Case Study
MTK News
A volunteer STEM and technology publication — founded from zero in 2021, wound down on purpose in 2024. This is what happened in between.
- Role
- Founder & CEO
- Recruited, oversaw, managed
- Run
- 2021–2024
- Three years, end to end
- Team
- ~35 writers
- All volunteers, at peak
- Output
- 700+
- Published articles
The Story
Built from a blank page
MTK News started in 2021 the way every volunteer project starts: with nothing. No budget, no masthead to inherit, no institution behind it — just a name, an empty site, and the conviction that a team of volunteers could publish STEM and technology coverage worth reading.
Everything after that had to be built, not inherited. Writers had to be found and convinced to give their time away. An editorial process had to exist before there was much to edit. At its peak, the team reached roughly 35 volunteer writers, publishing steadily across science and technology beats.
My job was everything that wasn’t the byline: recruiting, onboarding, assigning, editing, scheduling, publishing. Setting a quality bar and holding it — keeping a team of volunteers moving in the same direction when no paycheck was doing the work of motivation.
Three years of that cadence added up to hundreds of published articles — and an operational education in how publications actually run: pipelines, standards, burnout, and recovery.
In 2024, I wound it down — deliberately, not by drift. Three years is a complete run for a volunteer publication, and my own work was pulling hard toward aerospace. MTK News ended the way it ran: on purpose.
The Work
What running it actually meant
Editorial operations
Every piece crossed one editing desk: mine. Pitch to draft to publish, on a schedule, with a quality bar that didn’t move just because a deadline did.
Leadership without leverage
Roughly 35 writers, zero paychecks. Alignment had to come from clarity, momentum, and respect — the most transferable management training there is.
Institution-building
Recruiting pipeline, style standards, publishing workflow — all stood up from scratch, and all kept running for three straight years.
The Run
Three years in three beats
-
2021
Launch
Founded MTK News as a volunteer STEM and technology publication — first writers recruited, first articles shipped.
-
2022–2023
Scale
The roster grew to roughly 35 volunteer writers and the archive grew to hundreds of articles, on a steady publishing cadence.
-
2024
Wind-down
Closed the publication after a full three-year run — deliberately, with the lessons banked.
MTK News wound down in 2024, but the site is preserved as an archive — three years of the team’s STEM and technology coverage, still readable.
What It Taught Me
The publication ended. The training didn’t.
Editing hundreds of other people’s drafts rewires how you write your own. Leading volunteers teaches you to create alignment without authority. And running a publication end to end — recruiting, cadence, quality control — is an operations education no classroom offers. All of it feeds directly into the aerospace reporting I do now.
See where it led