News outlet Markup ousts editor-in-chief Julia Angwin, prompting resignations | Hacker News Reader

News outlet Markup ousts editor-in-chief Julia Angwin, prompting resignations

cjr.org

18 pointsjmsflknr5 comments

Very bizarre, and sad. Worked with Jeff Larson (the Markup's co-founder, and now editor in chief) during the early years of ProPublica's news apps team. Can't even imagine what kind of internal conflict would put him on one side and Julia the other -- they were both lead co-authors on the investigations into algorithms [0]

Craig Newmark, who makes up $20M of the ~$23M in initial funding, has only said "I can’t ethically comment right now."

https://twitter.com/juliacarriew/status/1120742407371235328

[0] https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/julia-angwin-jeff-larson-...

> "Executive director Sue Gardner is now seeking to change the mission of the newsroom to one based on advocacy against the tech companies. She argues that The Markup needs to be a ‘cause’ rather than a ‘publication.’"

> "She has removed any reference to investigative journalism from our Editorial Value Proposition. She has urged me to run articles with headlines such as ‘Facebook is a dumpster fire.’"

This is pretty damming, the most important thing to a news organization is it's credibility. Going to their website it looks like they haven't launched yet, this may cause them to be DOA.

This seems far more honest (removing the reference to investigative journalism) than current publications who claim to be impartial publications, but clearly push blatant cause driven articles.

Sadly it seems to be more of the same. They intend to present themselves as journalists while acting as activists. No matter what side of what aisle you come down on you should be dismayed by what this appears to be.

FWIW Gardner is denying the claim that the Markup has changed its mission. And The Markup's various about pages have not changed (from what I can tell, when comparing to Internet Archive), including mentions of its investigative mission. For example:

https://themarkup.org/donations-faq.html#negative-tech-stori...

> Most of our stories will expose problems; that’s just the nature of investigative journalism. (As George Orwell reputedly once said, “journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.”) But that doesn’t mean we’re anti-technology; we have the same love/hate relationship with technology that everybody does.

That said, this is a pretty specific claim:

> According to Angwin, Gardner, the former head of the Wikimedia Foundation, created a spreadsheet ranking candidates for reporter positions according to their views toward technology companies.

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