As Obama famously quipped during his last Whitehouse Correspondent dinner:

     Even reporters have left me. Savannah Guthrie, she has left the White House press corps to host the Today show. Norah O’Donnell left the briefing room to host CBS This Morning. Jake Tapper left journalism to join CNN.

Many publications have long relied on outside contributors with various degrees of transparency and conflicts of interest. When blogging was the hotness, as an analyst, I contributed to CNET (unpaid; they paid some bloggers but I didn't want that conflict of interest). After CBS bought them and the whole blog climate changed (and I moved to a vendor), I stopped doing that. But a ton of that sort of thing went on in the tech trade press--some good and some almost certainly not so good.

The key difference is that ProPublica is a non-profit. There are very few non-profit investigative journalism orgs in the world, but their funding is fundamentally different than for-profit news orgs. They rely on public grants to keep things running, so therefore, they don't have to abuse their brand in similar ways.

That's also why they publish only a couple of stories per day instead of hundreds, why they never cover breaking news, why there's a donate button (as opposed to now-standard paywalls), why there's no ads, why the interface appears cleaner etc. If we were talking about tech companies, it'd be like comparing Wikimedia/Mozilla/Internet Archive to traditional for-profit tech companies. To an untrained eye there is no difference, but a somewhat trained eye quickly realises that their incentives are completely different.

(Disclaimer: I work for a different non-profit investigative journalism organization.)

They are funded by NGOs controlled by billionaires, so in the end there is a number of things they cannot investigate if they want to maintain the NGO money.

That's not how grants work, they don't come with a "you can't report on us specifically" clause.

There is no such clause because that would be unlawful, but there is certainly the "unwritten clause" of whether the NGO likes your work or not.

But it could be that if you don't follow the unwritten rules, you don't get another grant next year.

It's common wisdom that you "don't bite the hand that feeds you".

While this is technically correct, it is the wrong response to GP.

Yes. ProPublica is biased to look in certain directions. Every single reporter, editor, publisher, is biased in this way. The answer to this is more, not less.

FIRE rose from decisions the ACLU took about representing cases. This is a fundamentally good thing, speaking as a diehard ACLU supporter.

Speaking as a huge fan of ProPublica, I'm hoping that they're investigating all of the supreme court justices (for example), because we won't pass laws to reign in judicial corruption without bipartisan action. But if they aren't, I desperately hope that there's a market for a conservative-focus investigative outfit that can stick to the facts like ProPublica.

Hopefully there are multiple organizations with different funding sources who aren’t beholden to each other, so they can fill whatever gaps in coverage they see. That would be a better outcome than everyone refusing journalism as a career because you will always have a conflict of interest with whoever is paying you.

It's also why ProPublica's content niche is so small. They don't cover anything except corruption and abuses of power. No sports, no celebrity news, no news about new movies or music, etc. They can't afford more, and their charter doesn't allow it anyway.

I’ve seen a lot of non-profit journalism outfits coming out of the woodwork.

These aren't news sections that are being outsourced, they're things like "The 9 best leggings on Amazon, according to fitness experts¹" and "Best pet insurance companies of September 2024²".

¹ https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/fashion/best-leggings-on...

² https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/pet-insurance/best-..., https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/best-pet-insurance

Click forbes.com, then hamburger icon, then scroll the list to the “advisor” or “health” news sections.

Sample sections from advisor:

- Cheap Car Insurance

- Pet Insurance

- How Much Is Pet Insurance?

- Cheap Pet Insurance

Under health, they have a sub-section “best cbd gummies”. I clicked on a few articles and they’re outsourced(?) amazon affiliate spam that claims Forbes actually tested the products.

The health section is served from forbes.com, but the navigation is different and includes a “back to forbes.com” button.

In some other parts of forbes.com they have clear disclaimers, like:

Innovation -> SAP Brand Voice | Paid program

So, they’re definitely trying to pass off the marketplace content as legitimate news sections.

I don't buy the claim that this is trying to pass as news. It just looks like 90% of the other review pages on the internet. Here's what I'm seeing:

At the top of the page I see an Advertising Disclosure link. After that I see a byline for the actual human freelancer that wrote the article.

After that I see a huge call-out that "Commissions we earn from partner links on this page do not affect our opinions or evaluations. Our editorial content is based on thorough research and guidance from the Forbes Health Advisory Board".

Below that is a "Featured Partner Offer" with an info popover that reads "Partner Offers feature brands who paid Forbes Health to appear at the top of our list. While this may influence where their products or services appear on our site, it in no way affects our ratings, which are based on thorough research, solid methodologies and expert advice. Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services". The offer contains no rating or editorial text.

Below that are the reviewed items, which have ratings and editorial text. Some of the text is linked to full reviews of specific products (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/health/cbd/cbdfx-gummies-review/).

Below that is the methodology: "To determine the best CBD gummies, the Forbes Health editorial team analyzed data on over 100 CBD gummy products ... then ranked the CBD gummies based on price, potency, flavor options available and whether its ingredients are all natural, organic, gluten-free and/or vegan-friendly." They don't claim to have tested all of them.

Again, this looks like 90% of the other review pages on the web, including things Forbes already publishes (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/article..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/article...).

>It just looks like 90% of the other review pages on the internet.

90% of websites are not in the top 10% of mainstream media big budget brand reputation... so if the top 10% look like the other 90%, that says something, and it's not good.

That sounds like an obfuscated way of saying that pre-internet brands shouldn't be allowed to compete with tech bros.

Your deduction from this that they are trying to pass of the content as news is actually crazy.

I'm pretty sure I saw a "Forbes" guide on how to beat some video game quest at some point, or some other video game thing people would have been searching for at the time. I understood it to be SEO spam but this whole comment section puts it into better context.

These sort of pay-to-play review marketing didn't originate on the internet. These are copies of arrangements that print media invented. My hometown newspaper had this kind of stuff too.

News sections are outsourced to AP's essaybots.