Fun that the org chart posted says "confidential" at the top. I'd like to see that org chart compared to other news organizations, or maybe compared to the structure The Intercept had in it's first decade. It seems still about two-thirds weighted towards journalists, especially without knowing how many freelancers they hire. Is it that crazy a structure? (I mean... you're gonna need HR, digital team, and yeah, with a company like that you will definitely need lawyers...)
The org chart for the Intercept doesn't look "top heavy", in fact it looks pretty well run. It's a news outlet that sometimes publishes controversial stories that are disliked by various governments, you're probably going to be happy there's a legal team backing you up and a tech team keeping the site up?
I'm more worried about the legal department not restricting themselves to legal opinions. On a newspaper, you'll want lawyers who are willing to field fights with powerful outside entities. If these lawyers are not open to the idea that some rich people are going to be inconvenienced by the reporting, they will not want to help the reporter finding robust ways of publishing dicey material.
The racket is that billionaire Bezos gives money to retired Admiral McRaven, who donates it to disabled veterans?
That is NOT a racket, and it can't be. If anything, the racket is how Bezos makes his money (Amazon, low taxes) not how he gives it away.
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.
I think that if society or societal standards are going to mean anything at all, it's that it's fair to expect, to demand even, that people make the necessary efforts to achieve information literacy.
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.
The article has a childish tone (comparing head chopping regimes to, er, wealthy people) but past all the bluster there may be some substance here - The intercept killed a story about Jeff Bezos donating 50M to a charity run by Admiral William McRaven. Sadly little detail about what this person would’ve given Bezos in return.
> 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 :-)
I personally find it really annoying that an individual deems it important to let a whole community know they have made an existantial choice to resign from their place of employment.
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.
Don't people publicly explain why they've resigned when they believe the knowledge will benefit the public?
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.
Because ultimately, journalists have followings, so they need to announce to 1. avoid confusing previous readership about your departure and 2. vent their spleen. The first is professionally courteous and smart, the latter is a tough call.
> an individual deems it important to let a whole community know they have made an existantial choice to resign from their place of employment.
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?
Because that's why we invented blogs? Blogs is short for web logs which were personal journals on the web. Sharing your personal story, including things like changing jobs, is totally reasonable activity for a web based journal, wouldn't you say?
Given what Glenn Greenwald has to say about The Intercept (who was the co-founder before leaving for similar reasons), and now this -- I think it's entirely appropriate and reasonable that this person wanted to sound the alarm that 'this organization is no longer what it used to be and should not be trusted.'
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 looks like he started regularly writing for The Intercept in January 2021, soon enough after Glenn Greenwald got kicked out for having the audacity to actually do investigative journalism and publicly sounded the alarm that The Intercept had been co-opted, that he would have known what he was getting into.
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.
Or it could be a signal that Greenwald cannot be trusted.
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.
