Rogue joins the worker-owned journalism crew

Several former Polygon staff have collected their efforts to launch a new, independent venture: Rogue.site. Co-founded by Alice Jovanée, Cass Marshall, Jeffrey Parkin, and Ryan Gilliam — with Clayton Ashley, Patrick Gill, and Toussaint Egan as founding collaborators — Rogue promises video game news, criticism, and guides that speak chiefly to the team's interests. There's even a Patlabor anime watch podcast borne from a (sigh) labored pun. Worker-owned and reader-supported, Rogue has eschewed both traditional advertising and coverage dictated by web search "best practices." In their own words:

All we’ve ever wanted to do is share our passion for all things nerdy with an audience that shares the same passions. Moreover, we don’t want those passions to be dictated by a search algorithm.

Video game journalism finds itself in dire straits these days, whole outlets fed into the LLM thresher by corporate owners while staff gets thrown out with the gristle. Few career opportunities remain, and professionals fight with new talent over insulting freelance rates. But some of us are cursed to enjoy blogging, and the lack of health insurance or pensions hasn't kept us from building our own homes. Rogue isn't the first outlet to carve a future with the tools of collective ownership; our friends at Aftermath and Defector cleared the trail for Rascal, and now we're doing the same for Rogue. We have nothing if we do not have each other.

You should read Rogue's mission, and then you should subscribe to their website. That's the long and short of it. I believe that independent media is one of the clearest paths forward out of the ethically poisoned, sucking morass of traditional journalism. Others may arise in the future — I pray they do — but for now, your best bet at securing news and criticism un-fucked by venture capital vampirism is throwing money directly at hardworking writers.

And Rogue is full of writers you should support. I know because they allowed me the privilege of assisting in its creation. If you'll allow me a brief pulpit, Polygon's pseudo-death hit hard. The writers under its masthead shaped how I think about journalism and media criticism — I would not be the writer I am today without reading their work. It only felt right, then, when Valnet and Vox Media laid off the majority of the team, that I reach out with an offer to assist in cobbling a future from the wreckage. To be clear, Rogue still happens without me. I truly believe that. But if the wisdom gleaned from founding Rascal and improving it over the last 18 months helped ease the team's labor pains, then I'll consider the scales partially evened.

Does that make Rogue our sibling site? Yeah, kind of! You might see familiar names cross the aisle from time to time, and we will no doubt help each other out in a collectivist fashion that I believe is vital to the continued existence of websites such as ours. Rogue is more than just "Rascal for video games," but there is much of our site's DNA in their principles. My hope is that we can grow together, learn from each other, and from such a relationship define our own paths. The best sibling rivalries are equal parts love and competition.

To be honest, it is simply good to see more independent websites in the world. Go support its growth; go support Rogue.