Why I'm Resigning from the Intercept
kenklippenstein.com
kenklippenstein.com
Sounds like The Intercept got neutered.
And the Washington Post should not depend on hand-outs from Bezos (the "missing" $100 mio). Can't he see that's the worst position for a newspaper to be in... for example from his own personal journey at The Intercept, or maybe by following what's happening to Twitter? A sustainable business model is better than being beholden to bread crumbs falling from the table.
Furthermore, the $50/$100 million split isn't explained well either.
I see a lof of mad fury here, but not good storytelling or a good choice of stories. I think the other parts of the article – Bill not given Slack access, a hold-up on the member list and the UN vote story – are much more relevant.
I wish the author best of luck, but I think he'll need it.
That's the same refrain I hear from tons of people, from Donald Trump and Biden to TurboTax to the HR department.
What I don't understand about journalists is why they think any of us believe they especially deserve anyone's trust.
Excellent question.
I guess the answer is simply mutatis mutandis: they appreciate that they don't have, but do need our trust and that uttering said refrain might achieve installing it :-)
It may be true that you hear similar refrains from different quarters, but, the best diagnosis I have heard of this is that it's a similarity in psychology without a similarly in underlying facts.
So broad brush despair against "the system" as a whole is, to me, not doing the homework of trying to differentiate. Sometimes those claims will be true, sometimes they won't, and the devil will be in the details. And we shouldn't regard any discussion to have truly begun until participants show an interest in doing the homework.
I would say the balance of emphasis at the Intercept has been pretty clearly on truth-to-power stories, and they clearly haven't prioritized customer lock-in or profitability to a similar degree. I might be right or wrong here, but meaningful conversations will, as ever, have to center on specific facts pertinent to their history rather than broad brush declarations of despair at the impossibility of knowing.
Who is really bothered?
Imagine if every person on the planet deemed it important to let the whole world know they just resigned from their jobs.
Thousands upon thousands of people resign every day.
I think I will set up a website:
Ihavejustresigned.com
Sadly I am sure that most problems that goes on never make it to any corner of the internet that is public.
To pretend like this announcement is like 'every person on the planet voiced their displeasure about something happening' is so incredibly disingenuous.
The Intercept started out with noble goals and intentions, that at least one of it's founders felt have gone so far astray he cut ties very publicly with the company he founded, and now we have another journalist there corroborating his take.
The organization that broke the Snowden Files, along with many other uncomfrotable stories (for those in power anyway) is now a husk of it's former self, and the author is basically telling you if you read closely 'I left because the organization has been coopted and now refuses to run stories that make certain powerful people uncomfortable', and you are hand waving it away as if it's the equivalent to some random twitter using complaining about their coffee this morning.
Glenn Greenwalds statements and actions around The Intercept should have been a wake up call that it cannot be trusted and has likely been co-opted by some Mockingbird-like program, and now we have further validation of the muzzles being put on staff there. If you can't see the forest from the trees here, I don't see how it can't be due to deliberately putting your head in the sand.
It could also be both.
I'm not here to take a position either way, but the existence of a conflict between former allies does not tell you which side of the conflict has changed.
Furthermore, he doesn't once mention Glenn Greenwald's ouster, which would be a very obvious topic of discussion given the context.
I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one. This is a naked career move, and he's using his side's lingo buzzword salad to appeal to his potential readers.
Personal blogs are literally made for this use case, public autobiography.
Eg, in this case:
"The Intercept has been taken over by suits who have abandoned its founding mission of fearless and adversarial journalism, and I can’t continue in an environment where fear of funders is more important than journalism itself."
Given it's often the case, your website would probably be quite a good source of topical news.
I hope someone does set it up.
Which individual did that to which community? Someone posted on their personal blog that they've changed jobs, and that exists on the internet for a different person to post it to hackernews. What exactly do you want to change here?