That is quite fascinating. Billionaire pays millionaire rock star journalist and calls it charity. I wondered why it was that I never find anything meaningful in The Intercept.
I prefer the journalism that is more citizen journalism, a guy with a Wordpress blog and time to spend in front of a keyboard with maybe 50 people paying $2 a month on Patreon.
The joke of content is the price of it, how much does it cost to keep the lights on really? Does it have to cost thousands for an article? I can understand this if you are writing a research paper on difficult science, but working out what happens in the world for real, can that only be done by people paid telephone number salaries?
> I prefer the journalism that is more citizen journalism, a guy with a Wordpress blog and time to spend in front of a keyboard with maybe 50 people paying $2 a month on Patreon.
> how much does it cost to keep the lights on really?
how much does it cost to keep the lights on really?
Depends. Would you like original reporting based on reporters actually going somewhere and investigating, and not just reviewing documents in the evenings? Would you like them to have health insurance and a retirement plan?
Should the publication be edited and fact-checked? Should their website be capable of supporting more immersive style than simple blog posts: videos, visualizations, timelines, graphs? Should they host independently or remain at the mercy of censors at YouTube?
Would it only cover one city? One country? A big one like the US or an organization like the EU? The whole world?
The cost can easily range from $20 a month to $20 million a month.
Glenn Greenwald spends too much time on Twitter railing imho
when that time could gave been spent doing Journalism.
It was the in depth journalism that he originally did that made Snowden contact him. Not the current 75 tweets a day on everything under the sun.
Ideally journalists need to get off Twitter. It's a waste of their time. Especially the pointless fact checking of bullshit. I'd rather see and PAY for one Spotlight story a year than 24x7x365 days of tweeting.
Last time I've said this, I got a huge karma hit, but I'd say it again: Greenwald is a political activist not a journalist. I had huge expectations in investigative journalism with The Intercept, but for me it failed.
But it looks like it wants to stay that course, with
"said it could no longer afford its research team, and was eliminating those jobs as part of a 4 percent cut in its workforce."
+100 for
"I'd rather see and PAY for one Spotlight story a year than 24x7x365 days of tweeting"
The Intercept has become a pretty large organization that goes well beyond the vision (and personal views) of Greenwald.
GG has no doubt upset a lot of powerful people who want to see him fall professionally (or even worse). It's not surprising that he has his hands full on twitter fending off attacks. I don't think GG or his staff are only on Twitter in order to find scoops and topics for regurgitation (or that twitter is automatically a problem affecting the magazines output).
The Drone Papers[1] released in 2015 by Jeremy Scahill were an outstanding piece of writing.
In 2016 they revealed[2] that a AT&T site in NYC hosts a secret NSA surveillance site
It is probably hard to create such hits on a regular basis especially when their new content will always be judged on their previous (first) successes
I don't see the quality of their reporting being reduced though, but fwiw they did expand into a more mainstream political sphere which isn't always about tech-conspiracies (NSA, Snowden, Drone-papers) and so they have to compete with other outlets that cover the same stuff. If they have become less edgy (more "blah") than they used to be maybe less funding will be good for them and they'll find their roots again.
I'm a bit confused, if NSA mission is to be able to spy on other counties' military operations, why wouldn't that include the ability to intercept communications coming from outside the country or information going out from suspected spys? What I'm saying is the facility in NYC is not at all surprising, there are a ton of fiber cables that come in from overseas into NYC. Anyone with half a brain about internet infrastructure and has ever read any of the mission directives or legal authorities of NSA will realize exactly what they're doing there. That is looking at cyber operations/attacks coming into the country and looking for covert communications from people who are trying to influence our government for their foreign government's military or economic benefit.
Also, for what it is worth, NSA is also pretty important in ensuring weapons proliferation and military equipment movements (which helps indicate possibly wars, covert actions or invasions) using measurements of various types to track nuclear, biological and other weapons. That is fairly essential for upholding and enforcing international laws and treaties.
Finally I'm also confused when people say "domestic" tracking. Basically the NSA had databases they could look at if given legal authority to do so (meaning they think someone is a spy and show evidence of that) to see interactions between a person and other people (who they call, how often, where their phone is, etc). Apparently it seems now they just have to request or, like anyone else, buy that data from the telecoms instead of it being in house.
> Anyone with half a brain about internet infrastructure and has ever read any of the mission directives or legal authorities of NSA will realize exactly what they're doing there.
It's a good thing when long running rumors can be corroborated, so labeling this as non-info is somewhat unfair. News in Europe of cell towers listening-in on national parliaments discussion or phones being directly targeted, make scary headlines outside in Europe or anywhere outside US. This story drove home the same message to Americans: that it's not just something the NSA does overseas to "keep us save". The story also made sense since it continued the established narrative from previously published Snowden leaks in The Intercept.
> NSA is also pretty important in ensuring weapons proliferation and military equipment movements (which helps indicate possibly wars, covert actions or invasions) using measurements of various types to track nuclear, biological and other weapons
as a non US citizen, this deeply terrifies me (even without the current geo-policial climate).
IMHO, Greenwald is producing the best journalism in Brazil at the moment.
Unfortunately, most of what is produced in Brazil is just the opinion of the journalist or, worse, his boss's. In fact, a local journalist once admitted the only thing he ever read was his own paper and nobody thought anything of it (Paulo Sant'Ana from Zero Hora). If you think about it, the big names in Brazil, like the recently deceased Boechat or Reinaldo Azevedo, spend all day in different medias. Where would they get the time to investigate anything?
I’m overall no fan of GG, but it seems (speaking as an outsider) he had the goods on Bolsonaro before the election, and his husband is now in the literal firing line as a gay, liberal Congressman in a time of rising right-wing violence. I’m not sure Greenwald has been effective or even all that salutary in regards to US politics and policies, but he might just be the journalist Brazil needs now.
The intercept started on laser focus on privacy and state surveillance and turned into full blown sj outlet later on. And that is crowded space lately. So it is hard to get good ROI.
Anyway the intercept went from having interesting articles you can only read there to having run off the mill articles that you can read literally anywhere else. So you have no reason to read there. A hard hitting report about eric prince could be read only in the intercept. If you want to write hot takes about how terrible Trump or Bolsonaro is you compete with literally every other big outlet there is. And they lost.
We have something similar in Hungary -- a group of journalists living off donations who produce a few big stories a year. It's not an easy way of making a living.
Well its difficult making money with writing things people don't want to hear.
How many people in the US or Hungary want to read about everything that is wrong in the country? Isn't it much easier to believe that everything is great?
Not exactly. The US media is happy to sell us bad news that reinforces our own sense of moral superiority. What we don't like is non-partisan news that challenges it.
Is there a tool that gives the average daily/weekly tweeting frequency of an account for last few months or just overall? I often have to unfollow already followed twitter accounts that, even though they are interesting, tweet too much effectively drowning other accounts' tweets which are not that aggressive and I end up unfollowing them. I wish there was a tool that I can decide right in the beginning whether they tweet a lot - find such accounts easily among the ones I follow. (I check Twitter occasionally - once or twice in a day or 2-3 days)
I remember Greenwald being known for being an outspoken, opinionated writer. Maybe his Twitter presence today projects a different image than his blogging presence back in the day. But I was under the impression that Greenwald tendency of "railing" about things, like the Iraq War, was what made Snowden aware and trusting of Greenwald:
> In my own exploration of the blogosphere over a decade ago, I soon ran across Glenn Greenwald. In some ways he seemed to break the rules of writing online: he wrote long blog posts composed of long sentences in long paragraphs. His blocks of text did not welcome, but I read them anyway. So did thousands of others.
> In the process of blogging, Greenwald helped form a community of interest, just as opposing communities formed to support Bush and his policies. In forming his community, Greenwald eventually drew the attention of a young man who’d been mostly hanging out in techie communities: Edward Snowden.
Long blog posts requires more thought and work than his current tweeting. The kind that you usually find in Books in a Library. Twitter content is what you find in the garbage bins of writers. I don't think Twitter has helped Greenwald evolve into something better.
I 100% disagree with you. There are not many influential people doing what ge is doing in twitter. I would rather see him post on twitter and reach out to more people than release articles that only few read.
It's been a while since I read Glenn. I'm not remotely left but usually find him a good read, well reasoned and well argued from evidence. From there you can disagree or not as you choose. So given this comment I thought I'd read his twitter feed.
Holy s&t!
Wow. So a bunch of senior US politicians have been telling lies to try and start a war in Venezuela and most of the US media has been parroting those lies without any checking or indeed re-enforcing the lies with their own lies, in CNN's case. The New York Times finally got off their backsides and called it. Wow. Yeah write that Glenn, tweet it too. And while you're at it shame the hell out of those people impersonating journalists who did that and have not retracted it as being entirely* false.
Wow.
Yeah so this is why people hate on Glenn. He's good and that's super inconvenient for the corrupt. He's actually really good. I wish there was someone less leftist as good as he is. I really do. But yeah, read Glenn, disagree with him by all means, I do, often. But read, he has something to say about things you should probably know and be thinking about.
In any case, that definition is too Orwellian. That is, today's entertainment should not be passed off as journalism; by definition it is not (journalism).
Not to sound harsh, but that's the equivalent of calling op-ed news; Taco Bell fine dining; or an elected official leadership. We can't allow the wrong words to be used (and the right ones abused) and expect to get the downstream discussions right.
> but that's the equivalent of calling op-ed news; Taco Bell fine dining; or an elected official leadership.
(edit, kinda off topic but related to calling op-eds news)
Gannett allows their advertisers to run light promotional articles as op-eds. It's disgusting, ads made to look like a true opinion piece.
Read your local Gannett site, look at the local paper's op-ed. Look for articles ghost written by Physicians, CEOs, lawyers that talk about community. No notice aside from a brief mention of the employer of the person in the Story Highlights.
Well, yes? People don't read The Boring News do they? "Today in The Boring News, a pencil manufacturer produced its 4 millionth pencil. It was yellow. Also, it rained yesterday."
The ratings are moving away from boring local TV news too. The audience is shrinking and moving to online sources. Local evening news is mainly controlled by the corporate owners, some news gets through but it's primarily a showcase for 3-4 stories from around larger markets.
It's hard to care too much about the publication that hosts Sam "Bring Back Bullying" Biddle [0] and his reporting on technology and the people involved in it through a lens of deep personal contempt. Funding a reporter (he is their tech reporter, not an opinion columnist) to grind an axe about his own hatreds and social status anxieties is not a recipe for truthful engagement with real-world complexity.
Making an ad hominem attack on one reporter who said something sarcy and twitterlike on Twitter (not in an article) five years ago, while employed at a different company, should hardly determine whether you care about The Intercept. His output for them is here if you care to identify how is 'hatred and social anxiety' is affecting his work: https://theintercept.com/staff/sambiddle/
We're all assholes to some extent, but Twitter accentuates that aspect of many personalities. It seems fine-tuned to generate heat with no light. Many people have withdrawn from public life entirely because Twitter could never be arsed to implement decent blocking mechanisms.
His output is “look at all these villains in technology, and cheer on all these heroes who are coming to kick their asses,” exactly in line with his stated mission.
Look, organizing and agitating against the tech community is valid work, but it’s distinct from journalism. For that I look to EFF, which has clearly disclosed set of principles to be activist about, and goes after anyone and everyone in defense of those principles. Often tech companies, but also everyone else.
Not the same thing as choosing an enemy, looking for anything and everything you can use against it, and calling it journalism.
I think some of Biddle's writing and conduct has been awful, but he's written of having anxiety and depression, and even that weren't the case, these kinds of personal attacks on staff writers are unfair.
Better to criticize the publishers who encourage that behaviour, and perhaps exploit the writer's flaws for the traffic and drama it generates.
I don’t think it’s a personal attack to say that someone is telling the truth about the crusade he’s on. It’s your right to be an activist about whatever topic you want. I’m less amused that The Intercept sponsors it as reporting.
Ideologically motivated writing targeted at the things I care about is fine, from a columnist who is part of an interesting stable of columnists. I don’t need NYT to fire Douthat. But they have the good sense not to make him an LGBT issues reporter.
The Intercept lost all credibility when it didn’t even take basic steps to protect the identity of a confidential source who emailed them internal NSA documents (Reality Winner). The fact that in this case the documents contradicted Greenwald’s public position raises the possibility that the reality was even uglier, with their actions potentially being deliberate.
They have also been accused of having revealed identities by a couple of other NSA whistleblowers.
There has been zero consequences from the entire set of revelations. What is the incentive to continue to do investigate journalism as great risk to one self when there are no results?
What Snowden seems to have inadvertently revealed is a culture that is a lot more interested in posturing around these issues than the issues themselves. And its those breaking the illusion be it Snowden, Manning or Assange who will face the music while civil society looks the other way.
Zero consequences? There was one illegal program (phone metadata collection) in the revelations. It was shut down. The revelations showed that the NSA had in the past extracted email metadata from email companies from international cables. The email companies have since encrypted their cross-datacenter internal traffic. Snowden disclosed many Chinese targets to the PRC. The PRC has presumably secured them.
If you think Snowden leaks was about 'one illegal program' you are seriously misinformed and have a lot of catching up to do. These are large scale and illegal mass surveillance programs. [1][2][3][4][5]. More can be found here. [6]
No one has been held accountable for these illegal programs. The then head of NSA James Clapper brazenly lied to Congress and has still not being held accountable. [7]. On the contrary there is a grand jury out to get Assange, Manning is back in jail and Snowden is being hounded and in exile. No good deed goes unpunished.
China had nothing to do with the Snowden leaks or any of these secret mass surveillance programs as you will discover. Happy reading!
You are clearly the misinformed one. None of the links you posted are for domestic surveillance programs, and none of them are illegal. The first two and the fifth are data processing systems for lawfully acquired data. The third is not even an NSA program. The fourth is not domestic.
James Clapper was never the head of the NSA (except in the sense that Trump is the head of the NSA).
> China had nothing to do with the Snowden leaks or any of these secret mass surveillance programs as you will discover.
You are severely underinformed. Snowden immediately revealed Chinese targets in a failed attempt to gain asylum from China. The PRC laughed him off, as anybody with a high school degree would have expected. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...
Try reading actual news instead of misinformed Reddit posts.
I'm always amazed by comment threads at TI. So much vitriol! At least they are hidden by default. We are told that lively comment sections increase engagement, but I wonder if that's really the case for TI. ISTM they should have just set up something on Reddit and not had any comments on the main site. E.g. "reddit/r/theintercept/russiarussiarussia" would be irredeemable, but only those who are interested would be exposed to it.
It is interesting to see how The Intercept/First Look has evolved, both as a news organization and a non-profit, speaking as someone who has also worked at a billionaire-founded nonprofit news org [0]. Both orgs have a focus on accountability journalism, and PP, like TI, drew criticism for its seemingly high salaries (for the non-profit world). I think undoubtedly TI had significantly more attention/awareness/pageviews than PP, when comparing the first few years; I wouldn't be surprised if Greenwald has more Twitter followers than the entire PP staff combined. Beyond that, I don't know how directly comparable the two orgs are, because the state of online-first journalism in 2008 was so much different than it was 2014, when TI launched.
That said, one main difference might be ProPublica having more a general plan for self-sufficiency through philanthropy. The Sandler Foundation promised $10M for the first 3 years, and to provide support afterwards -- their share would shrink as contributions from other donors came in (don't remember if there was a solid plan if PP failed to attract significant donors after the first 3 years). PP's early investigations [1] were relatively niche topics (at least at the time, and most certainly compared to anything Trump-related today). But the drive to have "impact" -- awards, collaboration with other news orgs, spurring legislative action -- was ostensibly attractive to philanthropic foundations looking to donate. It's worth noting that PP has for awhile dedicated fundraising staff -- $1M in fundraising expenses according to its 2017 990; I don't see First Look listing any fundraising expenses in its 990s so I don't know if they'll start going that route or plan to find revenue from other sources.
The article didn’t dive into it much, but if The Intercept were declassified as a foundation, the deductibility of Pierre Omidyar’s donations would be capped based on his AGI.
64 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadI prefer the journalism that is more citizen journalism, a guy with a Wordpress blog and time to spend in front of a keyboard with maybe 50 people paying $2 a month on Patreon.
The joke of content is the price of it, how much does it cost to keep the lights on really? Does it have to cost thousands for an article? I can understand this if you are writing a research paper on difficult science, but working out what happens in the world for real, can that only be done by people paid telephone number salaries?
> how much does it cost to keep the lights on really?
Well... probably more than $100 a month.
Depends. Would you like original reporting based on reporters actually going somewhere and investigating, and not just reviewing documents in the evenings? Would you like them to have health insurance and a retirement plan?
Should the publication be edited and fact-checked? Should their website be capable of supporting more immersive style than simple blog posts: videos, visualizations, timelines, graphs? Should they host independently or remain at the mercy of censors at YouTube?
Would it only cover one city? One country? A big one like the US or an organization like the EU? The whole world?
The cost can easily range from $20 a month to $20 million a month.
Well... The Intercept is basically an extension of this guy's Twitter: https://twitter.com/pierre
And, as you can see, all that there is is monothematic hate.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/an-extremely-expensive-cove...
It was the in depth journalism that he originally did that made Snowden contact him. Not the current 75 tweets a day on everything under the sun.
Ideally journalists need to get off Twitter. It's a waste of their time. Especially the pointless fact checking of bullshit. I'd rather see and PAY for one Spotlight story a year than 24x7x365 days of tweeting.
But it looks like it wants to stay that course, with
"said it could no longer afford its research team, and was eliminating those jobs as part of a 4 percent cut in its workforce."
+100 for
"I'd rather see and PAY for one Spotlight story a year than 24x7x365 days of tweeting"
GG has no doubt upset a lot of powerful people who want to see him fall professionally (or even worse). It's not surprising that he has his hands full on twitter fending off attacks. I don't think GG or his staff are only on Twitter in order to find scoops and topics for regurgitation (or that twitter is automatically a problem affecting the magazines output).
The Drone Papers[1] released in 2015 by Jeremy Scahill were an outstanding piece of writing.
In 2016 they revealed[2] that a AT&T site in NYC hosts a secret NSA surveillance site
It is probably hard to create such hits on a regular basis especially when their new content will always be judged on their previous (first) successes
I don't see the quality of their reporting being reduced though, but fwiw they did expand into a more mainstream political sphere which isn't always about tech-conspiracies (NSA, Snowden, Drone-papers) and so they have to compete with other outlets that cover the same stuff. If they have become less edgy (more "blah") than they used to be maybe less funding will be good for them and they'll find their roots again.
[1] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/
[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-...
Also, for what it is worth, NSA is also pretty important in ensuring weapons proliferation and military equipment movements (which helps indicate possibly wars, covert actions or invasions) using measurements of various types to track nuclear, biological and other weapons. That is fairly essential for upholding and enforcing international laws and treaties.
Finally I'm also confused when people say "domestic" tracking. Basically the NSA had databases they could look at if given legal authority to do so (meaning they think someone is a spy and show evidence of that) to see interactions between a person and other people (who they call, how often, where their phone is, etc). Apparently it seems now they just have to request or, like anyone else, buy that data from the telecoms instead of it being in house.
It's a good thing when long running rumors can be corroborated, so labeling this as non-info is somewhat unfair. News in Europe of cell towers listening-in on national parliaments discussion or phones being directly targeted, make scary headlines outside in Europe or anywhere outside US. This story drove home the same message to Americans: that it's not just something the NSA does overseas to "keep us save". The story also made sense since it continued the established narrative from previously published Snowden leaks in The Intercept.
> NSA is also pretty important in ensuring weapons proliferation and military equipment movements (which helps indicate possibly wars, covert actions or invasions) using measurements of various types to track nuclear, biological and other weapons
as a non US citizen, this deeply terrifies me (even without the current geo-policial climate).
edit: reduce waffle
Unfortunately, most of what is produced in Brazil is just the opinion of the journalist or, worse, his boss's. In fact, a local journalist once admitted the only thing he ever read was his own paper and nobody thought anything of it (Paulo Sant'Ana from Zero Hora). If you think about it, the big names in Brazil, like the recently deceased Boechat or Reinaldo Azevedo, spend all day in different medias. Where would they get the time to investigate anything?
Anyway the intercept went from having interesting articles you can only read there to having run off the mill articles that you can read literally anywhere else. So you have no reason to read there. A hard hitting report about eric prince could be read only in the intercept. If you want to write hot takes about how terrible Trump or Bolsonaro is you compete with literally every other big outlet there is. And they lost.
How many people in the US or Hungary want to read about everything that is wrong in the country? Isn't it much easier to believe that everything is great?
Primarily designed with OSINT in mind but covers tweet frequency, among other functions:
- Average tweet activity, by hour and by day of the week
- Timezone and language set for the Twitter interface
- Sources used (mobile application, web browser, ...)
- Geolocations
- Most used hashtags, most retweeted users and most mentioned users
- Friends analysis based on most frequent timezones/languages
https://thetyee.ca/Books/2014/05/30/No-Place-to-Hide/
> In my own exploration of the blogosphere over a decade ago, I soon ran across Glenn Greenwald. In some ways he seemed to break the rules of writing online: he wrote long blog posts composed of long sentences in long paragraphs. His blocks of text did not welcome, but I read them anyway. So did thousands of others.
> In the process of blogging, Greenwald helped form a community of interest, just as opposing communities formed to support Bush and his policies. In forming his community, Greenwald eventually drew the attention of a young man who’d been mostly hanging out in techie communities: Edward Snowden.
Holy s&t!
Wow. So a bunch of senior US politicians have been telling lies to try and start a war in Venezuela and most of the US media has been parroting those lies without any checking or indeed re-enforcing the lies with their own lies, in CNN's case. The New York Times finally got off their backsides and called it. Wow. Yeah write that Glenn, tweet it too. And while you're at it shame the hell out of those people impersonating journalists who did that and have not retracted it as being entirely* false.
Wow.
Yeah so this is why people hate on Glenn. He's good and that's super inconvenient for the corrupt. He's actually really good. I wish there was someone less leftist as good as he is. I really do. But yeah, read Glenn, disagree with him by all means, I do, often. But read, he has something to say about things you should probably know and be thinking about.
Investigative journalism is in sharp decline. It really has all but disappeared to most people.
In any case, that definition is too Orwellian. That is, today's entertainment should not be passed off as journalism; by definition it is not (journalism).
Not to sound harsh, but that's the equivalent of calling op-ed news; Taco Bell fine dining; or an elected official leadership. We can't allow the wrong words to be used (and the right ones abused) and expect to get the downstream discussions right.
(edit, kinda off topic but related to calling op-eds news)
Gannett allows their advertisers to run light promotional articles as op-eds. It's disgusting, ads made to look like a true opinion piece.
Read your local Gannett site, look at the local paper's op-ed. Look for articles ghost written by Physicians, CEOs, lawyers that talk about community. No notice aside from a brief mention of the employer of the person in the Story Highlights.
[0] https://archives.cjr.org/the_kicker/gawker_bullying.php
His output is “look at all these villains in technology, and cheer on all these heroes who are coming to kick their asses,” exactly in line with his stated mission.
Look, organizing and agitating against the tech community is valid work, but it’s distinct from journalism. For that I look to EFF, which has clearly disclosed set of principles to be activist about, and goes after anyone and everyone in defense of those principles. Often tech companies, but also everyone else.
Not the same thing as choosing an enemy, looking for anything and everything you can use against it, and calling it journalism.
Better to criticize the publishers who encourage that behaviour, and perhaps exploit the writer's flaws for the traffic and drama it generates.
Ideologically motivated writing targeted at the things I care about is fine, from a columnist who is part of an interesting stable of columnists. I don’t need NYT to fire Douthat. But they have the good sense not to make him an LGBT issues reporter.
For comparison, Fox News was run at a massive loss for its first decade. Most of the other right leaning orgs have patrons.
One needs stomach, fortitude, deep resources, and business acumen to build a self-sustaining media presence from the ground up.
Alternately, use the seed capital to start an endowment, keep the effort modest.
They have also been accused of having revealed identities by a couple of other NSA whistleblowers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept#Exposure_and_a...
What Snowden seems to have inadvertently revealed is a culture that is a lot more interested in posturing around these issues than the issues themselves. And its those breaking the illusion be it Snowden, Manning or Assange who will face the music while civil society looks the other way.
No one has been held accountable for these illegal programs. The then head of NSA James Clapper brazenly lied to Congress and has still not being held accountable. [7]. On the contrary there is a grand jury out to get Assange, Manning is back in jail and Snowden is being hounded and in exile. No good deed goes unpunished.
China had nothing to do with the Snowden leaks or any of these secret mass surveillance programs as you will discover. Happy reading!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairview_(surveillance_program...
[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundless_Informant
[6] https://theintercept.com/search/?s=snowden
[7] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/19/republicans-co...
James Clapper was never the head of the NSA (except in the sense that Trump is the head of the NSA).
> China had nothing to do with the Snowden leaks or any of these secret mass surveillance programs as you will discover.
You are severely underinformed. Snowden immediately revealed Chinese targets in a failed attempt to gain asylum from China. The PRC laughed him off, as anybody with a high school degree would have expected. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...
Try reading actual news instead of misinformed Reddit posts.
That said, one main difference might be ProPublica having more a general plan for self-sufficiency through philanthropy. The Sandler Foundation promised $10M for the first 3 years, and to provide support afterwards -- their share would shrink as contributions from other donors came in (don't remember if there was a solid plan if PP failed to attract significant donors after the first 3 years). PP's early investigations [1] were relatively niche topics (at least at the time, and most certainly compared to anything Trump-related today). But the drive to have "impact" -- awards, collaboration with other news orgs, spurring legislative action -- was ostensibly attractive to philanthropic foundations looking to donate. It's worth noting that PP has for awhile dedicated fundraising staff -- $1M in fundraising expenses according to its 2017 990; I don't see First Look listing any fundraising expenses in its 990s so I don't know if they'll start going that route or plan to find revenue from other sources.
0: https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-10th-anniversa...
1: https://propublica.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/about/PP_2010_ann...