Alicia Kennedy

been the downfall of journalistic rigor and civic engagement, but that nobody’s earned enough money to make the effort worthwhile: “Those guys are picking up nickels in front of steamrollers.” The logical move, Abeyta said, if one is interested in media, is to “own” an audience, feeding them material they like to read along with stuff they want to buy. That is his way, and what became the basis of Project M.

hen Abeyta set his eyes on Revolver, in 2016, he sent an out-of-the-blue LinkedIn message to Brandon Geist, who had worked at Revolver for ten years and was now the editorial director of Rolling Stone’s website. Geist had been gone from Revolver only two years, and he wasn’t dying to return to what he called the “small and very complicated pond” of metal. Besides, Revolver was trending toward oblivion; at one point when Geist was in charge, his online budget was zero dollars. In meetings, he’d have to justify himself to the owners by explaining Slayer’s importance. But Geist was exhausted from the pace at Rolling Stone and told Abeyta that he’d be willing to talk. They got together near Geist’s office, in Midtown Manhattan. Abeyta showed up sweating in spandex; he’d biked there. “Initially, I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ ” Geist said.

Abeyta detailed his vision for Revolver and Project M. “You could tell there was a lot of exciting energy coming off him,” Geist recalled. To conclude, Abeyta opened his laptop: “He showed me a spreadsheet of every concert he’s been to in his whole life, meticulously laid out. All these details were noted, and he told me his various rules about what counts as a show. It was really kind of amazing. It spoke to his personality, but also to his fandom.” After Abeyta bought Revolver, he tattooed the magazine’s logo, a single R, on his hand.

Geist was impressed by Abeyta’s devotion to heavy metal, but it’s also true that Abeyta is, more broadly, a fan of fandom. That’s the lens through which he regards media, as an array of outlets serving their fan bases; Revolver is to metalheads what Fox News is to Republicans. Abeyta is not a moralist and claims that he isn’t political; he only wants to cultivate a community of active consumers, united by their interest. In his acquisitions, he is bundling publications with similar audiences, centralizing what had been decentralized.

It took him some time to work out the particulars. For the first two years, Project M’s expenses were too high, and there was no money coming in. Abeyta and Edmund Sullivan,

VOICES OF THE PANDEMIC

What We’ve Learned

Food media has a good lesson to learn from the pandemic. Our food systems are kept afloat by unsustainably low wages, by undocumented workers, by food that is not ecologically sound.

You have to dig deeper into the political and economic forces that control how food gets to a plate.

—Alicia Kennedy

Freelance food journalist

the chief financial officer, kept writing checks to stay afloat. During that period, Abeyta was also consumed with personal hardship: members of his family died at a rapid clip—his mom, his dad, his grandma. He packed up his apartment in New York and moved to Cave Creek.

Then Abeyta sought out Inked, which was thematically close to Revolver but came with robust merchandising capabilities. (You can decorate an entire house with stuff you’ve obtained on Inked’s website, like Day of the Dead–patterned plates, mystical shower curtains, and vampire-cat fleece blankets.) “We just didn’t have SKU numbers,” Sullivan said. “We didn’t have T-shirt manufacturers. And we didn’t have the audience to sell into.” After the deal closed, Abeyta estimated, 80 to 90 percent of Project M’s revenue started to come from e-commerce. With Revolver, Inked, and now The Hard Times, Abeyta is building a network in which each site’s products appear on the others’—one big store. “We haven’t quite optimized that yet,” he said. “We’re crushing it so much in merchandise.”

As an extra incentive to keep the business up, Project M offers its senior employees, including Geist and Saincome, partial ownership. “All my employees understand what our monetization is,” Abeyta told me. “I will also go, ‘Here are five stories: this is how much this will make us, and this is how much this will make us.’ Just so they know.” It’s the kind of conversation that typically signals disaster—a collapse of the wall between business and editorial. Producing coverage to maximize profit is just too tempting. When I spoke with Geist and Saincome, however, they didn’t seem all that concerned. Abeyta was hands-off, Saincome said; his involvement in The Hard Times was limited to stuff like suggesting which headlines could make for good T-shirt slogans. Geist’s tone suggested a sense of resignation. “I’ve always been told that I’m a very branded-content- and marketing-friendly editor,” he said. “There are some editors who draw very sharp lines, but I’m not like that.”

At the Horny Toad, Abeyta asked me why journalism existed: “Is it a public good, or are newspapers actually moneymaking enterprises?” He already had his answer. “The reality is, they are moneymaking enterprises. I’m not making a moral judgment on that. I’m not saying that’s the way society should or should not be. I have zero commentary on that. But it is a factual statement.” His professed lack of a moral stance was, nevertheless, a moral stance; he remains, first and foremost, a finance guy. (He even moonlights for Tilson, blasting out a newsletter on investing strategies to thousands of subscribers; recently he and Saincome unveiled a vertical, “Hard Money,” that’s a satire of day traders investing with internet platforms like Robinhood.) Abeyta has no desire to expose truth to power; he avoids negative or salacious coverage. By design, the outlets he has acquired are soft news, lifestyle, humor. Revolver features band interviews, vinyl spotlights, video premieres; Inked includes Q&As with celebrities about their tattoos, updates on the goings-on of viral tattooed TikTok-ers, and an “Inked Girl of the Week.” Geist told me, “We had a mission statement on the content side from the very beginning. One of those was to be very positive and community-building.”

Muckraking it’s not. Then again, there’s something appealing about the way Project M’s strategy has fostered loyalty. The metalheads want what they want; somebody’s got to cover it for them. I wondered if some version of that approach might be replicated elsewhere in media, and called Penny Abernathy, an expert in news deserts and the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina. “It’s much more difficult to create a sustainable business model for general news,” she said. “The print advertising model has clearly collapsed, and a digital model hasn’t come to be.” Still, she was interested in what local newspapers might be able to borrow from Abeyta—how he develops a sense of community and cultivates a variety of revenue streams. The few instances of success in local news, she said, typically feature a creative and disciplined leader who has strong ties to the audience being served.

The unlikely virtue of Abeyta may be his level of commitment. Hedge funds are predatory because their only goal is turning a quick profit; Project M, it appears, has sincere longhaul ambitions. That’s enough for Saincome. “There’s something about owning these things,” he said. “The person who owns it, at the end of the day, really should have some skin in the game.” cjr