I’ve been stressing time and time again recently the importance of relying on certain trusted sources for news and information rather than being manipulated by social media and search engine algorithms – see “TUAW Joins iLounge as an AI-Powered Zombie Site” (July 11, 2024) and “Comparing Blogtrottr, Feedrabbit, and Follow.it for Receiving RSS Feeds in Email” (August 22, 2024). One tech publication that continues to impress me 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 strive to do society-changing technology journalism and build a sustainable, responsible, reader-supported media company around it. We will report and publish stories you won’t find anywhere else, and we believe only we can. We hope these stories will sweep the internet, influence 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 you’ll read these stories and want to send them to your group chat or bring them up as conversation starters at parties.

I’ve been a subscriber since the beginning of the year and can attest that 404 Media does important investigative journalism that is 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 domain. I’ll admit that with my TidBITS posts – while I’ve broken some stories over the years, I’m fundamentally a tech writer focused on explaining the world, not a reporter sourcing for the next big scoop.

How did the quartet of 404 Media do in their first year? When announcing their anniversary, they summed up the year with obvious satisfaction (though I also appreciated their personal comment afterwards – it’s a nice reminder that there are real people behind all of this):

In our first year, we uncovered how scammers can create realistic photos of fake IDs in seconds, how hackers attack each other in the digital underground, how multibillion- and trillion-dollar companies are devouring the internet to train AI, and exposed dangerous working conditions at the nation’s largest medical lab. We explained how big tech companies prefer AI trash over human-made content, got to the bottom of Facebook’s Shrimp Jesus AI spam situation, demystified how the ticket scalper industry works, and uncovered thousands of pages of documents via public records requests. Thanks to our work, Google was able to shut down a shady surveillance company, curb abuses at venture-backed AI company Civitai, force Microsoft to stop people from using its tools to create explicit AI images of Taylor Swift, spark a lawsuit against Nvidia for scraping YouTube, and more.

And it continues. Just days later, Joseph Cox published an article detailing Cox Media Group’s (CMG) pitch deck for “active listening” ad targeting. This was a follow-up to 404 Media’s earlier reporting on services that allegedly serve ads based on what prospects say within range of device microphones. The deck never mentions where CMG allegedly gets this voice data from, but claims that CMG works with Google, Amazon, and Facebook. In response to 404 Media’s inquiries, Google removed CMG from its affiliate program, Amazon said it never worked with CMG, and Meta (Facebook) said it was investigating whether CMG violated the company’s terms of service. This is 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 scour for leads, comb through court filings, and push for corporate comment, all in the service of exposing what’s really happening in the tech industry. My only problem with 404 Media’s reporting is that it exposes the tech industry in general as a darker, more unscrupulous place than I’d like to believe.

404 Media is independent and has no deep-pocketed corporate backer. Some of the site’s articles are available for free with advertising, but 404 Media is primarily funded by subscribers who pay $10 per month or $100 per year. Subscribing gives you access to all articles, no advertising, the ability to comment, a full-text RSS feed, and more, similar to our TidBITS membership program. Frankly, I wasn’t dissatisfied with the amount of content in the free email subscription; I subscribed to support the work of 404 Media, not because I needed more content. If you’re interested in more in-depth technology journalism that you can’t find elsewhere, sign up for the free subscription and see what you think.