New York Review of Architecture is a worker cooperative.

On May 1, 2019, our first issue included an editorial announcing we would become a cooperative. At the time, the publication did not even have a bank account, much less bylaws. Since then, we have changed our format, design, and personnel. Nevertheless, this year we enter the second half of our first decade as a freshly minted member of the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives.

It was not easy. The cooperative movement took shape in the nineteenth century as an application of universal suffrage to economics. In the same way that within a democratic nation each citizen should have one vote, regardless of background or property, the advocates of cooperatization argued that within a business each stakeholder should have one vote, regardless of their role or level of investment.

That premise might sound simple, but it presents a lot of questions. Who are the stakeholders, and who is in charge? Which decisions go to a vote? How does the cooperative raise capital? How do new members join, and how do they leave?

In December of 2019, we found a Minnesota lawyer specializing in cooperatives who incorporated our company in such a way that it could convert into a cooperative. We found someone from the New York Network of Worker Cooperatives who walked us through the questions we needed to answer and taught us that there are in fact three kinds of cooperatives: consumer, producer, and worker. The first two types are well established in the United States. Examples of consumer cooperatives include REI and the Park Slope Food Coop. Major producer cooperatives include Ace Hardware (owned by its store owners), Land O’Lakes (owned by dairy farms), and the Associated Press (owned by newspapers and broadcasters). By contrast, there are few US worker cooperatives (as of 2021 only 612, with a combined revenue of $283 million); none of them are household names; and in 2019, there were no examples of media worker cooperatives we could find.

We got stuck. In the meantime, we were producing a publication, so we tabled the cooperative dream. Then, in the summer of 2020, we caught a break: The entire staff of the sports blog Deadspin quit and established a new publication, Defector Media, structuring it as a media worker cooperative. They took it upon themselves to show their work, publicly sharing their bylaws and publishing annual reports. Soon, a small cohort of other media worker cooperatives sprang up, including the New York news outlet Hellgate. We had a model and proof of concept.

Still, the model could not be applied one-to-one. Unlike Defector, where every full-time employee is a worker member, NYRA has no full-time employees. And Unlike Defector, which has had enough subscription revenue to cover its costs from its first day of operation, NYRA does not.

To address our operating deficit, in November of 2022 the Architectural League became our fiscal sponsor, allowing us to apply for grants and receive tax deductible donations from sponsors. Then, in December of 2022, we enlisted the Cooperative Development Institute to help us draft a set of bylaws that would answer the part-time employee question. Last September, Samuel Medina, Marianela D’Aprile, and I implemented those bylaws, turning the publication into a worker cooperative. Here is how it works: After a six-month waiting period, all W-2 employees (regardless of their individual, total worked hours) become eligible for membership in the worker cooperative. Those members each exercise one vote on fundamental questions, such as the election of board directors and the firing or hiring of the publisher and the editor, and they also receive all the relevant information, including financial reports, they need to make such decisions.

Worker members do not vote on everything. The two co-op managers, the editor and the publisher—that is, Medina and myself—have the latitude necessary to run our respective departments. We just know that we ultimately answer to our employees—they can, after all, fire us—and therefore have a strong incentive to share information, solicit input, and build buy-in.

Why did we go through the trouble? Well, worker cooperatives statistically have all sorts of practical advantages: lower turnover, higher productivity, and better survival rates. There are ethical grounds, too: In the world’s largest worker cooperative, Mondragon, the ratio between the highest- and lowest-paid workers is 9:1. According to the AFL-CIO, in corporate America the average ratio across the S&P 500 is 272:1.

Then there is the ideological point. In American business, capital holds nearly all the cards. Capital elects the boards; capital drafts the budgets; capital sets the strategy; and capital owns the profits. In the cooperative model, labor elects our board; labor drafts our budget; labor sets our strategy; and labor will—when we eventually realize them—own our profits.

Of course, the other reason it has taken us so long to sort all of this out remains the same as ever: through it all, we have been hard at work delivering a great magazine to an ever-larger public. We do not expect that public to read because of the jargon in our bylaws, but because of the prose in our issues. But if reading a magazine where the people making it also control it closes the deal for you, do not take our survival for granted: Become a sponsor or, at the very least, consider starting a subscription.