The Intercept cuts back
cjr.org
cjr.org
It was the in depth journalism that he originally did that made Snowden contact him. Not the current 75 tweets a day on everything under the sun.
Ideally journalists need to get off Twitter. It's a waste of their time. Especially the pointless fact checking of bullshit. I'd rather see and PAY for one Spotlight story a year than 24x7x365 days of tweeting.
GG has no doubt upset a lot of powerful people who want to see him fall professionally (or even worse). It's not surprising that he has his hands full on twitter fending off attacks. I don't think GG or his staff are only on Twitter in order to find scoops and topics for regurgitation (or that twitter is automatically a problem affecting the magazines output).
The Drone Papers[1] released in 2015 by Jeremy Scahill were an outstanding piece of writing.
In 2016 they revealed[2] that a AT&T site in NYC hosts a secret NSA surveillance site
It is probably hard to create such hits on a regular basis especially when their new content will always be judged on their previous (first) successes
I don't see the quality of their reporting being reduced though, but fwiw they did expand into a more mainstream political sphere which isn't always about tech-conspiracies (NSA, Snowden, Drone-papers) and so they have to compete with other outlets that cover the same stuff. If they have become less edgy (more "blah") than they used to be maybe less funding will be good for them and they'll find their roots again.
[1] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/
[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-...
Also, for what it is worth, NSA is also pretty important in ensuring weapons proliferation and military equipment movements (which helps indicate possibly wars, covert actions or invasions) using measurements of various types to track nuclear, biological and other weapons. That is fairly essential for upholding and enforcing international laws and treaties.
Finally I'm also confused when people say "domestic" tracking. Basically the NSA had databases they could look at if given legal authority to do so (meaning they think someone is a spy and show evidence of that) to see interactions between a person and other people (who they call, how often, where their phone is, etc). Apparently it seems now they just have to request or, like anyone else, buy that data from the telecoms instead of it being in house.
It's a good thing when long running rumors can be corroborated, so labeling this as non-info is somewhat unfair. News in Europe of cell towers listening-in on national parliaments discussion or phones being directly targeted, make scary headlines outside in Europe or anywhere outside US. This story drove home the same message to Americans: that it's not just something the NSA does overseas to "keep us save". The story also made sense since it continued the established narrative from previously published Snowden leaks in The Intercept.
> NSA is also pretty important in ensuring weapons proliferation and military equipment movements (which helps indicate possibly wars, covert actions or invasions) using measurements of various types to track nuclear, biological and other weapons
as a non US citizen, this deeply terrifies me (even without the current geo-policial climate).
edit: reduce waffle
Unfortunately, most of what is produced in Brazil is just the opinion of the journalist or, worse, his boss's. In fact, a local journalist once admitted the only thing he ever read was his own paper and nobody thought anything of it (Paulo Sant'Ana from Zero Hora). If you think about it, the big names in Brazil, like the recently deceased Boechat or Reinaldo Azevedo, spend all day in different medias. Where would they get the time to investigate anything?
https://thetyee.ca/Books/2014/05/30/No-Place-to-Hide/
> In my own exploration of the blogosphere over a decade ago, I soon ran across Glenn Greenwald. In some ways he seemed to break the rules of writing online: he wrote long blog posts composed of long sentences in long paragraphs. His blocks of text did not welcome, but I read them anyway. So did thousands of others.
> In the process of blogging, Greenwald helped form a community of interest, just as opposing communities formed to support Bush and his policies. In forming his community, Greenwald eventually drew the attention of a young man who’d been mostly hanging out in techie communities: Edward Snowden.
How many people in the US or Hungary want to read about everything that is wrong in the country? Isn't it much easier to believe that everything is great?
Anyway the intercept went from having interesting articles you can only read there to having run off the mill articles that you can read literally anywhere else. So you have no reason to read there. A hard hitting report about eric prince could be read only in the intercept. If you want to write hot takes about how terrible Trump or Bolsonaro is you compete with literally every other big outlet there is. And they lost.
Holy s&t!
Wow. So a bunch of senior US politicians have been telling lies to try and start a war in Venezuela and most of the US media has been parroting those lies without any checking or indeed re-enforcing the lies with their own lies, in CNN's case. The New York Times finally got off their backsides and called it. Wow. Yeah write that Glenn, tweet it too. And while you're at it shame the hell out of those people impersonating journalists who did that and have not retracted it as being entirely* false.
Wow.
Yeah so this is why people hate on Glenn. He's good and that's super inconvenient for the corrupt. He's actually really good. I wish there was someone less leftist as good as he is. I really do. But yeah, read Glenn, disagree with him by all means, I do, often. But read, he has something to say about things you should probably know and be thinking about.
Primarily designed with OSINT in mind but covers tweet frequency, among other functions:
- Average tweet activity, by hour and by day of the week
- Timezone and language set for the Twitter interface
- Sources used (mobile application, web browser, ...)
- Geolocations
- Most used hashtags, most retweeted users and most mentioned users
- Friends analysis based on most frequent timezones/languages
But it looks like it wants to stay that course, with
"said it could no longer afford its research team, and was eliminating those jobs as part of a 4 percent cut in its workforce."
+100 for
"I'd rather see and PAY for one Spotlight story a year than 24x7x365 days of tweeting"
They have also been accused of having revealed identities by a couple of other NSA whistleblowers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept#Exposure_and_a...
For comparison, Fox News was run at a massive loss for its first decade. Most of the other right leaning orgs have patrons.
One needs stomach, fortitude, deep resources, and business acumen to build a self-sustaining media presence from the ground up.
Alternately, use the seed capital to start an endowment, keep the effort modest.
What Snowden seems to have inadvertently revealed is a culture that is a lot more interested in posturing around these issues than the issues themselves. And its those breaking the illusion be it Snowden, Manning or Assange who will face the music while civil society looks the other way.
No one has been held accountable for these illegal programs. The then head of NSA James Clapper brazenly lied to Congress and has still not being held accountable. [7]. On the contrary there is a grand jury out to get Assange, Manning is back in jail and Snowden is being hounded and in exile. No good deed goes unpunished.
China had nothing to do with the Snowden leaks or any of these secret mass surveillance programs as you will discover. Happy reading!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairview_(surveillance_program...
[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundless_Informant
[6] https://theintercept.com/search/?s=snowden
[7] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/19/republicans-co...
That said, one main difference might be ProPublica having more a general plan for self-sufficiency through philanthropy. The Sandler Foundation promised $10M for the first 3 years, and to provide support afterwards -- their share would shrink as contributions from other donors came in (don't remember if there was a solid plan if PP failed to attract significant donors after the first 3 years). PP's early investigations [1] were relatively niche topics (at least at the time, and most certainly compared to anything Trump-related today). But the drive to have "impact" -- awards, collaboration with other news orgs, spurring legislative action -- was ostensibly attractive to philanthropic foundations looking to donate. It's worth noting that PP has for awhile dedicated fundraising staff -- $1M in fundraising expenses according to its 2017 990; I don't see First Look listing any fundraising expenses in its 990s so I don't know if they'll start going that route or plan to find revenue from other sources.
0: https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-10th-anniversa...
1: https://propublica.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/about/PP_2010_ann...
In any case, that definition is too Orwellian. That is, today's entertainment should not be passed off as journalism; by definition it is not (journalism).
Not to sound harsh, but that's the equivalent of calling op-ed news; Taco Bell fine dining; or an elected official leadership. We can't allow the wrong words to be used (and the right ones abused) and expect to get the downstream discussions right.
(edit, kinda off topic but related to calling op-eds news)
Gannett allows their advertisers to run light promotional articles as op-eds. It's disgusting, ads made to look like a true opinion piece.
Read your local Gannett site, look at the local paper's op-ed. Look for articles ghost written by Physicians, CEOs, lawyers that talk about community. No notice aside from a brief mention of the employer of the person in the Story Highlights.
Investigative journalism is in sharp decline. It really has all but disappeared to most people.
His output is “look at all these villains in technology, and cheer on all these heroes who are coming to kick their asses,” exactly in line with his stated mission.
Look, organizing and agitating against the tech community is valid work, but it’s distinct from journalism. For that I look to EFF, which has clearly disclosed set of principles to be activist about, and goes after anyone and everyone in defense of those principles. Often tech companies, but also everyone else.
Not the same thing as choosing an enemy, looking for anything and everything you can use against it, and calling it journalism.
Better to criticize the publishers who encourage that behaviour, and perhaps exploit the writer's flaws for the traffic and drama it generates.
Ideologically motivated writing targeted at the things I care about is fine, from a columnist who is part of an interesting stable of columnists. I don’t need NYT to fire Douthat. But they have the good sense not to make him an LGBT issues reporter.
I prefer the journalism that is more citizen journalism, a guy with a Wordpress blog and time to spend in front of a keyboard with maybe 50 people paying $2 a month on Patreon.
The joke of content is the price of it, how much does it cost to keep the lights on really? Does it have to cost thousands for an article? I can understand this if you are writing a research paper on difficult science, but working out what happens in the world for real, can that only be done by people paid telephone number salaries?
Depends. Would you like original reporting based on reporters actually going somewhere and investigating, and not just reviewing documents in the evenings? Would you like them to have health insurance and a retirement plan?
Should the publication be edited and fact-checked? Should their website be capable of supporting more immersive style than simple blog posts: videos, visualizations, timelines, graphs? Should they host independently or remain at the mercy of censors at YouTube?
Would it only cover one city? One country? A big one like the US or an organization like the EU? The whole world?
The cost can easily range from $20 a month to $20 million a month.
> how much does it cost to keep the lights on really?
Well... probably more than $100 a month.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/an-extremely-expensive-cove...