The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)
from 404 Media
One Year Anniversary Subscriber Bonanza
Episode Notes
/Transcript
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JljlkHSuko
Some of the podcasts we recommended:
- trashfuture
- Tech Won't Save Us
- Techtonic
- Search Engine
- Slate's What Next: TBD
- NPR's On the Media (episode is called Not an Internet Error: How 404 Media Aims to Shake Up Online Journalism)
Hello, and welcome to the 1 year anniversary 404 Media Podcast only for paying 4 0 4 media subscribers. We're here. We're all together. Finally, we're doing it. We're gonna celebrate, the year that we've had running this company, tell you what we've done, things you may have missed, what we're going to do in the future, how the business is going, all of that, pretty inside baseball stuff, but, you know, as a subscriber, I'm sure you're gonna find it interesting.
Joseph:I guess briefly, what took us so long to do this? We were gonna do this last month. I mean, Jason, was it you Dude,
Jason:I don't even know I don't even know what happened. I was on vacation for a minute, and then Sam and I were in Portland for XOXO Festival, which was really cool. And hopefully our talk will be, public at some point. I think they do post, like archives of talks there. And then I got sick with COVID and then I had to do some travel after it was better, for 404, But it wasn't just me.
Jason:That's just that's what happened to me, but other people were also. So you were on vacation?
Joseph:I I took a vacation for a little bit where all I did was play Diablo, and it was great. And I needed to do that. I think Emmanuel, were you out for a minute?
Emanuel:Yeah. Also traveled for work and then also vacation and then also COVID.
Sam:I have not had COVID.
Jason:You were sick, though. You were sick at some point, but I think you were still in the pod I think you were still in the pod when you were sick.
Sam:Oh, yeah. Because I was in Mexico and had, like, food poisoning or the flu and was, like, on the pod with Joseph. It was just me and Joseph.
Joseph:Oh, yes.
Sam:And I was, like, sweating bullets, like, holding it together for an hour on this podcast. No AC running.
Jason:Yeah. I I think that this this probably makes us sound like we have really exciting lives, but for the most part, like, I've just been like convulsing in bed, when I was unable to do this. And Yeah. And Yeah. And it's it's good that we're back.
Joseph:Also makes us sound like jet setters, and we're not even that anyway. It's just we had a bunch of, like, work stuff. Like you say, you gave this talk, and we we're doing more of those. Right? Like, we give talks to various conferences or festivals telling them about what it's like to run a media company today and all that sort of thing.
Joseph:We've just been super, super busy, but I'm really, really glad that we can talk to subscribers now. The TLDR I mean, you could stop listening, but please don't at this point. But I'll say, things are good. I think things are stable. And I think we're doing what we set out to do, which is make a sustainable business so we can publish investigative journalism.
Joseph:I mean, I I am I right? I think it's okay. Are things okay?
Sam:Things are okay. According to, CJR, we are sustainable as of it was, like, 9 months ago or something.
Emanuel:Yes.
Sam:Yeah. Which is a funny headline to get.
Joseph:Yeah. In over the past year, we have published something like 781 or 782 because literally before we started recording, I just published the Telegram confirmed it gave, US data to you user data to law enforcement. Slight caveat on that in that that also counts posts that we email, in different ways. So, Jason, what do you think the real figure is? Something like 500?
Jason:Probably at least 500. Yeah. Something like around 500 articles in a little bit over a month or a little over a year, from, you know, 4 people, and then Jules had a couple, and then there's been a couple freelancers. So for the most part, like, probably 500 articles by the 4 of us, which is pretty wild.
Joseph:Well, you and Emmanuel managed motherboard, basically. Emmanuel, is that a lot of articles for 4 people?
Emanuel:It is for 4 normal people. It's not for present company. Yeah. I I mean, it's true. I mean, we have a high metabolism.
Emanuel:It's like everyone in motherboard was pretty productive. We've probably said this a 1000000 times, but we're all of a generation of blogging where quantity was a type of quality, and we've all done various shifts in the content minds. I've I've I've been to up to 10 blogs a day when I was starting out, which were very bad blogs, obviously, and we're not working at that rate. But when it comes to covering the news and getting a story out, we're very good at it. And I think Jason and I have talked about how that has been, like, a big portion of what we've been talking about when we've been talking to journalists, which has just been like, hey, try publishing articles.
Emanuel:That usually works. Yeah. That's
Joseph:and yeah. You say publish articles and that works, and that's kinda wants to bring up, which is like, a lot of people or more people are moving into launching their own media outlets or maybe their individual newsletter or something like that. I guess it would be slight different for a newsletter. But the advice I just keep giving people is that you just need to publish original stories. And, I mean, look.
Joseph:Maybe it's different in that some outlets could work by okay. You don't really publish anything for, I don't know, a month, 2 months, 3 months, and you come out with an absolutely massive investigation or something. And, you know, maybe that works for them. But have we found that we publish a lot, and that seems to help us. Right?
Joseph:At least, that's the way I see it.
Jason:Yeah. I mean, that as Emmanuel mentioned, like so a a recent talk that I gave was in Norway at the Norwegian Society of Journalists, which was a really awesome experience for me to to go over there and talk to journalists about reporting on cybercrime and just, like, our philosophy philosophy of reporting on big tech and things like that. And I know that Emmanuel gave a similar talk before, but I think the biggest problem with many startup news websites is that they announce that they are going to launch. And then there's like months of time pass while they all sort of work on their big story for launch. And then they launch and they publish these great stories and it's cool for the 1st couple days, but then they there's no plan for how they're gonna keep the website filled with articles to make it, like, daily or, you know, hourly or daily or even weekly visit for people.
Jason:And so I just don't think that that's a sustainable model for publishing, unless you have a really big staff or unless you are really well funded or unless every article you do is amazing. And I think that what we do, and we talked about this before, but we really try to do iterative ground up reporting. And what I have been telling people is, like, we will signal our interest in a topic by doing a small story about it, and then we'll do another story about it. And in each of these stories, we will have an easy way to contact us. And over time, we're sort of, like, building a narrative which leads to our investigations because each time we publish an article, more sources reach out, readers, subscribers have been really good about flagging things that they've seen that say, like, oh, this seems like something you'd be interested in.
Jason:And if you're not publishing regularly, you're not gonna get those tips from sources. You're not gonna get readers sending you things because people don't know what you care about if if you're not out in public, like, publishing stuff. So that's, I mean, that's why I think we try to publish so much and that's why we have a metabolism where it's like, let's just get something out. And it's not like, we have no interest in doing low quality things, but I think also not every story is going to be a 2,000 word investigation. There's gonna be a bunch of smaller and shorter stories, but in the grand scheme of things for both our reporting and for the website, like, they serve a purpose.
Jason:And sometimes that purpose is just like the correct source that met us happens to see it. It gets shared in their Slack or something, and then they reach out to you on signal and we're able to get a much bigger story.
Joseph:Yeah. The I this doesn't happen normally, but today, we're recording 2nd October. We arguably published too many stories today. Jason was just counting it before we started recording. And what was it?
Joseph:7 or something? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 posts, which, I mean, they're all great, they're all fantastic, but it's just because one was an embargo, one was some breaking news, another was breaking news. I mean, a lot of them are. They're all newsworthy. So I don't think we would try to do that normally, because there is a slight danger that one might drown out the other.
Joseph:I mean, I think you all know this much better than me. Like, I've just been a reporter for all these years, but, like, one could they could overlap. Is that is that fair, you think?
Emanuel:I don't think that's as much as a concern as just, pacing ourselves. Right? It's like you wanna publish something new every day. So if you publish 7 things on a Wednesday, it becomes harder to publish, like, 2 things a day the rest of the week. I don't think that's gonna happen.
Emanuel:But that's usually that's my concern usually.
Joseph:Right. But, generally, our cadence is working. If there's a lot of work, we, to be real, sometimes get stressed. But it it does seem to be working. And for that, let me look up the number of paid subscribers because, I think it was Sam.
Joseph:You recently went on NPR. Right? And said approximately a number of users. Yeah. At the time, you said it was nearly 6,000.
Joseph:Now it is 6,117. Maybe while I'm recording, somebody will unsubscribe, and then I can see it go down in real time, and and that'll be fun. And and people do people do, and that's fine. But then we publish another great scoop, and then more people come. And I I think it shows that you can do this and can be sustainable.
Joseph:I mean, for point of reference, we have 6,000 pays, and that took us, like, a year. Drop sites, which is made by some former intercept people, I think they got 5 k in 1 week. So, I mean, that's wild to me and good for them, but we have been working pretty damn hard to to get to where we are, and it looks like it's gonna be, stable. What do people think about what works as in what brings people in?
Jason:So I think the it's kind of interesting how our growth curve has gone because when we launched, there was obviously a bunch of attention and we got a few 100 subscribers the 1st day. I think we got like 6 or 700 in the 1st 2 days, maybe. And then we passed a1000 within maybe like a week or 2. But then it was pretty slow for a while. It's like, we, we really like inched up toward December Christmas.
Jason:Like we did a black Friday sale where I think we ended up getting like 40 subscribers, something like that. And then I don't know when we got to 2,000, but it was sometime in like maybe January, I wanna say. So it was pretty slow going at the beginning. I think that we were seeing enough growth that we thought like, okay, we can continue doing this. Like this is going to work if we keep working hard.
Jason:But one thing that we found at least in the early part of 2024 is one. We turned on the free wall and we wrote that article. We need your emails, where we sort of explained how AI was stealing our stuff. Social media was fracturing. So, so on and so forth.
Jason:And in the immediate aftermath of that, we got many subscribers. Like, I I don't have the numbers in front of me, but probably a 1,000 subscribers in the, like, weeks around late January when we published that.
Joseph:Which is funny because the wall was saying, we need you to be free subscribers because AI is stealing all our stuff, but then many people actually decided to pay instead.
Jason:Yeah. And then the the the the interesting thing is, like, as we got more subscribers, our growth got faster in terms of, I think I mean, this sort of makes sense if you think about it, but it's like more people were subscribed to us. So every day, we're reaching more people. And I think that we probably get a lot of subscribers from, like, word-of-mouth probably. And I think that our audience has done a pretty good job of evangelizing for us, which has been really awesome.
Jason:Thank you if you've shared, you know, any of our stories or talked about us to anyone. But I feel like our growth has sped up as things have gone on longer. And there's definitely been, like, ebbs and flows and plateaus and, slow months and things like that. Like, to be honest, the last couple weeks have been pretty slow in terms of growth. But, overall, it was interesting because it took a very long time to get to, like, 2,000 subscribers, but then from 2,000 to, let's say, like, 4,000 was only, like, a month or 2, something like that.
Jason:And of course we should talk about, like, individually what we think works, but it's been interesting to me that our rate of growth has, kind of increased at, like, as more people subscribe, which I think is a very good sign.
Joseph:Yeah. It's hard because we don't really, like, we don't really have much data. You know? Like, we're not doing all of this deep analysis with all of these different metrics or whatever. Like, you can go into an individual article and be like, oh, this many people subscribed be because of it.
Joseph:And that's kind of it. But there isn't actually a way to, like, zoom out and almost see it in the graph, and that would be nice. You know? But, like so it's almost anecdotal, but I feel like people respond well to original reporting. The one I'm really thinking of is not even one of my stories.
Joseph:It's actually one that Sam did about NVIDIA scraping YouTube, and I think people really, really responded to that. And, that was, you know, a pretty successful day for getting more subscribers, which which is not to say, oh, the goal is to always get subscribers. No. It's to publish what we think is important. And sometimes you get subscribers, sometimes you won't.
Joseph:Like, the thing I just published about how Telegram is given data to US authorities, I don't think that will result in subscribers because it's it's kind of not a scoop. It's like Telegram announced it, basically, if you go and interact with their little transparency bot. That being said, still think it's very important. You know? I guess just briefly, Sam, any thoughts on, your NVIDIA one and why maybe people responded to that?
Sam:Yeah. That actually it reminds me. I was I went and talked to, like, a grad school class at NYU last week, and this specific topic came up because we were talk they wanted to know, like, how like, what works as far as, like, source building and source gathering and things like that. And, it's all related, obviously, and it goes back to what Jason said about, like, not everything is that, like, 6,000 word feature. Like, some of it is just like a smaller, shorter thing that shows what you care about.
Sam:And because we don't have that, like, like, the deep demographic data that you would get from running a site that, like, runs a bunch of cookies and tracks people and does a bunch of surveys. It's like, we don't have that. So we publish what we care about and what we think is important and also what our audience believes is important and believes in. And part of that is the AI stuff. And so I published something before the like, we're we're writing about AI all the time, obviously, but I published something before the NVIDIA scoop at that particular source was like, hey.
Sam:I saw that you wrote about this. You might care about what's happening at NVIDIA. Oh, it was the runway thing. It was runway training. So RunwayML had been training its models on, like, YouTube data.
Sam:And then, that came to me via source, and then this next source said, you know, I'm at NVIDIA. I've I have this. And now I'm working on another story that someone saw the Nvidia story, and they were like, hey. I'm at this organization. I have a similar thing happening.
Sam:And it's like people just kind of you build that trust just by doing the thing. Like, it's not like I can go out and be like, I'm gonna go dig in at NVIDIA. It's like, it doesn't really Yeah. That doesn't really work. You can't really brute force it that way, in my opinion.
Joseph:People people, some media organizations have meetings about what they should cover. And I understand why you have to do that when you have a lot of staff members and, like, a lot of bureaucracy. We don't really do that. We go and do it. You know what I mean?
Joseph:Yeah. And, like yeah. Whereas another organization would probably, like, an editor would say, we should look into NVIDIA because, like, they're really big. You know? And Yeah.
Joseph:Yeah.
Sam:Which, you know, I'd like, we and another one of the questions that came up was, like, how do you approach, access and things like that? And it's like I mean, I think this is something that I've I learned from Jason and Emmanuel at Motherboard. It's just, the fact that we're not a lot of organizations will be, like, ingratiating themselves to us, like, a particular company or particular, like, group of sources or something and getting on their good side in order to get, like, more information. And a lot of the tactics that we have taken have been to be such a pain in their ass that they have no choice but to speak to us, which I know Jason's done a lot of a lot of reporting about and so is Manuel. It's like that's, that's very much a strategy, in my opinion, to just be like, you can't ignore us anymore because we are on your shit.
Sam:So you have to
Jason:done a lot of reporting about how to be a pain in the ass.
Sam:Yeah. It works. It's like, you know, you can get all the cocktails you want with, like, some PM at meta, but, like, you can also just, like, find out what's going on there and really, like, you know, use the products and then start reporting on them that way. And then, this the whole thing kind of snowballs from there. So, yeah, I think that's and, yeah, it's like like you said, Joe.
Sam:It's not, not like I wrote the NVIDIA story being like, I'm gonna get a bunch of subscribers out of this. It's just Right. A story that needed to be written. So
Joseph:And then it happens together because people just happen to be into that. Like, we don't go in thinking, oh, yeah. This will get subscribers. It's just Yeah. You know, people respond to what they like.
Joseph:Other ways that things are going well, you know, we've done various collaborations with other media outlets. 1 is, Capital Forum, which is, much more of a government and legal centric publication. You may have noticed at the top of some articles it says, you know, this is made in partnership with the Capital Forum. I think we've all done at least 1 or or 2 of those each. And the idea is that we allow them to publish our text.
Joseph:They give us a little bit of money, obviously, for that privilege. But to me, the main motivating factor is that their readership and their stuff is, a very hard paywall, I think. Their readership is much more people in government, in regulatory bodies, attorneys, that sort of thing. So especially the stuff I'm writing about, data and privacy and credit header data, I like doing that because it allows us to get our coverage in front of, I mean, basically, policymakers and people in a position to actually generate some impact. And maybe they do, maybe they don't.
Joseph:Maybe they come over and they then read us more widely. Maybe they then think about becoming a source or something. But it, I think we'll talk about distribution in a bit, but it's very much trying to get our articles in front of people that we want oh, obviously, as many as possible is great, but there's also a particular type of person you want to read your coverage, at least I'm speaking for myself. So that sort of partnership comes up there, and I really hope we can continue working together. Another one, of course, is CourtWatch.
Joseph:Seamus Hughes who he will go and find an insane court record, then send it to us. We will write it up. Maybe we'll do some additional reporting, you know, get comments or maybe speak to a source or something like that. We then both publish at the same time, and it's like the ideal partnership. It's so smooth and so easy, and I love to collaborate with other journalists, and that's fantastic.
Joseph:And if you don't already, please subscribe to Courtwatch more just so they can keep doing what they're doing because US court records are so fucking expensive. You know? We do have another potential partnership coming, but I don't really wanna mention it just until it's confirmed. You know? That's how I am in in life in general.
Joseph:So I think we'll probably wait on that one. One thing, should we do a really, really quick refresher? I mean, super quick on how we got here because I think actually and I was surprised by this. I've noticed over the past year, people come to us and they subscribe or they just read, and they don't actually know that we came from vice and all of that context. Emmanuel, is that something you would want to lay out briefly, just how we got here?
Emanuel:Let's see. What is what is the briefest version of this? So in the beginning,
Joseph:there was the big bang. And Yeah. Yeah.
Emanuel:I mean, maybe not separate. So we all worked at Motherboard, which was the Vice's tech and science publication for many years. And as people, who follow media know, and if you don't, then I'll tell you, Vice kind of, went through this painful, awful bankruptcy process during which we saw how the company was spending its money, and it wasn't spending it on journalism. And we were like, hey, what if we started a company that prioritize journalism? Would that work?
Emanuel:And here we are a year later, it does work. Congrats to us. How was that? How was that version of it?
Joseph:Dude, that was so brief. I love it. That was exactly it. Okay. So people have that context now.
Joseph:Now, what have we well, we we start the company. We I remember launch day and the articles we published. I actually still think one of the best articles I've written for the site was the first one I wrote, and I'm still trying to like, shit, I've gotta find a better story than it was the the Telegram bot that can dox anyone in the US for $10. So we publish all those, and then we're publishing other stories, and we gain more subscribers. And then, eventually, we have enough funds and resources to start to grow responsibly.
Joseph:And we've done that in a couple of different ways. Emmanuel, to put you on the spot again, just because I feel like you're handling this mostly, what is the abstract exactly which we launched maybe 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago at this point?
Emanuel:Yeah. I'll keep this also brief because I think we should have Becky on the pod to talk about this and her work in general. But, at Motherboard, as long as we've worked there, I think none of us worked as there as long as Becky Ferrera, who was our kinda hard science reporter, And in my opinion, is the best in the business, hands down. Just very good writer on a sentence level and has such a passion for the subject and, writes in kind of like an infectious way about very, very complicated subjects, in a way that makes you understand why they're cool or important or relevant to your life. And she was like a huge hit in terms of traffic at motherboard, and just like a hit with me personally in my heart, and was able to give us something that none of us were doing.
Emanuel:Right? Like, we all cover multiple beats, but none of us are writing about, I don't know, scientific papers about, the sun, which I know is Becky's favorite favorite celestial body. So yeah. So she now every Saturday, we publish this column called the abstract where Becky covers a bunch of new scientific papers. There's like one paper which he goes to in-depth at the top and then a bunch of kind of small blurbs underneath it.
Emanuel:And the blurbs are just as good as the main piece. They might be my favorite because they're able to, like, very quickly run you through a very complicated paper. So that's every Saturday morning. Please check it out. And hopefully, we'll have Becky on to to talk about this herself soon.
Jason:Yeah. I have talked to Becky about her favorite celestial body and I think it's Europa, the moon of Jupiter, which,
Joseph:getting cooled out. Getting cooled out. Oh, that's
Emanuel:Let's resolve this when she's on. I thought it was the sun.
Jason:With us. Yeah. I mean, I like the sun as well, but, I believe Europa is, like, has water on it. We'll we'll ask Becky. That's a great question.
Jason:I'd love to know for sure.
Joseph:My favorite is earth. Do you know?
Jason:The world's Wudot. God. Yep. The world's only 1. Yeah.
Jason:We have only 1 home despite what Elon Musk wants.
Sam:One day. 2 moons now, though. Oh, I know. It's sick
Jason:that we have a second moon. We
Sam:have another moon.
Jason:Yeah. We have another moon.
Sam:Yeah. We do. Look it up, man.
Jason:Earth picked up a second moon. I think it's just temporary, but, but an asteroid entered our, orbit and it is a moon. That's the definition of a moon. You, you could also argue that the international space station is a moon because it orbits the earth, I believe, But we're we're wasting Becky time. This is these are better questions for her.
Joseph:Yeah. I I look forward to asking her whether there are 2 moons down the but something else we've done, we have hired an audio producer for the podcast, along with Kaleidoscope, who are friends of ours. I will be real. I'm sure if you've been listening to the podcast for some time, the quality has ebbed and flowed because I am not an audio producer. I try my best to host, and I try my best to lay out, what we're gonna be doing, and everybody helps with that, and I really appreciate it.
Joseph:I've tried here and there to do a bit of audio, but it's just it's arrogant to assume that I can do it. And to be clear, I didn't assume I could do it. I knew I was shit, but I we had to do it because it was just the 4 of us. So we have someone on who cleans up all of our podcasts, and, we really, really appreciate that.
Jason:I feel like the our listeners appreciate the most because we really had some adventures with audio levels and things like that. Most of which were my fault. I feel like during times you weren't here, I always think that I'm a better audio producer than I am. And I then am watching YouTube videos about how to do levels and things like this, and, there were a few episodes where I was like, I think this is correct. And then I listened to it, and one of us was much quieter.
Jason:Someone would be very loud. Someone would be very quiet, etcetera, etcetera. So, yes, the subscribers have helped us get an audio producer, which is amazing.
Sam:I recently sang the intro and outro when it was just me and Emmanuel on the pod because I didn't know how to do the music, and that was a disaster also. So we appreciate Joseph and Jason and their soundboard match.
Joseph:Dude, I'm just clicking buttons. I don't even have a fun sound at this time. I usually have a Duke Nukem quote or something, but we haven't had time. But, there's some stuff in here. Maybe I'll play the Dark Soul sound a little bit.
Joseph:Any stories we just wanna shout out that we're happy with over the past year? I mean, I'm kind of copping out because I already said mine, which is Sam's and Nvidia one. But any others that people wanna shout out?
Jason:I like Joseph's identity, story, which is very vague. The ones where,
Joseph:This is like show and tell. I put you on the spot. It's like
Jason:It's like complimenting. The know your customer scammers where they basically are taking frankly, like poor people and are, having them take all these photos of themselves and then, scammers are using those. That was a really, really crazy story. No one's allowed to say any of their own stories.
Joseph:Sam, Emmanuel. Sorry. I I I didn't put this in the demo.
Sam:I'm like, scrolling. I'm scrolling on the website being like, what are the stories? What are the stories?
Joseph:I mean, you don't have to say one. I would just say that
Jason:I No.
Sam:I wanna say one. I wanna say one. Okay.
Joseph:Okay. I got
Sam:I got on the phone.
Joseph:But while but while you're looking, I would just say that I actually totally forgot about the one Jason mentioned, and I remember just, I think, messaging Emmanuel over and over like, there's there's something here. And Emmanuel's like, yeah. Okay. Well, do it then. I'm probably misremembering again as I always do every interaction I have, apparently.
Joseph:But, yeah, we're there. We we we've published a lot a lot of good shit.
Sam:Right. I like this. I like why do these Instagram electricians want to deepthroat you by Emmanuel? Just What?
Joseph:Mostly following up on Friday. I do remember. Yes.
Sam:Do you remember that? It was like a referral scheme, like, thing going on on Instagram where it was like you were a roofer, selling your roofing skills, but it was also, like, hot women and tight shirts, on the ads. Yeah.
Emanuel:Yeah. Just, this is a good rule, by the way, Jason, because I think we all ended up talking about, like, everyone is represented. And I I really like Jason's adventures in film development, which I have done myself, but will never do again. But it's sort of like the fun stuff we get to do because we own the company and own the site and we can publish whatever we want. And when Jason said he wanted to do it, I was like, okay, that's cool.
Emanuel:That's fun. You know what I mean? You own the company, you can do it. But like people really responded to it. People were really into it.
Emanuel:And then it also led to some scoops actually. So just like fun, like having the freedom to do whatever we want is is always always good.
Joseph:Emmanuel, any piece you wanna shout out? You didn't have to.
Jason:He just did.
Emanuel:I just did.
Joseph:Oh, sorry. The film 1,
Emanuel:the film, the the his his two his two film development and then the the actual news that came out of it. I'm really sorry. Film stock. It's all good.
Joseph:No. I have people yelling at me in my emails right now. So I'm just trying to
Sam:Why are people yelling?
Emanuel:You wanna read it
Joseph:in the email?
Sam:Let's hear it. Let's hear it.
Joseph:No. No. I'm good. I'm good. It's just a part of being a journalist, telling me that why did you write this story or something.
Joseph:I know I skimmed.
Emanuel:I got an email from someone who, like, published something that is very public, and he was like, I don't want you to write about it. I was, like, okay. Cool. I took this before reading our inbox in the air.
Joseph:We should do that. Subscribers, certainly, here's a here's an inbox file. So we've done a lot of press in various different places. And the reason I bring this up is not because, oh, look all the press we're doing. It's more that I mean, I'm kind of curious if people can write in whether they actually know about these or not by I feel like if you're a subscriber, you may only get a slice of what we do.
Joseph:Like, we don't tell people, oh, we were on this, in this news website or on this podcast or something. Right? But we've been in a lot of different places with a lot of different, sort of outlets, I guess. You know, some well, a lot of journalism ones and there's some tech ones and that sort of thing. Sam, what was NPR on the media?
Joseph:Like, I mentioned it earlier, but what was the thought?
Sam:It was fun. I was a pinch hitter for Jason for that one, because he as we mentioned I don't know if you guys know, but Jason had COVID. So he was supposed to be on that podcast and then and then was like, I'm very, very ill, and I can you do it? And I was like, okay. I guess so.
Sam:Luckily, it's not it wasn't live. So it was, like, not a lot of pressure. And, also, like, I don't I think I just, like, talked very fast and a lot for, like, 30 minutes, and the host is very kind about it. But, yeah, it was fun. I mean, I like doing podcasts.
Sam:They're they're enjoyable. So and I like bragging about us. So that was a good one. It's a I mean, that's a big one too. It's like on the media.
Sam:It's a it's a very heavily listened to podcast. So no.
Jason:Yeah. You did a really good job, especially under, like, bad circumstances, which I dropped out of it, like, 3 minutes before because I just was I was feeling really sick. And I was like, Sam, you have to do this. I'm so sorry. It's fine.
Jason:I think everyone else was out.
Sam:I'll get you back when you least expect it. I'm gonna be set to go on, like, CNN or something, and I'm gonna make you do it.
Joseph:It Has to grab a suit really, really quickly or something. Yeah. Don't ever do that to me. I only I only own one suit, and I haven't dry cleaned it probably in the month or or or more, so don't ever do that to me. I went on search engine, which was actually more about my book, but Search Engine is a new podcast from PJ Vogt, and I really enjoyed it.
Joseph:It was really in-depth for an hour. The reason I bring it up is because they have been very kind and they have mentioned 404 Media several times. They've had these various conversations with various different people about independent media and sort of this shift towards it where people are quitting their corporate media jobs and making their own companies or newsletters. So that was fun, and they just occupy a similar space to us, but then also talk a lot about the people who, are definitely in the exact same space as us, like, Defector and and various other sites as well. I've been on Slates What Next TBD podcast.
Joseph:Jason, did you go on that as well?
Jason:Yeah. I've been on that a few times. They're they're very good. They ask really good questions. They have a really good story sense, so that's a good one.
Joseph:Yeah. I spoke about well, it was again the book actually, but then it it was about AI and policing and and and that sort of thing. And it's just nice that other journalists recognize that, oh, we need to talk to somebody about AI. Well, I'll they'll contact Sam or Emmanuel or if it's about deepfakes or Nudify or I know you did a lot of media about the Shrimp Jesus Facebook stuff, Jason. What are some of the others you went on that was trash Yeah.
Jason:I'm gonna shout out a couple that I've been on just because these are these are recommendations to our listeners. I'm not gonna belabor going on these, but these were, like, podcasts I really enjoyed the experience of going on and have started listening to since I, have been on them. So Trash Future is like a UK based dystopia comedy podcast, more or less. It's really funny. They're so much funnier than us.
Jason:I'm sorry, but they're really, really they're very knowledgeable and very funny. I don't they're a mix of, like, comedians and journalists, etcetera. I would recommend checking them out. Paris Marks' Tech Won't Save Us. Just fantastic show.
Jason:Definitely check that one out. Really good. And then I went on artificial human, which is a BBC Radio 4, podcast. I had only heard it once before, and I think that they had the best questions for me about Shrimp Jesus and AI, and they were it was it was just very well done and executed by them, I thought. And then Tectonic with Mark Hurst, this is a you should have you should go to the website of Tectonic.
Jason:It's, like, was designed in 1995 or something. And, this is on New Jersey public radio, and they have like a live chat that I don't know how it works, but it feels like a guest book vibes, while they do it. I would highly recommend checking them out as well.
Joseph:Yeah. And kind of what I said about, you know, partnering in limited forms with other media outlets, it just gives us a chance to reach other readers. And, of course, with an NPR one, it's like you're you're reaching a massive number of people. When it's more of a tech centric podcast, you're maybe reaching a particular audience that's interested in AI or or labor or privacy or whatever. And that's a great opportunity for us to be able to reach those people as well who may not ordinarily know about us or or visit the website.
Joseph:And that idea of reaching other people, I think leads on to what I want to talk about next, which is distribution. Which is getting our material out there, which is getting it in front of people to read. It's hard. It remains very hard. It was hard when we started, and I don't know if it's got more difficult.
Joseph:Maybe maybe it's the same. Like, what what defeat what do people think about, getting our articles in front of people?
Jason:Everything is still kind of the same that it always was, but also completely different. As in, like, I feel like a lot of our traffic and therefore readers come from things like Reddit, Hacker News, Slash Dot, and then of course, like people sharing it on socials. I think it's just that the effort required to get things onto to get these things to go, not even viral, but to, to get them to, like, have any pickup whatsoever takes, like, a lot more effort. And we talked about this before, but it really used to be the case that I would go tweet something and then never think about it again. And it would, like, make its way to all of these other platforms.
Jason:And now it's like, you have to be threading. You have to basically, like, make this story live natively on all of these different platforms more or less. And it's not that you have to completely sell it differently necessarily, but it is very hard for me at least. Some people are better at this, but for me to manage my presence across, like, 6 different platforms, and to respond to people there and, like, not have, people feel like I'm just dumping links and then moving on which admittedly I do on a couple of platforms where I'm just, like, I can't like, I'm barely on Blue Sky, but I post our articles there but I'm not, like, scrolling blue. I don't know what the con topic of conversation on Blue Sky is every day because it's just, like, I can't monitor all these and still have any idea.
Jason:Like, I couldn't do my job if I did that.
Joseph:I'm a little bit different in that well, I agree with everything you just said, and it it's labor, and it gets in the way. And, like, I wish I didn't have to do it because then I'd have more time to do journalism. But Blue Sky, I do post on just like I do on Twitter and, I'm asked on as well. And I don't know. Just the conversation seems to resonate a lot more of my articles there just because it's about data privacy, and all of that sort of thing.
Joseph:I have stopped even, like, logging in to Fred's. Like, I just I don't care. I'm sorry. Just, like, I don't even post links anymore, and maybe I'll get back to that. But it was like, I can't move off to build a whole following on this platform.
Joseph:And, I mean, maybe, Jason, you know more than this, but it seems like a very or more pro tech space, and I would say that my articles are not exactly pro tech. Like, do you think that's fair?
Jason:I mean, that's how I feel, and I I really don't like threads, but at the same time, sometimes I've had things go, like, massively viral on there in a way that feels like old Twitter, especially recently. And so there was a while where I was ignoring it because I was just like, it's too much. And now I feel like I'm starting to spend more time there. But the whole thing is is a mess and it's a we've talked about it before, but I feel like, growing an audience for a new thing is really hard. And we've, we've done it and we feel like very blessed that it it's working.
Jason:But, like, if we were trying to do scale only, I don't I don't know. I don't think it would be possible. Like, Emmanuel, you know way more about how traffic and the Internet works, I feel, or at least you're a kindred spirit in analyzing these things. Like, what do you think?
Emanuel:I mean, I definitely agree that scale would not work. Like, that's not our business. And the way that I think about morality and traffic has totally changed, because we have such a different business than Vice did. I guess I do look at it a lot, and I do think about it a lot. And I think I personally rather than think about platforms, I think about the specific mechanics through which something would go viral.
Emanuel:So literally sometimes I will write a story and I'll be like, well, this person will retweet it and they have 80,000 followers. And that's like a certain click on Twitter and they'll all retweet it and then somebody else will pick it up and like, yada yada yada. You know what I mean? It's like you can reverse engineer a viral story and see how it happened. And when we look at traffic, we can see how it happened.
Emanuel:Like, oh, this subreddit will pick it up and run with it. I just know it. And it does. You know? But I mean, to go back to what Joe was saying earlier, if I think something has no attraction and, like, no one is interested in it, maybe I won't write it.
Emanuel:But other than that, it's like, if I think there's any interest in it, then I'm just gonna, like, write it and publish it and hope for the best and not think about it again. And also, it's like advice when you used to publish something. And if it didn't get, like, 25,000 views, you'd feel like, why did I do this? And that is not the situation that we're in now because we have this whole other metric for success, which is people subscribing to the website. So, I mean, the example and I'm sorry to talk about my own story, but the example that I think about a lot is I wrote a story about LabCorp, which was very, very labor intensive.
Emanuel:It's like one of the hardest stories that I ever worked on. And it didn't go massively viral. Like, it did fine, but I think it did convert a lot of people to pay for the website. And that is just, like, more important to us now. Right?
Emanuel:And it's like when and and even though now it's not getting a lot of traffic, I think if you come to our website and you start clicking around and you see that story, it gives us as reporters and for for media as a company, I just, like, increases, like, the value proposition. Right? And every day that goes by, we publish more stories than increase the value proposition of of what we do here. And that's a very different and I think frankly better way to do journalism. I don't know that it's easier.
Emanuel:I mean, in a lot of ways, it's much harder. But I think it's it's healthier to chase trust and loyalty and, like, think about what value am I actually offering people by writing this story as opposed to, like, I know this is going to get people to click because it touches on something that is in the news or it's just, like, agitating in a certain way or whatever. I think we overall have better incentives now than than traffic, even though traffic is still very important.
Jason:I I think something you just mentioned brings us to, like, the next thing that Joseph has on our document here, which is the fact we're still not on Google News, which I wanna hear Joseph's rant on, but we're still also not indexed very well on Google, and that is probably partially because of our wall, which we can talk more about in a second. But I definitely worry about like, we have all of these great articles that we will be referring back to for a long time and that still have value and relevance even if we publish them months ago. And I really worry about people being able to find them because I don't know how I don't know how they're gonna find them really. And I think that that is like, in the past, Google search used to be the long tail traffic where you publish something and it just kept getting, like, views over time. Whereas, like, social and, I guess, Google News would be like, oh, here's the article of the day.
Jason:And I really worry about that with the AI snippets and the fact that we're not indexed super well. And I think that maybe we will need to figure out how to better surface this stuff on our own website, like greatest hits vibes or something like that. But, I really worry about the fact that Google isn't grabbing us correctly.
Emanuel:And also it's obviously punishing us for the wall. Right? So it's like, we'll have something and will rank well on Google, and then after a certain time, we'll put it behind a free wall or a pay wall. And that clearly impacts our Google ranking. Just think about your own Internet usage when you're Googling for something.
Emanuel:It doesn't happen often or at all in my experience where it's like you click in the top result on Google and it's a Wall Street Journal article with a paywall. Like, Google is not trying to send you there. It's trying to send you somewhere where you can scroll to the bottom and get all the information that you need, which I understand from, like, a Google user experience perspective. But from, like, a news health of information perspective, it's it's bad. And it's also bad for our, like, the long term Google traffic stuff.
Joseph:Yeah. So the note I have in the document is still not on Google News, several exclamation marks and fucking nuts exclamation point, which I absolute well, I've I wrote it. Obviously, I agree with it. Case case in point, I go to Google News. I type in Ray Bans' Meta, which is a reference to the story we just published today, which is about how these Harvard students took Ray Ban, the meta Ray Ban smart glasses and combined it with facial recognition technology, LLMs, people search sites to instantly dock strangers in public.
Joseph:It is one of the wildest privacy stories I've ever covered or projects I've ever seen. You type in Ray Bans Meta into Google News. The top result, The Verge. College students use Meta's smart glasses to docs people in real time. You read the article.
Joseph:It is referencing our report. There's another one from MacRumors. Students add facial recognition to Meta smart glasses to identify strangers in real time. I open the article. It is immediately citing us.
Joseph:Thank you, MacRumors, for for doing that. I I I I appreciate that. Right at the top is clearly treating us as a news source. And what I would just add to that is that, obviously, we are not in the Google News results for that story even though we broke that news, and I spent time talking to those students and verifying that what they were doing was real, which is not to disparage you ever reporting of the people who have done. They sort of ping meta as well.
Joseph:But it's like our original reporting is not being included in Google News, and that is because as an outlet, as a media company, we are not seen as a source inside Google News. Now you can search for 404 Media, and then you'll go and I think you'll, like, find our page or something like that, a topic and a source, and I'm clicking on that. I've clicked 404 Media as a topic. That's now all articles just about us, obviously. I then click 4 zero four media as a source, and it does have our articles.
Joseph:I was like, okay. Great. It doesn't surface them for a news issue. It doesn't surface them for, oh, this news happened, and 4 zero four media broke it, or 4 zero four media reported on it. Here is their well, not even their take.
Joseph:Here is the news that they broke. And I don't know how much traffic or interest the Google News generates. I presume it's quite substantial because people are on here and people want to get on here. I'm I'm more just pissed off. It's just like a principle to me that we're breaking this news and you're not letting us on.
Joseph:And I think the last time we heard about this was that it's, it's not a manual process. So we're on Apple News, and that's an invite only, process where Apple comes to you and say, we think you produce high quality journalism. We'll bring you into Apple News. You can then be on the platform. And we've done that, and, it gets our articles in front of other people.
Joseph:I don't think ordinarily who would see it, and that's great. Google is much more automatic or algorithmic in that Google, the big capital g Google algorithm, has to see you as a reliable source and then introduce you to Google News so then you can do everything I just said. And that hasn't happened. And last time we heard from Google or in passing about it, it was like, it would be unfair to manually introduce outlets. Well, didn't we find the outlets that were ripping off our articles when we create an AI copy of our website were included in Google News?
Joseph:Like, is that right, Emmanual?
Emanuel:I mean, yes. I guess, I am Everything you say is true. I guess my level of worry about all of this is far lower now than it used to be, and that is primarily because we're in a good healthy spot financially. And also not because we're geniuses, but because this is how it shook up shook out because of Google and social media. It's like we're just kind of relying on human recommendation now, more or less.
Emanuel:It's like and that is people telling people, but more than that, it's like other outlets referencing our work and other newsletters and independent media publications recommending us. And that is sort of like the basket that our eggs are in by by default. And it's working out. And I look over at, like, the other model, which is, like, trying to do SEO and engineering content for social media. And those people are like screaming from the rooftops about how everything is broken and like entire websites are getting shut down because they lost like the SEO lottery.
Emanuel:So it's like, would it be nice to be the first result for this news that we break? Obviously, would it be nice if Reddit linked to our work when we break the news? Like, I didn't even have the heart to tell Jason, but it's like, I think that an aggregation of the exoskeleton story hit the front page. And it's like a fine it's a fine aggregation.
Jason:I saw it.
Emanuel:Yeah. Okay. You saw it. And it's like
Joseph:We we try not to hurt each other. Right. So it's
Emanuel:like if I was advice and it was mother born, I I would get really mad. Right? But now I see them. I was like, that's too bad. But it's like, it's fine.
Emanuel:You know what I mean? It's just like we're getting more subscribers. The the the people who we can convert are finding us and continue to find us. So it's like it's not fair and it's wrong. And I think this will have very bad outcomes for, like, for Google.
Emanuel:But for us, I think it's gonna be okay.
Joseph:To be to be clear, I totally agree with everything you said. I absolutely do not want to, like, rely on Google either. Like, that sounds
Jason:Of course.
Joseph:Awful. You know? I don't want anything to do with that. Again, it's not even about the traffic for me. It's just the principle.
Joseph:I'm just, like, outraged that it's just, like, you allow this clickbait, like, garbage, and I'm referring to the AI copies of us, not of a legitimate use websites, and you just don't allow us. It just seems like a broken system, and that annoys me. And, I mean, you mentioned the well, I mean, I mean, you mentioned that we have this subscriber base, and and I would just stress that, like, that is why it's so important we have the subscribers because we're not at the whims of some random ass algorithm that will or will not introduce us. And may maybe we even were in Google News, and then tomorrow they change something and they kick us off. You know what I mean?
Joseph:Like, that's why we are a vast majority of our income comes from subscribers. Right? And I think just the last thing I'll say is, like, that is why email is so vital because as Jason was saying about social networks and, like, having to post all of those, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, all that stuff about Google News and then just Google more generally. This is why we emphasize email so much because it is a largely direct way to get our articles to you. Now there are some there are some issues with, with email.
Joseph:You know, we get reports from subscribers. There's like, hey. Your email was marked as spam and that sort of thing. I think that's something to do about how we constantly change the sender name because, obviously, we wanna say that Joseph sent this, and Mango sent this, and Sam sent this, whatever. I I didn't fully know, to be perfectly honest.
Joseph:But that is why you get an email every day if you've, subscribed to it, obviously. You get an email every day saying, this is our big story of the day. And we publish so many today. We have to email one of those tomorrow because it was just a deluge of of news, but that's why we, emphasize it so much. We mentioned earlier this free war that we put up in large part because AI companies and websites and, hustlers, I guess, were, like, scraping our work and and reproducing it.
Joseph:The wall remains fluid. Like, the vast majority of our investigations, our articles do end up behind the paywall and only accessible to subscribers, but we continue to experiment because if you if you do it too aggressively, too early, you can kill a story. I mean, I really think it depends on the type of story as well. And I know we're just still figuring out and still improvising, and I think that's okay. Like, I don't think you have to have a set policy, but I think it's working.
Joseph:You know? And I think subscribers get their money worth because they get access to those 700 or whatever, 500 articles that we've written. Yeah. Any thoughts on the wall, Jason?
Jason:I mean, I think it remains the most like, unscientific thing that we do. It's just, it's very complicated. It's super complicated. I think that we talked about this before, but as a, an internet user, I would like things to be seamless, like a seamless experience. And hopefully if you're subscribed, it's pretty seamless.
Jason:Like you can get it through RSS. Like, hopefully, you stay logged in for a long time. Hopefully, you don't have trouble getting logged in, logged out, things like that. But I just, like, weave walled stuff sometimes when we publish them, and then I can see that no one is sharing it because no one knows what this like, only then our readers, our subscribers are gonna know what the story is, and sometimes people aren't willing to do it. And so I think often it's like we will leave it unwalled for a very short period of time so that people can share it.
Jason:And then once people start sharing it, we will put a wall up. But I I think that there's there's still, like, a lot of human guesswork going on there, and it's, like, I think the ideal would be some sort of, like, metered situation. But, because of the way Ghost works, it's kind of difficult. Like, there Ghost doesn't really use cookies at all. We also theoretically want our website to be, like, low touch in terms of trackers and things like that.
Jason:Like, there are ways to metered paywalls in, way that doesn't that doesn't have cookies, except for if you do it that way, it can be bypassed trivially, like, super easily. You can just, like, open it incognito.
Joseph:Like, the search journals one and that sort of thing.
Jason:Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. It's it's tricky, but I mean, overall, it's working. I think it's just like, I have seen people say on, like on Twitter or Mastodon or wherever, like, oh, this is paywalled.
Jason:And very often, it's not paywalled. It's just like it's an email wall or something like that. And I don't know. It's hard to convey that. We try to convey all of that, but it's like from a user experience side, it's, it's difficult.
Jason:And we're like not we're kind of limited in the amount of web design that we can do at the moment. It's just like, we're not web designers and we have to contract that stuff out. And, yeah, I think it's like something that we would probably like to do is have a more see like a, a experiment with like a metered paywall or, or something different.
Joseph:Well, that's what we wanted potentially when we launched. Right? But as you say, it's just not available out of the box and goes, and it's like, we had no money at the start. It was like a very, very, very small investment from all of us just to be able to buy the domain and that sort of thing. But, like, I don't know.
Joseph:Maybe we do that in the future, but it's a nontrivial problem for sure. We seem to take on a lot of nontrivial problems, and then we have to figure them out. But, you know, maybe that'd be an interesting one.
Sam:People I've talked to about the wall and, like, how we do it are always really surprised. Like, they don't really understand what I'm saying when I say it first that we do it manually. They're like, what do you mean? You've like, you change every post to be free walled and then pay walled? When?
Sam:How? What are you talking about? And it's like, yeah. We go into the article in the CMS, and we have to flip a little toggle to make it whatever type of wall we want, and it's very much Widespace, which is strange to people. But, yeah, you would think there's there's gotta be an ease there's an easier way, but we don't wanna inflict a bunch of tracking on people.
Joseph:Yeah. Like, maybe we should figure out a policy, a policy, but even then, like, I don't know. There's nothing wrong with experimenting, and that's what we continue, to do. My favorite one is when people will at me on Twitter or whatever and say paywall, and I'm like, yeah, I know. I turned it on.
Joseph:Yeah. I was like, yeah, I
Sam:did it. Why are you telling me?
Joseph:I literally turned it on. I know it's paywalls. You know? Alright. How about we talk about the party, which was our 1 year anniversary party.
Joseph:Sam, you were the driving force behind this. You did an absolutely phenomenal job organizing basically everything. Me and Emmanuel just turned up. You know? And they carried maybe a
Emanuel:couple of lights. The lanyard, bro. We put up Dude, that was hot. That was hot. It was much harder than anything Sam has ever done.
Sam:That's true, actually. Anything. Jason didn't know that. He Jason writhed in bed in Los Angeles, which, again, COVID.
Jason:I I did mail the merch. I mailed
Sam:the merch. The merch to me, which is still in my house. And, yeah, it was a lot of fun. I don't know. I I keep saying we wanna do more parties, but we're also just very tired, I think, from the last month and a half, but more parties on the horizon.
Joseph:For for those who weren't there, can you just briefly say, what you brought, what we did, what it felt was like.
Sam:So if you weren't there
Emanuel:because, of
Joseph:course, it was very localized, you know, and that's that's just how it was that time, you know, but maybe we'll do more in the future.
Sam:Yeah. I mean, so if you weren't there, you should have been there. Beyonce was there. Katy Perry was there. Billie Eilish came through.
Sam:Joe and Emmanuel were there. No. I mean, it was, yeah, it was a good time. A lot it was cool to see people in person, honestly. I think because we all work from home and we're in our little worlds and we're all on the Internet all day, it's like we're talking to our subscribers and our readers online all the time, but then to see people in person and to see people, like, show up in a really big way.
Sam:It was like the turnout was really good. I had to, like, like, figure out how to sell tickets on Eventbrite at the door, which was, like, shocking to me. I was like, people were just showing up and being like, I want in, at the door, which is awesome. It was at the woods, which thank you to the woods in Brooklyn. And, yeah, it was cool to see people IRL.
Sam:I don't know. That's kind of I it was a blur to me.
Joseph:It was it No. You go ahead, Emmanuel.
Emanuel:I was pretty confident that people would show up because it was in Brooklyn, and we know a lot of people in Brooklyn. And Sam and Jason are very popular and invited all their friends who showed up. But it was
Joseph:You admitted me from there, and I appreciate that.
Emanuel:And and myself.
Jason:Many of my friends didn't show up because they heard I wasn't gonna be there, and then they didn't come.
Sam:So I was like, where's Jason? And I was like, Jesus Christ.
Emanuel:Well, the the thing that was really I don't know what word I would use even. It was very nice. It was just extremely nice to have people come up to me and be like, hey, I'm so and so. I started reading the site because of this story, and I'm really interested in it. Like, oh, I'm a teacher and I'm really interested about surveillance in schools.
Emanuel:So I started reading the website and I really like it. I'm so happy to be here. And then just like having a little conversation about their job, and things that I might be interested in and not somebody who followed us from motherboard and not someone we know personally, just somebody who dare I say it, it's like, I think we all are worried about using this word, but, like, part of our community, it definitely felt that way when we were there for the first time. Like, oh, these people are just, like, into what we do and, like, dig each other and, wanna support us. And to see that in real life and have those people be very cool and not psychos was wonderful.
Emanuel:It was really, really nice. Thank you for coming out. Thank you for for coming up to me and saying something nice.
Joseph:Yeah. And that's sort of why I asked you to say earlier, like, our origin story because that is something again I've learned at the party, but then also over the past year is that I think people from the outside looking in, and again, I would have assumed the same, was like, oh, they they were just followed over from Motherboard. And it's like, these are entirely new people who did not know us before, and I find that really refreshing and just interesting in that we publish articles and then somebody sees, like, your LabCorp story as you said, or maybe I do something other data privacy. Like, oh, what's going on here? And then they get looped into it.
Joseph:That is is promising. You know? It shows that, oh, you don't have to rely on, like, previous credentials. You can build something new, and, that's what we've done. Also, there was somebody wearing a iPad earring that was fucking sick.
Joseph:It was literally an iPad hanging from the ear.
Sam:I saw some really good styles. Somebody had a cap that said Wikipedia editor. Good shit.
Joseph:Were were they in the Wiki I think they were. Right?
Jason:I have that hat.
Sam:Do you?
Jason:I got a XOXO from depths of Wikipedia.
Sam:No way. Okay.
Jason:Fantastic. I need
Sam:to get
Jason:a Yeah. It's depths of Wikipedia merge. Should check that out. I see.
Joseph:Very nice.
Jason:That was after you left, Sam.
Sam:Yeah. Yeah. Missed it.
Jason:Well Dude, so can I tell the story of how Sam got into a bike accident when we were together, in Portland, and it was the scariest thing that's ever happened to
Sam:something else that probably does? Yeah.
Jason:Yeah. That's something else that happened to us. So we were at XOXO, which is a conference in Portland, and Sam and I were going to a party, for The Verge. Like, The Verge threw a party there. So we were gonna go see people who work at The Verge, and, we were we took out a bike share, and we biked there.
Jason:Portland is a very bikeable city. It is also seemingly like prone to sudden downpours, because it was sunny when we got the bike and then suddenly, like there were localized rain clouds directly above us.
Sam:And there were ebikes also. So there
Jason:There were ebikes. Yeah. And we turned we got almost there and we turned on the street and it had, like, grates in the ground. Yeah. Tram tracks.
Jason:And I thought to myself, this is very dangerous and scary, like literally like 10 seconds before I hear a terrible noise. And I look back and Sam had fallen into the train tracks and fallen directly in front of an SUV, and her head was very close to the wheel of the SUV, and it was so scary.
Sam:Duh. I was like, I made a noise that, like, I hope to never it haunts me. It's like, that's the noise I make right before I die, that kind of noise, which I'm sure is what Jason heard. And I, like, I didn't even the guy jumped out of the car and was like I'm, like, laying in the mud under his car, and he jumps out and he says, why did you hit me like that? Which, fair, because I literally skidded out into the road and hit the SUV into the side of the SUV with my head.
Joseph:Like, didn't I do it on purpose?
Sam:No. I was like I I think I said, like, I I slipped. But, like, from his point of view, this nut just, like, rammed him from the side head first for no reason. He was then very nice.
Joseph:And then
Sam:and then people in Portland, like, a bunch of people came over and were like, are you okay? And then Jason, like, came back. He was like, what the fuck just happened? And then we continued on to the party, by the way. Yeah.
Sam:Wet and bleeding.
Joseph:Mild mild concussion. Nothing that 5 to 6 beers can't fix.
Sam:That's why I was like, I feel great. I wanna drink. And then that later that night, I was like, I feel like I got hit by a car.
Joseph:Well, you hit a car. Right?
Sam:I hit a car. We hit each other.
Joseph:Yeah. Mutually responsible. Yeah. I mean, that was no. That's terrifying.
Jason:I bring this up because, we almost lost the founder that day.
Sam:Yeah. There's been many close calls. You almost died of COVID. It's like yeah. Emmanuel almost died on a plane or something trying to get through, security.
Sam:Joe, I don't know what you're up to. You're almost dying every day.
Joseph:Various people are trying to kill me.
Sam:Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing that we're alive every day. Yeah.
Joseph:It's true. Well, with with that sentiment, let's briefly, before we wrap up, look to the future. What are we I mean, I it's funny. We haven't even spoken about this. This is, like, our team meeting now.
Joseph:But just briefly, like, what are we planning for our 2nd year of 4 zero four Media? We recently started taking a few more freelance, pieces. You know, obviously, we have Becky doing the abstract. We've had a couple of pieces from Matthew Gault as well. So, you know, maybe we're gonna do some more of that.
Joseph:I wouldn't say that we're turning to a freelance as a sort of model. I mean, at least personally, I I still wanna focus on my journalism, you know, and and all of your journalism as well, but a good piece is a good piece. I'm interested in more podcasts, for sure. Not me doing the audio of them, as well. I tried the DEFCON one.
Joseph:Had some good interviews. It was tricky, you know, but,
Sam:I thought that turned out good. I liked it.
Joseph:Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It was actually it was a hell of a lot of work considering it was, like, 20 minutes, 25 minutes or something. It was it was hard. It was it was exhausting, but I enjoyed it.
Joseph:I would love to do a narrative podcast in some form. I don't know what that would be, but, I think there's room there. You know? Jason, what do you think about that? I know you because you're much more you're much more across the audio side of things.
Jason:Yeah. I mean, I think that narrative podcasts are cool. They're very time consuming, and they're very specialized. I I would love to do one. I think we'd have to do one in partnership with a production company, probably, just considering the time outlay.
Jason:And it would probably have to be like a specific story. Not just like an ongoing, like, 4 zero four media narrative podcast. It would probably be like a limited series where we had a really great story that we were kind of telling. But, yeah, I mean, I would love to do that. I I think that we have talked about turning some of our articles into documentaries or scripted stuff.
Jason:You know, we don't have anything to announce or, like, any projects specifically in the works, but, like, we've had meetings about that stuff. And I I really enjoy that, and I think that we've had genuine interest in some of our stories. So it it it's been like, I would hope hopefully this year, you know, to do some more of that. I also think that while we're doing with the abstract is really cool, I think the abstract is great. I think that, like having something that people can look forward to on a specific day is nice.
Jason:But I think we, we have to be like careful about how we do it because we don't, one, we like, as you said, we don't wanna water down our own work. And I think 2, we don't wanna overextend ourselves. We talked about this at the top of the podcast, but like our company is in a good place, but it's still like, we can't go hiring tons of people at this moment. Like we, we don't have that sort of, financial or, brain bandwidth for it. And I think that that's something that, I think that's something we've learned where it's like, you, you might not get everything done properly if you do it yourself, like as in we weren't audio engineers or whatever, but I'm glad that we did it our selves to start with so that we could learn what goes into it and what to do and what not to do.
Jason:And then that helped us, like when we went to go, bring on an audio engineer, we knew what to to look for. And so I think that kind of had to do that with everything where I don't know. If we start bringing in, like, tons of consultants and, like, solve this problem for us, solve that problem for us, like, it it will get messy very quickly and get financially untenable really quickly. And that's, like, when we started. We said, you know, we wanna be conservative and sustainable about this.
Jason:So that's part of why we don't have, like, a social media editor, and it's, like, that that would be something that would probably be very good for us. But at the same time, it's, like, do we have the bandwidth not only to pay for this person but also to, like, manage them properly, and treat them fairly and figure out, like, how to do, you know, the HR type stuff that would be required, with that. So, yeah, that was a rant, a ramble, but that's like the sort of things that I'm personally thinking about as we're thinking about growing.
Joseph:Yeah. For sure. I mean, it's hard. Yeah. You you can't just bring someone on and be like, okay.
Joseph:Go do it. We have a very particular style, a very particular style of journalism, political leanings as as well, like a voice. We all definitely have our own voices and having bringing other people in either with their own voice or to mimic mimic our own. It's it's, it's not straightforward necessarily, but I'm really, really glad where we are. I mean, I think we're just gonna continue to grow, but, responsibly, we're gonna have these fits and starts of, oh, a big piece of growth because we did a story or, as you said, Jason, the past few weeks, have been quite slow, and that's all fine.
Joseph:And it's much more that it's okay if it's slow because we have the sustainable base of the subscribers. And, I mean, I open a Google document we have called the prog doc, which is sort of an artifact from when you 2 ran Muffleboard, and I didn't really use it then obviously because I wasn't an editor in any capacity. But I open that up and it it shows the articles we have for the coming week, and I'm like, oh, we're fine. And then I chill out. You know?
Joseph:It's like it's a very therapeutic document, to go through, at least personally. It would be nice to be slightly less busy. Again, that's sort of why this podcast has been so delayed. I thought it was just something we'd go in on late August, early September, and we'd do it or whatever. But things have actually ramped up with various projects, stories, and, administrative stuff and all of that.
Joseph:Maybe we'll get less busy. I I guess we'll we'll see. But, kind of just to round it off, I guess, sort of what stories or maybe areas are we thinking about over the coming year? My one personally is actually what I published when we first launched the company, which is credit header data, which is the data that you give to a bank or a credit card company that then goes to, a credit bureau or whatever that then trickles down and hackers manage to get that and it lets people dox them. I know the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is aggressively looking into this.
Joseph:I feel like I've been yelling about it nonstop, and I get on the phone with people. I explain the issue and they but I can't see them because we're on the phone. But, like, I can tell they're staring into space. Like, I'm absolutely fucking crazy. I'm gonna continue hitting that, I think.
Joseph:Jason, what about you? I mean, this isn't a pitch meeting.
Jason:Yeah. No. I I think I wanna do a couple stories this year where, something I'm I'm writing about something that's happening in real life. And I'm like at that thing, like in the field reporting for lack of a better term. I'm very happy with the articles I did in the 1st year and it will probably be more of the same.
Jason:I think, for very good reason we have over indexed on AI, and I think AI is going to remain really important and we're going to continue to write about it a lot but like if you told me that first day that we would write about AI so much I would be like, oh, that's, I don't know. Like we've written many, many stories about AI and we're gonna continue to write many, many stories about AI, but I, I wanna also try to think about other things I can write about in addition to that.
Joseph:Sam, what do you got on your plate?
Sam:That's a tough question, in my opinion. Well, lit literally, as
Joseph:we're talking, you've just posted an AI thing in the chat.
Sam:Well, I'm posting
Joseph:Which I actually saw.
Sam:Scooping something that we were talking about, so that doesn't count.
Joseph:I see.
Sam:It's
Joseph:dead it's dead to us. Yeah. Yeah.
Sam:Ignore ignore it. I was listening to everything you guys were saying, but I was also in Slack. Yeah. I mean, it's tough to, like, kinda it's tough for me to kinda I'm not good at planning out because I feel like every day I wake up, and it'll be like, what's happening today? What new horrors would the Internet show me today?
Sam:And that's kind of what we do. But, obviously, I'm kinda continuing on this thread of, like, what's going on inside of companies and how they're using AI. I think that that's gonna I do think that there's, like, a bubble effect coming up with that where we're gonna kinda see that being less of a thing. But even that is interesting because these companies are blowing a lot of money on this shit, and, I wanna know why and how that's going on. And I don't know.
Sam:I mean, I not to be like a a big dork, but, like, the election is in November. And I feel like depending on how that goes, will affect a lot of stuff it might be with the adult industry and, kind of the the aftermath of that will be interesting with, like, the project 2025 stuff, coming up. And age verification and things like that are gonna keep being an issue no matter who's in charge. But, yeah, that's that's where my head's at.
Joseph:Yeah. And I'm already daydreaming of depending on which way it goes, like, is there gonna be more surveillance of abortion clinics, all of that sort of thing? And I'm almost mapping out, like, what I'm gonna be doing, potentially. But, you know, I guess we'll have to see. And, Emmanuel, just to round it off, what what are you thinking about potentially for the year coming?
Emanuel:I mean, I'm definitely more in Sam's camp where, it's whatever is on fire on any given day and what I have time to get to, but without without scooping myself, because I'm looking at 2 things right now, I'll be a little vague, but one is, just an adaptation to AI. Like, we've written a lot about the problems, and I think that people are starting to actually deal deal with it and mitigate against many of the problems that we've highlighted. And then the other one is I believe that generative AI has, I'm sorry. This is again gonna sound very right. It's like it's it's trickled down into the system in ways that we have not fully realized yet.
Emanuel:And is it appearing in places that we have not uncovered yet, and is impacting us in ways that we have not yet covered. I'm sorry. This is very vague.
Joseph:No. I get it because I I think I know what you're talking about, and it's a very good story slash area and you shouldn't scoop yourself. But Yeah.
Emanuel:It's just like Yep. I guess another way to say it is like, we've covered AI for a year and a lot of it is like, wow, this is new. Look at this. This is crazy. But it has matured in several ways.
Emanuel:Right? So it's like the sophistication of the way it's being leveraged to, like, abuse is much more sophisticated and the way that people mitigate it against against it is much more sophisticated and more grassroots than just like, oh, Facebook is gonna watermark images. Like, people are getting together and trying to do something about it.
Joseph:Yeah. And also, potentially the scale and where the AI may be. And I'll leave it at that. This has been a really, really fun, podcast. Thank you.
Joseph:If you listen to this, you are obviously a paid for a full media subscriber. As I think we've demonstrated over the past 1 hour and 23 minutes and 42 seconds, we cannot do this without your support. The vast majority of our revenue and income comes from you as a paying subscriber, and you are the reason that we are able to do this. I think people appreciate when we are transparent about the business as we can be, and I feel like we've done that here. So, I hope you as a listener, enjoyed this as well.
Joseph:We will do another comments show soon. We didn't do that here because we just wanted to talk about sort of the business and the the media outlet side of things. We will do a subscriber comment show soon. I'm not committing to a date because our schedules are fucking crazy. But with that, I will play us out with the really, really intense subscriber music.
Joseph:Goodbye.