The liberal-leaning publication The Intercept has lost some of its top brass.
Ken Klippenstein, an investigative reporter at the outlet, published a piece on Substack Tuesday headlined, “Why I'm Resigning From The Intercept.”
“The Intercept has been taken over by suits who have abandoned its founding mission of fearless and adversarial journalism, and I can't continue in an environment where fear of funders is more important than journalism itself,” he wrote.
Klippenstein slammed The Intercept's management, which he accused of fueling the “corporatization” of the site that has seen its management team grow at the expense of the editorial team.
“In my time at The Intercept, I've watched the newsroom increasingly become dominated by management and bureaucrats whose numbers continue to swell as the number of people who actually produce news dwindles,” he wrote. “While the Intercept now has one poor copy editor for the entire website, it employs two staff attorneys, as well as a legal fellow, a chief strategy officer, a chief digital officer, a business coordinator, a senior director of development and an associate director of development, a product manager, a senior director of operations, a chief of staff, and a chief operating officer. And for the first time in The Intercept's history, as of Monday, the new editor-in-chief now answers to the CEO.”
The Intercept was founded by the journalists behind the Snowden leak and backed by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar until he pulled out in 2022. The liberal publication has reportedly fallen on tough times in recent years. Semafor reported earlier this month that it is on track to go broke by May 2025.
According to Mediaite, Klippenstein focused on a piece about billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos which faced internal scrutiny from Intercept general counsel David Bralow, who thought its premise was “naive” and told the top editor at the site, William Arkin, during a heated call that he was “killing the story.”
Arkin and Klippenstein threatened to resign if the story, which criticized a charity grant from Bezos to retired Admiral William McRaven, was indeed killed. Bralow apparently backed down, and the piece was published. According to Klippenstein, Arkin was fired by The Intercept on Friday.
Recently, longtime NPR reporter Uri Berliner left the network after more than two decades and accused the legacy media outlet of lacking viewpoint diversity in a scathing editorial posted to Substack.
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