Fund the future of media

Elle Griffin
Jan 11, 2025
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The Elysian is a collective media ecosystem imagining a better future.

Our audience

  • 150,000+ monthly views // 20,000+ subscribers including:

    • Progress thinkers at Schmidt Futures, Progress Institute, Roots of Progress, Abundance Institute, Progress Ireland

    • Employees at OpenAI, Disney, Y Combinator, Substack, Spotify, Audible, Wattpad

    • VC investors Album VC, Kickstart Fund, Urbanist VC

    • Intellectuals like Matthew Yglesias, Judd Legum, Brad DeLong, Bill Bishop, Michael Moore

    • Professors and students at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, NYU

    • Editors at The Information, The New Atlantis, Every, Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Hearst

Our media projects

Through solutions-oriented and speculative journalism we’re thinking through the most important ideas of our time. Here are some of our upcoming projects:

  • CITY STATE // A print magazine about autonomous government

    • Featuring Tomas Pueyo, Étienne Fortier-Dubois, Elle Griffin

  • TERRAFORM // A print magazine about terraforming the earth

    • Featuring Tomas Pueyo, Étienne Fortier-Dubois, Elle Griffin

  • FUTURE CAPITALISM // A print book detailing innovative business structures

    • Featuring Google, Mondragon, Unimed, Haier, and Starbucks

  • THE NEW REPUBLIC // 10 modern thinkers recreate Plato’s republic, imagining the ideal city-state for a podcast, vinyl album, and print book

    • Featuring Parag Khanna, Jason Crawford, Rutger Bregman

  • THE DAILY HUMANIST // A philosophy book prompting modern readers to make the world a better place through human effort

Fund the future of media

We are currently raising $300,000 to fund our 2025 budget.

Sponsor The Elysian and be part of what we are creating:

  • Write the foreword to our books

  • Print your name in our books

  • Collaborate with us on a themed issue in your sphere

  • Custom bookmark included with our books

  • Your name in our online essay series

  • Host our annual event

Your contribution will directly fund editorial operations including writers, graphic design and illustration, printing, and shipping. More importantly, you’ll be funding a better media system. A collective of artists imagining a better future.

  • Sponsor one year of the Elysian (exclusive) // $300,000

  • Sponsor one year of the Elysian // $100,000

  • Sponsor one project // $25,000

  • Custom inquiry (let’s brainstorm!)

Email elle@elysian.press for more information.

We’re building a cooperative media ecosystem

Every project we publish is owned by the writers, podcasters, and filmmakers who write, podcast, and film them.

  • Two writers could host a six-part techno-futurism podcast together and share the earnings

  • Three filmmakers could launch an animated solarpunk film series and split the profits

  • Five writers could collaborate on a magazine or book about Cooperatism, Terraforming, or City States and share the earnings

  • 20 writers could host an annual worldbuilding event and split the earnings

Most projects have a creative director or team who earns the bulk of profits, but they could also have any number of collaborators and be organized according to any financial split.

Imagine an animation team decides to create a five-part solarpunk short film collection and sell it for $50, but they don’t have a large marketing reach with only 5,000 newsletter subscribers between them. As 5% to 10% of an email audience generally converts to paying customers, they might expect 250 to 500 sales and earn $12,500 to $25,000 through their efforts alone. But if they collaborate with, say 50 other writers/podcasters/video producers in their niche who have a combined reach of 50,000, they could boost the project to another 2,500 to 5,000 sales, earning the project an additional $125,000 to $250,000.

Now imagine the creative team also needs funding to make these films a reality. They might bring in another partner who contributes $100,000 in startup capital in exchange for their name in the credits, the ability to host and introduce the film at the film premiere, and 15% of the profits. The creative team could decide upfront to keep 50% of the profits for themselves (split between creators), give 25% to investors, and the other 25% to promoters. If the project earns $250,000, the creative team would earn $125,000 instead of the $25,000 they would have earned alone, with the other $125,000 split between contributors.

We want to fund projects that better the future

Eventually, we hope to fund even larger projects up front—like protopian video games, sci-fi films, and architectural projects. If we sell hundreds of magazines, books, podcasts, videos, conferences, and events over the next 10 years, we could cumulatively sell hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in media projects. If the Collective earns a share of every sale, it could create a fund that invests in longer-term projects with the expectation that the Collective would earn a percent of the earnings when it’s done and continue to invest in other projects from there.

For more on this idea, read my essays: What if we fund artists the way we fund startups? or I’d rather have an investor than a publishing contract.

About Elle Griffin

I am the founder and editor for The Elysian. For my work in human progress, I was named a Roots of Progress fellow and Substack fellow. My newsletter has been featured by The New York Times, BBC, Business Insider, Fast Company, The Information, Publisher’s Weekly, Means of Creation, and Morning Brew.

I want to see our media ecosystem transformed from doomer sensationalism, partisan journalism, and dystopian thought, to solutions-oriented journalism, speculative brainstorming, and generative thought about how we can create something better. I’d love to see that media ecosystem owned and operated by independent writers and podcasters and filmmakers rather than media moguls with an agenda, an algorithm, and an ad-captured sensationalist bent.

I’m even optimistic enough to believe that by changing our media ecosystem, we could change our outlook on the world. And be inspired to create a better one.

I hope you’ll join us.

“Journalism meets sci-fi.” —Chris Best, CEO Substack

“Elle’s reinterpreting how our civilization is structured from the bottom up and the inside out—I love it, It’s a fantastic project.” —Parag Khanna, author of Move, The Future is Asian

“Elle is doing some of the most important work right now—imagining the future of how we live as technology changes rapidly and distrust continues to grow in legacy systems of power.” —Katie O’Connell, OpenAI