Today we are happy to announce WIRED is going to co-publish two of our articles a month on its website. We are really excited to get our stories in front of a wider audience and grow 404 Media. We also hope to occasionally collaborate with our friends and colleagues at WIRED on stories we can do better together.
To be absolutely clear, 404 Media remains a 100 percent independent, journalist-owned company managed by the four of us. Our collaboration with WIRED is similar to our collaboration with Court Watch and Capitol Forum, and involves us co-publishing stories on like-minded publications that we think their audience will like and widening our reach beyond what we’re able to do by ourselves. If you’re a paying subscriber reading this, there’s not really anything for you to do or to know—you’ll continue to get ad-free access to all of our articles, including those we co-publish with WIRED. And if you’re reading any of those co-published articles on our site, you will need to be a paying 404 Media subscriber.
Like most people who follow technology, we’ve been fans of WIRED since before we became journalists ourselves, and we’re especially happy to partner with the legendary title now that it is home to many of our talented former co-workers at VICE. We’re regularly jealous of their features and scoops, and are proud that some of our investigations will be published alongside of their excellent work. By getting our articles in front of WIRED’s audience, we hope some of its readers will decide to become 404 Media subscribers themselves, and with more reach comes the potential for generating more impact with our journalism.
Our first story with WIRED, out now, is a deep dive from Joseph into the world of infostealers, a type of malware that has led to breaches at some of the most important companies in the U.S. He went into the forums where “traffers” hire other criminals to help spread the malware across the web.
Thank you all again for continuing to support 404 Media and making all of our work possible. We are more optimistic than ever about the future of what we are doing here and independent media more broadly.
If you are just now learning about us thanks to WIRED, we hope you check out some of the best work we’ve done since we launched in August of 2023 and consider sticking around.
