404 Media Is Doing Important Tech Journalism

I’ve recently been banging on about the importance of relying on specific trusted sources for your news and information rather than allowing yourself to be manipulated by social media and search engine algorithms—see “TUAW Joins iLounge as an AI-Powered Zombie Site ” (11 July 2024) and “Comparing Blogtrottr, Feedrabbit, and Follow.it for Receiving RSS Feeds in Email” (22 August 2024). One tech publication I’ve become increasingly impressed with is 404 Media, which just celebrated its first year.

Journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox founded 404 Media after working together at Vice’s Motherboard. In their introductory post, they wrote:

At 404 Media, we aspire to do society-shifting technology journalism, and to create a sustainable, responsible, reader-supported media business around it. We will report and publish stories that you will not find anywhere else, that we believe only we can do. We hope these stories will take over the internet, impact public policy, and expose bad actors. We will point out the absurd. We will be irreverent and have fun. We will also do very serious work. We hope that you will read these stories and want to send them to your group chat, or bring them up as conversation starters at parties.

I’ve subscribed since early this year and can confirm that 404 Media is doing important investigative journalism that’s highly unusual in today’s tech world. Very few other publications actually break stories or venture beyond opinions based on information already in the public sphere. I’ll cop to that with my writing in TidBITS—while I’ve broken some stories over the years, I’m fundamentally a tech writer focused on explaining the world, not a reporter canvassing sources for the next big scoop.

How did the foursome at 404 Media do in their first year? When announcing their anniversary, they recapped their year with a distinct air of hotlinked satisfaction (although I also appreciated their subsequent personal commentary—it’s a nice reminder that there are real people behind it all):

In our first year, we have exposed how fraudsters can make realistic photos of fake identity documents in seconds, how hackers in the digital underground attack one another, how multi-billion and trillion-dollar companies gobble up the internet to train AI, and exposed dangerous working conditions in the country’s biggest medical lab. We explained how big tech companies favor AI slop over human-made content, got to the bottom of Facebook’s Shrimp Jesus AI spam situation, have demystified how the ticket scalper industry works, and uncovered thousands of pages of documents via public records requests. Our work led to Google cutting off a sketchy surveillance company; curtailed abuse of VC-backed artificial intelligence company Civitai; forced Microsoft to stop people making explicit AI-images of Taylor Swift using its tools; triggered a lawsuit against Nvidia for scraping YouTube, and much more.

And it continues. Just days later, Joseph Cox wrote a story sharing the Cox Media Group (CMG) pitch deck for “active listening” ad targeting, a follow-up on 404 Media’s earlier coverage of services that claim to target ads based on what potential customers say within range of device microphones. The deck never says where CMG allegedly sources this voice data but claims that CMG partners with Google, Amazon, and Facebook. In response to 404 Media’s queries, Google removed CMG from its Partners Program, Amazon said that it had never worked with CMG, and Meta (Facebook) said it was looking into whether CMG violated the company’s terms and conditions. That’s journalism with a positive impact.

I don’t necessarily agree with 404 Media’s stance on everything, but I’m looking for trusted sources to tell me things I don’t already know, not an echo chamber. They track down tips, scour court documents, and push for corporate comments, all in the service of exposing what’s really happening in tech. My only issue with 404 Media’s coverage is that it reveals the broader tech industry to be a darker, more unscrupulous place than I’d prefer to believe.

404 Media is independent, without a deep-pocketed corporate backer. Some of the site’s articles are available for free with ads, but 404 Media’s primary funding comes from subscribers who pay $10 per month or $100 per year. Subscribing opens up access to all articles, eliminates the ads, allows commenting, provides a full-text RSS feed, and more, a bit like our TidBITS membership program. Honestly, I wasn’t unhappy with the amount of content with the free email subscription; I subscribed to support 404 Media’s work, not because I needed more content. If you’re interested in deeper tech journalism that you won’t find elsewhere, sign up for the free subscription and see what you think.