The Intercept Is Running Out of Cash
semafor.com
semafor.com
"The Intercept was awarded a grant of $3.25 million from Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. It had only received $500,000 when Bankman-Fried went bankrupt and the shortfall in funding "will leave The Intercept with a significant hole in its budget" according to its editor-in-chief." [1]
What was he hoping to achieve? It seems to me that he was hungry to buy into elite social circles, and they were willing to part with his cash to deliver that service.
Journalism is hard work and it doesn't pay much (unless you're a celebrity reporter like Greenwald) and subsequently people who pursue a career in journalism do so out of idealism. They see wrongs in the world and hope that by drawing attention to these wrongs society will improve. Partisanship in journalism isn't childishness. Journalists overwhelmingly believe that exposing the crimes and malfeasance of "the other" is the most important thing and writing about the failures of their own party is a distraction from that cause.
The substack model isn't a solution, either. Substack is fine for intelligent commentary but you can't pay for investigative journalism with a substack model. It just looks like real journalism just isn't profitable and I consider that a serious problem.
Why not? Some of the best investigative journalism I've read has been on Substack.
> Most news organizations have figured out that partisan coverage helps grow your audience while criticizing your own team results in cancellations ... Journalism is hard work and it doesn't pay much
That's probably true of e.g. the New York Times, but the Intercept isn't a great example. The history there is quite complicated. When they had Greenwald at the helm they were doing OK and got an audience. Once they booted him out and went fully partisan they lost most of their audience but the editors didn't care because they are/were funded by a billionaire.
Even then it was complex. Greenwald technically wasn't cancelled - he quit because his editors didn't want him to write stories attacking their side - and wrote about how Omidyar had successfully divorced his funding from his own political views here:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/pierre-omidyars-financing-o...
no matter how much my attacks escalated on his [Omidyar's] core beliefs and the other groups he was heavily funding — and escalate they did! — I never received any remote signal that my outspoken journalism and commentary were imperiling his ongoing funding of The Intercept.
[The Intercept] is a dream job for most of [the employees]: enormous salaries, endless expense accounts, a complete lack of job requirements, and no need even to attract an audience. For years, outside of three or four journalists, articles published by The Intercept produce almost no traffic. With rare exception, nobody reads the site. They have a massive budget to create highly produced videos and yet their videos almost never exceed even 10,000 views: most tiny, from-their-garage, zero-budget YouTubers attract larger audiences. And nobody cares, because the money flows in from Omidyar no matter what.
See for example "These Journalists Spent Two Years and $750,000 Covering One Story": https://archive.ph/L7PA2
Newspapers also have to churn out content or else their subs will cancel. That's inherent to any form of recurring subscription journalism.
Do you have examples of important stories broken on Substack?
Greenwald has broken a few huge stories in his life, but in general he's not an investigative journalist. Rather, he's a political commentator, and that's what he does on Substack. In fact neither Greenwald nor Laura Poitras was an investigative journalist; that's not why Edward Snowden selected them.
This type of (mis)characterization is really tiresome and you see it all the time in new media.
It seems pretty clear from my perspective that the Snowden papers were a high watermark of Greenwald's career. Everything else since then has been a cash-in on selling to the populist anti-establishment grift, regardless of fact. I wouldn't say Greenwald himself is "right-wing", but that end of the aisle is objectively more favorable to his beat.
This is true. We're long past the days when the left was the anti-establishment voice.
It's a judgement that you can disagree with but as a characterization it does fit the facts.
That makes him an agent of Russia using the same logic that decades ago said opposition to invading Iraq made you a terrorist sympathizer.
Maybe, maybe not. But things are certainly going to be very interesting over the next decades. Buckle up.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI ["Googlezon", 10m]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner#Release_of_cl...
And apparently these are a "worst-case scenario."
The Tara Reade story had so many rocky foundations, so much so that mainstream publications were hesitant on breaking it, but The Intercept decided to move ahead anyway because their angle is "leftist anti-Democratic establishment" and the story would hurt Biden. That story completely collapsed and Tara Reade is now a Russia Today Putin stooge.
The other was a story commented on by Crooked Timber[1]. If you read the article itself[2], it's even written poorly and disjointed. Add that with a pretty horrendous quote-butcher that CT mentions and it's clearly just a hack piece.
1. https://crookedtimber.org/2023/06/08/disinformation-and-the-...
2. https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
there will be a man who
will have a theory of sculpture and he will
relate things that other people will for example
im giving a parallel example that is im
not leading into greater depth here what im
assuming is that a man publishes an
announcement in some accessible place saying
that he will pay a reward for the capture of
this notoriously nondangerous criminal who is
among the twenty most or least wanted men
by the united states government the name of the
man who published this is douglas huebler
and he offered a reward of a thousand dollars
for the capture of this notoriously nondangerous
man who the police also wanted and he
was going to pay a reward for the capture on the
basis of selling the documentation that is to
say he was going to sell the documentation
involving the apprehension of the criminal and his
offer to pay the thousand dollars and when
he did this he set a kind of diminishing reward
if the capture was effective within so
many days a thousand dollars was paid if not
it was reduced gradually over a period of about
a year i believe and the thing was worked
out very carefully because as the time elapsed
between the offer and the capture the price of
the art work i believe was being reduced to
keep it equivalent so that the whole thing" "
Edit: source: https://www.artforum.com/features/talking-at-pomona-213137/