There’s an icy fatalism that runs through the veins of most modern journalists. Everyone knows that no matter how rewarding a regular gig might seem, it could all go away tomorrow. The outlet might get sold, the Slack might shut down and the doors will get locked just in time for people coming in on Monday morning to wonder what happened.
It’s happening everywhere on the internet but it’s been particularily brutal in the realm of games journalism as of late. Dicebreaker shut down over the Memorial Day weekend. Kotaku Australia laid off several staff members over the Fourth of July weekend.
It’s only a matter of time before the owners of these outlets decide that maintaining the servers is an easy expense to eliminate. Thousands of hours and millions of words will disappear in a flash, pushing back on the idea that the internet is forever. Even in the online media wreckage, however, sprouts of green are trying to push their way through the irradiated dirt.
“I was laid off,” said Lin Codega, co-founder of Rascal News. “Which is a story that literally everyone has who’s ever worked in media. Everyone has been impacted by media layoffs because it’s just kind of a rite of passage. As soon as I was laid off, I saw the writing on the wall. I saw the dominos falling and honestly, I’m not special. Everyone else saw it happening. I was like okay, this industry is not going to get any better. What I like to write about is so ferociously niche. I’m not going to get a job writing about this anywhere. It’s just not going to happen.”
Codega had been covering tabletop games for Gizmodo and had a banner year as a journalist in 2023. They broke the story of Wizards of the Coast attempting to alter the OGL, stories of dysfunction at Wyrmwood Gaming Tables and Hasbro’s use of Pinkertons to protect leaks about Magic: The Gathering products. These stories changed the industry in several ways, racked up thousands of views and got them nominated for the Diana Jones Award given out every year at Gen Con for the most influential thing going on in tabletop games.
None of that mattered when word of layoffs at Gizmodo came in November of 2023.
“There’s really great journalists out there,” said Codega. “Really great writers out there and a really great audience that’s just really hungry for this. Someone put it to me, like ‘well why don’t you start your own outlet?’ What if? What if I just did that?”
So began Rascal News, a worker-owned, reader-supported independent news site covering tabletop games. Inspired by other sites like Defector and Hell Gate that formed under similar circumstances, Rascal runs with a small team delivering the same insights about the industry without the weight of investors and click based performance weighing eveything down. Codega immediately knew who they wanted to bring into this endeavor as co-founders.
“I pretty quickly brought on Rowan Zeoli,” said Codega. “She’s great. She does a lot of interviews with people in the actual play space. That, I feel, is an underreported facet of tabletop roleplaying games. It gets a lot of attention but it doesn’t get a lot of critique. In order to make any type of tabletop role playing game outlet interesting and viable for the audience that exists now, it had to have a strong actual play component. […]And then we got to Chase [Carter]. He was like ‘I can’t really sign on because I like having healthcare’ which was valid. But Dicebreaker was getting sold off. I just want to see if [he] was interested in trying to build something. Luckily he was.”
Throughout July 2024, Rascal News is running a pledge drive to get more readers to support their mission. The drive also includes opening up their site to outside reporters to pitch article ideas. The current state of writing on the internet might be scary but maybe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel?
“We re going to take our time with the stories that matter,” said Codega. “We are going to tell them as well as we can. Possibly in a way that no other publication will publish.”
