Journalism is dead, long live journalism

The Washington Post fired over 300 reporters and editors last week; Matt Taibbi is hiring. These two events are not unrelated.

On Monday afternoon, I got two emails from Matt Taibbi’s Racket News. The first was from Matt and called “From The Old Editor.” The second was from Emily Kopp and called “From The New Editor.”

Yes, Matt has hired Emily, who has done amazing work over the last several years unearthing the truth about Covid and the coverup of its likely leak from a Chinese lab.

I’m a fan of both, and I owe Matt for being the first — okay, let’s be honest, only — journalist to cover Berenson v Biden¹ in any meaningful way. So call this logrolling if you like, but I loved Emily’s mission statement:

It was once fashionable for corporate media to prescribe what to think and for Big Tech to clamp down on free speech and debate. These days it’s in vogue to embrace a relativist attitude toward truth. No journalist can promise truth… The only thing we can promise is to try for it.

That’s why we’re bringing old school journalistic standards to the new school, wide-open Overton Window. If we do our jobs well, we’ll provide occasional relief from the cacophony.

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Part of me wishes I had hired Emily myself and expanded Unreported Truths the way Matt is growing Racket News. As long ago as 2021, I could see the new independent journalism would need flagships, not just buccaneers.

And Bari Weiss showed both investment and readers would flow to a smartly written outlet. Now Bari has rejoined the establishment (an understandable choice given the payday and power she received in selling The Free Press and taking over CBS News) — and Matt is scaling up.

But I have never taken the leap. I’ve always been most comfortable on my own. Raising millions of dollars and hiring and managing a staff would give Unreported Truths a larger voice and audience — and me less time to write, the job I really love.

And, frankly, it’s hard to find journalists who have the sensibility and the skills to be truly independent voices (and aren’t already stars themselves). There’s a reason I knew Emily’s name long before Matt hired her.

So Unreported Truths will stay remain a one-man show. For now. Never say never.

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(The best of the old and the new, for pennies a day.)

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The good news is that Emily and I are already talking about working together. I’m not sure exactly how those collaborations would work, but I hope we can make them happen. Racket and UT could be a powerful combination!

While Racket grows, the Washington Post is collapsing. Last week, the paper laid off more than 300 journalists, possibly as many as 375 — almost half of its reporters and editors. Two days later, its publisher, Will Lewis, resigned.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Post. But it lost $77 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024, and Bezos was apparently no longer willing to subsidize it.

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Some conservatives on X publicly cheered these layoffs. That attitude is cruel. Most Post reporters and editors probably made $80,000-$140,000, which in a high-tax, high-housing-cost market like Washington doesn’t exactly give them a lot of room to build a cushion.

And the people who got laid off were generally not the paper’s top names. They were anonymous, middle-aged editors or second- and third-tier reporters on unglamorous beats. They will have a very hard time replacing their incomes.

But whatever their personal losses, the Post failed terribly as a news organization over the last 10 years, if not longer. Even more than The New York Times, it became the stupid and reflexive voice of the left. It ran endless articles that went past self-parody, like this one — which came less than two weeks before Biden’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump:

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The New York Times has survived similar embarrassments because it has a bigger and better brand and because it made canny investments in popular newsletters like Wirecutter, games like Wordle, and podcasts like The Daily. But the upper-middle-class liberals of the world have time and subscription money for only one news outlet to satisfy their preconceptions. The Post ain’t it.

But trying to fix a money-losing business by cutting its staff in half without fundamentally fixing its problems is a recipe for a death spiral. Bezos would have been better off buying the Free Press and letting Bari take a swing at rethinking the Post from the ground up. Or Taibbi. Even me, despite the fact that I have never have run anything bigger than Unreported Truths.

At least we all understand that the Post needs to prove that it stand up to the Democratic blob. Better to be hated — and seen — by both sides than by serving the same pap as the Times, only with less style.

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(Until Bezos calls…)

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Until places like the Post figure that out, Racket and Unreported Truths and all the other truly independent voices will have plenty of room to run.

1. As of yesterday, with the filing of our appeal to the federal Second Circuit of Appeals in Manhattan, Berenson v Biden is officially known as Berenson v Trump. The case is the same, though. I know I owe you a full update, and I will have one soon.