5 ms·

The Intercept Is Running Out of Cash

60 points by jbegley 3y ago

richrichie 3y ago
[flagged]
spacebacon 3y ago
Article Frequency is low. I understand they are a small team but the attention economy is eating them alive with distraction. I would either triple the monthly articles or create more interactive articles with more rich content to keep the readers engaged longer.
jeegsy 3y ago
> "Greenwald quit in fury to make quixotic allies on the right" This type of (mis)characterization is really tiresome and you see it all the time in new media.
- richrichie 3y ago
  Worse is how susceptible otherwise intelligent people are to propaganda. Depressing.
  - gengwyn 3y ago
    What's propagandistic about it? 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.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > 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.
    - richrichie 3y ago
      It is truly sad that the right wing speaks truth to power these days. I mean when the Bushes, Cheneys, Roves, Boltons are feted by the left these days, one will have to skip past these traditional pigeon-holing.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  What's incorrect about this? I guess you could quibble about what "quixotic" is supposed to communicate there, which is not completely clear to me. But he did leave, prominently, angrily. And he has forged new alliances with the right since then.
  - kelipso 3y ago
    Clearly mischaracterizes it as the primary reason for leaving as opposed to one of the things that happened after he left.
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
      I mean we don't know his motivations but in retrospect he did immediately make a bunch of friends on the right, and align his work with their goals and messaging. It's a judgement that you can disagree with but as a characterization it does fit the facts.
      - kelipso 3y ago
        Plenty of explanations fit the facts for any given set of facts. That's why politics is so fun.
impish9208 3y ago
Maybe they should establish a hedge fund arm a la Hunterbrook.
gizmo 3y ago
Most news organizations have figured out that partisan coverage helps grow your audience while criticizing your own team results in cancellations. That's a problem for Glenn Greenwald who has always focused his energy on criticizing those in power, whichever party that may be. It ultimately resulted in him leaving the Intercept. 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.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  > you can't pay for investigative journalism with a substack model 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-of-the?utm_source=publication-search 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.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Was it inevitable that search engines would take all the news revenue, destroy the economics of news, and then release AI for a perfect storm of a post truth world? Maybe, maybe not. But things are certainly going to be very interesting over the next decades. Buckle up.
- maxbond 3y ago
  I don't think anything in history is inevitable, I think it's always contingent on decisions people made at the time and that could have been decided differently, but I will say that exact series of events was laid out in a speculative fiction short film[1] I watched about 15 years ago. So clearly it was foreseeable. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI ["Googlezon", 10m]
gengwyn 3y ago
The media is an important business, but I just don't have a lot of respect for The Intercept as a publication. The two biggest blows I can think of are the Tara Reade story and a smaller article on DHS leaks I read around a year ago. 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-intercept/ https://crookedtimber.org/2023/06/08/disinformation-and-the-... 2. https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/ https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
snakeyjake 3y ago
Guess the Russians turned off the money faucet once their plan to use Greenwald to flood The Intercept with Hunter Biden penis stories fell through.
basementcat 3y ago
In 2017 The Intercept helped the NSA identify Reality Winner after a classified document detailing Russian interference in the 2016 election was mailed to The Intercept offices. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner#Release_of_classified_document https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner#Release_of_cl...
- bootlooped 3y ago
  It seems only through incompetence though, I think that's important to note.
wslh 3y ago
Bye bye. Media business is hard if not almost impossible. The Snowden affair was an opportunity but it is very difficult, expensive and/or require unique journalists to break well researched events. "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] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept
- qeternity 3y ago
  It’s funny bc Semafor received something like $10m from SBF.
  - wslh 3y ago
    It is all about effective altruism [1] ;-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
    - CactusOnFire 3y ago
      Yeah, it's very effective to be altruistic to news agencies for that good PR.
  - blackhawkC17 3y ago
    Seems SBF went around spreading cash to everyone who cared to collect. 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.
    - tentacleuno 3y ago
      Or he was willing to part with his cash. I don't believe any news organizations made [substantial] donations to SBF, or FTX.
notjulianjaynes 3y ago
I'm reminded of a quote by the late poet David Antin, which I can not find at the moment, but found one which gets at a similar idea, which I think is relevant here because really theres two types of news: the kind you can predict will happen and plan for dedicatibg the recources needed to cover, and then the other kind, which in some cases is arguably more important, but because there's no plan in place to pay for the work involved in reporting on it it's trickier to have a permanent establishment that is responsible for it. I'm pasting the adjacently related quote I found below. Look up David Antin if the formatting seems strange: 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/ https://www.artforum.com/features/talking-at-pomona-213137/
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
"The Intercept is losing roughly $300,000 a month, is on track to have a balance of less than a million dollars by November — and could be completely out of cash by May 2025, according to data shared internally in March." And apparently these are a "worst-case scenario."
blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
This seems sad. The Intercept was seeming like a powerhouse back when Glenn Greenwald was involved. They're a very different organization these days, and their legitimacy has sometimes been in question due to alleged internal censorship. Still, I think it's a problem that our economic system doesn't leave room for financially viable journalism.
- bluepizza 3y ago
  Their legitimacy also has been in question due to Greenwald himself. His involvement with Russian agents is very questionable.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Could you cite, please? Be keen to read about that.
    - stufffer 3y ago
      Glenn Greewald is the journalist who is best known for founding The Intercept and broke the Edward Snowden story. He is also anti war and spends his time these days criticizing the US policy that created the situation in Ukraine. That makes him an agent of Russia using the same logic that decades ago said opposition to invading Iraq made you a terrorist sympathizer.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

60 points by jbegley 3y ago

[flagged]

Article Frequency is low. I understand they are a small team but the attention economy is eating them alive with distraction. I would either triple the monthly articles or create more interactive articles with more rich content to keep the readers engaged longer.

jeegsy 3y ago

> "Greenwald quit in fury to make quixotic allies on the right" This type of (mis)characterization is really tiresome and you see it all the time in new media.

richrichie 3y ago
Worse is how susceptible otherwise intelligent people are to propaganda. Depressing.
- gengwyn 3y ago
  What's propagandistic about it? 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.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > 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.
  - richrichie 3y ago
    It is truly sad that the right wing speaks truth to power these days. I mean when the Bushes, Cheneys, Roves, Boltons are feted by the left these days, one will have to skip past these traditional pigeon-holing.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
What's incorrect about this? I guess you could quibble about what "quixotic" is supposed to communicate there, which is not completely clear to me. But he did leave, prominently, angrily. And he has forged new alliances with the right since then.
- kelipso 3y ago
  Clearly mischaracterizes it as the primary reason for leaving as opposed to one of the things that happened after he left.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    I mean we don't know his motivations but in retrospect he did immediately make a bunch of friends on the right, and align his work with their goals and messaging. It's a judgement that you can disagree with but as a characterization it does fit the facts.
    - kelipso 3y ago
      Plenty of explanations fit the facts for any given set of facts. That's why politics is so fun.

impish9208 3y ago

Maybe they should establish a hedge fund arm a la Hunterbrook.

gizmo 3y ago

Most news organizations have figured out that partisan coverage helps grow your audience while criticizing your own team results in cancellations. That's a problem for Glenn Greenwald who has always focused his energy on criticizing those in power, whichever party that may be. It ultimately resulted in him leaving the Intercept. 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.

mike_hearn 3y ago
> you can't pay for investigative journalism with a substack model 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-of-the?utm_source=publication-search 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.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Was it inevitable that search engines would take all the news revenue, destroy the economics of news, and then release AI for a perfect storm of a post truth world? Maybe, maybe not. But things are certainly going to be very interesting over the next decades. Buckle up.

maxbond 3y ago
I don't think anything in history is inevitable, I think it's always contingent on decisions people made at the time and that could have been decided differently, but I will say that exact series of events was laid out in a speculative fiction short film[1] I watched about 15 years ago. So clearly it was foreseeable. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI ["Googlezon", 10m]

gengwyn 3y ago

The media is an important business, but I just don't have a lot of respect for The Intercept as a publication. The two biggest blows I can think of are the Tara Reade story and a smaller article on DHS leaks I read around a year ago. 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-intercept/ https://crookedtimber.org/2023/06/08/disinformation-and-the-... 2. https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/ https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

snakeyjake 3y ago

Guess the Russians turned off the money faucet once their plan to use Greenwald to flood The Intercept with Hunter Biden penis stories fell through.

basementcat 3y ago

In 2017 The Intercept helped the NSA identify Reality Winner after a classified document detailing Russian interference in the 2016 election was mailed to The Intercept offices. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner#Release_of_classified_document https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner#Release_of_cl...

bootlooped 3y ago
It seems only through incompetence though, I think that's important to note.

wslh 3y ago

Bye bye. Media business is hard if not almost impossible. The Snowden affair was an opportunity but it is very difficult, expensive and/or require unique journalists to break well researched events. "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] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept

qeternity 3y ago
It’s funny bc Semafor received something like $10m from SBF.
- wslh 3y ago
  It is all about effective altruism [1] ;-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
  - CactusOnFire 3y ago
    Yeah, it's very effective to be altruistic to news agencies for that good PR.
- blackhawkC17 3y ago
  Seems SBF went around spreading cash to everyone who cared to collect. 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.
  - tentacleuno 3y ago
    Or he was willing to part with his cash. I don't believe any news organizations made [substantial] donations to SBF, or FTX.

notjulianjaynes 3y ago

I'm reminded of a quote by the late poet David Antin, which I can not find at the moment, but found one which gets at a similar idea, which I think is relevant here because really theres two types of news: the kind you can predict will happen and plan for dedicatibg the recources needed to cover, and then the other kind, which in some cases is arguably more important, but because there's no plan in place to pay for the work involved in reporting on it it's trickier to have a permanent establishment that is responsible for it. I'm pasting the adjacently related quote I found below. Look up David Antin if the formatting seems strange: 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/ https://www.artforum.com/features/talking-at-pomona-213137/

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

"The Intercept is losing roughly $300,000 a month, is on track to have a balance of less than a million dollars by November — and could be completely out of cash by May 2025, according to data shared internally in March." And apparently these are a "worst-case scenario."

blackeyeblitzar 3y ago

This seems sad. The Intercept was seeming like a powerhouse back when Glenn Greenwald was involved. They're a very different organization these days, and their legitimacy has sometimes been in question due to alleged internal censorship. Still, I think it's a problem that our economic system doesn't leave room for financially viable journalism.

bluepizza 3y ago
Their legitimacy also has been in question due to Greenwald himself. His involvement with Russian agents is very questionable.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Could you cite, please? Be keen to read about that.
  - stufffer 3y ago
    Glenn Greewald is the journalist who is best known for founding The Intercept and broke the Edward Snowden story. He is also anti war and spends his time these days criticizing the US policy that created the situation in Ukraine. That makes him an agent of Russia using the same logic that decades ago said opposition to invading Iraq made you a terrorist sympathizer.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]