This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss being taken seriously, the Secret Service being secretive, and doing business while doing journalism.
JASON: Earlier this week, I spoke to a group of Norwegian journalists at the press club in Oslo. The talk was about how to report on big tech and crime on the internet. It was actually two talks—the first was basically an overview of this topic to a larger group of journalists and the general public, and then afterward there was a smaller seminar that was basically like a mini, IRL FOIA Forum where I showed them how to pull US court records, file FOIAs, and various tools we use to do our investigations.
This was a really cool experience for me, and it’s one of the really amazing things that cofounding 404 Media has allowed me to do. Since we’ve started the company, it feels like more people are interested in what we have to say, how we do our journalism, and our general theory of how smaller newsrooms can operate on the internet. Intuitively, this makes sense because people are interested in worker-owned publications, how we juggle the business with the journalism, and in learning more about how something new works. But it’s also a little bit weird because we were doing very important work at Motherboard, using many of the same strategies, and weren’t invited to do as many things like this. Paradoxically, it feels like our work is maybe being taken even more seriously without the umbrella of a larger news organization. Or maybe people just think that we’re doing something cool and want to support us or want to learn more about how we operate.