sign up for our weekly newsletter; follow us on Twitter and Instagram; or email us at hello@thebrick.house.

Accounts and Payment Info

Brick House subscribers can always access their accounts and control their payment on their own. Click the “button” that appears in the lower-right hand corner of our webpages to login to your account, then click “manage subscription” in the menu to do things like cancel a subscription, change the amount, or change the credit / debit card associated. Contact us with questions, we’re happy to help and to hop on the phone: hello@thebrick.house.

The Brick House Founding Editors

Maria Bustillos (Popula) is a journalist and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, the Times Literary Supplement, ESPN, Bloomberg, VICE, Gawker, The Awl, and elsewhere. She writes the public editor column for MSNBC at the Columbia Journalism Review.

Christina M. Greer (FAQ NYC) is an associate professor of Political Science and American Studies at Fordham University (Lincoln Center Campus), and the author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press, 2013). She’s also the politics editor at The Grio, a columnist for The Amsterdam News and a political commentator on MSNBC and NY1.

Myriam Gurba (Tasteful Rude) is a writer and artist. She is the author of the true-crime memoir Mean, a New York Times editors’ choice, ranked by O, the Oprah Magazine as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Paris Review, time.com, and 4Columns. She has shown art in galleries, museums, and community centers.

Brian Hioe (No Man is an Island) is a founding editor of New Bloom, an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific, founded in Taiwan in 2014 in the wake of the Sunflower Movement. He is a translator and journalist writing on social movements and politics.

Mike Kanin (Preachy) is the publisher of the Texas Observer. He is the founding publisher of nonprofit local daily the Austin Monitor. His work has appeared in the Washington City Paper, the Washington Post’s Express, the Boston Herald, Boston’s Weekly Dig, the Austin Chronicle, and the Texas Observer. He’s also served as the Washington City Paper’s City Lights Editor and as the co-founding editor of Unfit Times.

Jason Adam Katzenstein (AWRY) is a cartoonist and comedy writer for the New Yorker and Current Affairs. He is the illustrator of the graphic novel series Camp Midnight for Image Comics and the writer and illustrator of the autobiographical graphic novel Everything is an Emergency for HarperCollins.

Alex Brook Lynn (FAQ NYC) is a filmmaker and journalist living on the isle of Manhatta. She has written and produced video content for the Daily Beast, the New York Daily News, the New York Press, and Vice.

Joe MacLeod (Hmm Weekly) is a once and future gameshow contestant, creative director of Hmm Weekly, and former creative director of the Baltimore City Paper.

David Moore (The Sludge Report) is a co-founder of Sludge, an investigative newsroom on systemic corruption, and director of the Participatory Politics Foundation, a nonprofit organization building open-source technology for civic engagement.

Tom Scocca (Hmm Weekly) is the politics editor at Slate. He is a former editor of Gawker and Deadspin, and began his career at Baltimore City Paper and the New York Observer. He is the author of Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future.

Donald Shaw (The Sludge Report) is an investigative journalist who focuses on special interests’ efforts to influence politicians and shape public policy. He analyzed campaign contributions at MapLight and was the editor of OpenCongress.

Harry Siegel (FAQ NYC) is the senior editor for opinion at the Daily Beast. He writes a weekly column for the New York Daily News, is a visiting fellow at the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at NYU Silver School of Social Work, and teaches at the New School’s Journalism + Design program. His long career in journalism includes stints at the New York Sun, the New York Press, the Village Voice, and Politico. He is co-author (with his father Fred Siegel) of The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life.

Sunny Sone (Preachy) is a writer and editor living in Austin, Texas. Sunny has worked as an archivist, a bookseller, and a city reporter, and is presently digital editor of the Texas Observer and co-founding editor of Preachy. Sunny writes to spread tenderness.

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (Olongo Africa) is a Nigerian writer and linguist, a Chevening Research Fellow at the British Library, and the author of the poetry collection Edwardsville by Heart.

The Brick House Advisory Council

Emily Bell is founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and is a leading thinker, commentator, and strategist on digital journalism.

Paul Ford is a writer, product strategist, educator, programmer, and founder and CEO of Postlight. He writes about technology for publications like New York Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, and Print. He was an editor for Harper’s Magazine for many years. In 2016, he won the National Magazine Award for writing an entire issue of Bloomberg Businessweek consisting of the essay, “What Is Code?”

Anna Holmes is the founder of Jezebel and an award-winning writer, editor, and creative exec whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and The New Yorker online.

Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporter for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere.

Kyle Pope is the editor-in-chief and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review. He has worked as an editor at Condé Nast, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Observer, and in 2017 testified before Congress about threats to the press.

Gabriel Snyder is a writer and editor, the former editor-in-chief of Gawker and the New Republic, and is currently the New York Times public editor for the Columbia Journalism Review.

The Brick House Cooperative is a coalition partner of Library Futures, a nonprofit organization that champions the right to equitable access to knowledge. We believe in the imperative for libraries to lend, preserve, and acquire knowledge in the service of the public good.