Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
Use of DataNew York City, USA · Independent nonprofit · formerly an initiative of First Look Media
Status note: The Intercept has undergone significant organizational and financial turbulence since 2022. Pierre Omidyar ended major funding in late 2022; the organization spun off from First Look Media as an independent nonprofit in January 2023. In February 2024 it laid off approximately one-third of its newsroom. In April 2024 the outlet fired national security reporter William Arkin, and Ken Klippenstein resigned in protest. In July 2024, co-founder Jeremy Scahill and senior reporter Ryan Grim departed to found Drop Site News. The Intercept continues to publish as of 2025–26 but with a substantially reduced staff and ongoing questions about its financial sustainability.
The Intercept is an American nonprofit investigative news organization dedicated to adversarial journalism — reporting that explicitly positions itself as in opposition to the powerful institutions it covers, rather than neutral or equidistant from them. It was founded on February 10, 2014 by three journalists who had already, individually and collectively, demonstrated their willingness to publish material that governments and corporations considered dangerous: Glenn Greenwald, the civil liberties lawyer and journalist who had broken the NSA surveillance story for The Guardian in June 2013; Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker and journalist whose film Citizenfour documented Edward Snowden's decision to become a whistleblower and would win the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature; and Jeremy Scahill, the national security journalist and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007) and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013). The three were funded by Pierre Omidyar, the French-born Iranian-American co-founder of eBay, who committed $250 million to First Look Media — the parent organization he established to support the venture — making it one of the most generously capitalized digital investigative startups in American journalism history.
The founding of The Intercept was directly precipitated by the Snowden disclosures. Omidyar had been moved by the story of a government contractor prepared to give up his freedom in order to tell the public about the scope of state surveillance being conducted in its name — and by the willingness of Greenwald and Poitras to publish that information in the face of government pressure. He approached Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill with a proposition: a new publication, funded without advertiser pressure, with the specific purpose of publishing the Snowden archive in full and continuing the kind of journalism that had produced it. "To be truly effective in its mission," Omidyar wrote at the time, "The Intercept must be fearless — it can't pull punches out of a desire to please powerful friends or sponsors." The description of that mission — "to hold the most powerful governmental and corporate factions accountable" — remains on the publication's masthead.
The Intercept's launch story — published on its first day, February 10, 2014, under the bylines of Greenwald and Scahill — was "NSA's Secret Role in the US Assassination Program," which drew on Snowden's documents to reveal that the NSA was using phone metadata to identify and locate targets for drone strikes, a process that the article's sources said was subject to significant error rates and resulted in the killing of the wrong people. It was the kind of journalism the publication had been created to do: drawing directly on primary source documents, making specific factual claims the government had denied, and publishing the underlying evidence.
The Intercept hosted the Snowden archive as a searchable database and published reporting drawn from it throughout its first years — covering mass surveillance programs, the NSA's relationships with foreign intelligence services, the legal frameworks used to authorize surveillance, and the identities of specific targets and programs. In 2019, First Look deprecated the Snowden archive and laid off the research team associated with it, saying editorial priorities had changed. The journalist Barrett Brown, who had won a National Magazine Award for his Intercept column, publicly burned the award in protest at the decision to take the archive offline.
Beyond the NSA reporting, The Intercept built a record of investigative journalism covering the full range of its founding beats. Its reporting on the US military's targeted killing program — including the Joint Special Operations Command and SEAL Team Six — expanded on Scahill's prior work in Dirty Wars. It covered the CIA's detention and interrogation program, the prison system, immigration enforcement, financial corruption, and corporate accountability. Its reporting on CIA operations in Afghanistan won the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Digital Reporting on International Affairs. It has covered the conditions of death row prisoners and the administration of capital punishment, produced award-winning reporting on the conditions in immigration detention facilities, and covered the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on incarcerated populations. In February 2024, shortly before its major layoffs, The Intercept filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company had used its journalists' work without authorization to train ChatGI — one of the more consequential legal actions in the emerging field of AI and journalism intellectual property.
The Intercept's record on source protection has been a persistent and serious area of criticism. In June 2017, the outlet published a classified NSA document on Russian interference in the 2016 US election, having received it from an anonymous source. In the process of verifying the document's authenticity with the NSA, The Intercept shared a scan of the physical document with the agency — a scan that contained identifying printer steganography marks, the near-invisible yellow dots that color laser printers embed in every printed page, encoding the printer's serial number and the time of printing. The FBI used those marks to identify the source as Reality Winner, a 25-year-old NSA contractor who was arrested, charged under the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 63 months in federal prison — the longest sentence ever imposed for leaking classified information to a journalist at the time. The Intercept's role in Winner's identification — whether through negligence or inadequate security procedures — has never been fully and publicly reckoned with by the organization. Winner was released in June 2021 after serving her sentence.
The Winner case was not isolated. Terry Albury, an FBI special agent who provided documents to The Intercept about FBI culture and surveillance programs, was also identified and charged under the Espionage Act in 2018, pleading guilty and serving two years in prison. The pattern prompted significant criticism from press freedom advocates and from other outlets, who argued that The Intercept's operational security procedures for handling sources were inadequate given the sensitivity of the material it was soliciting.
The first decade of The Intercept's existence was marked by successive departures of its founding principals and sustained internal turbulence. Laura Poitras left in 2017 amid a dispute with First Look Media management; she later sued First Look, alleging gender discrimination and retaliation, and settled the case. Glenn Greenwald resigned in October 2020, alleging that the publication had refused to run an article critical of Joe Biden's alleged involvement in his son Hunter's business dealings during the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election — an article Greenwald said the editorial staff had demanded substantive changes to that he regarded as censorship. Greenwald went to Substack, where he has continued to publish, but has moved significantly toward conservative media alignment in the years since, drawing criticism from many former colleagues and supporters. Jeremy Scahill remained at The Intercept until July 2024, when he and senior reporter Ryan Grim departed to found Drop Site News, an independent newsletter-based investigative outlet.
Between those departures, the publication cycled through leadership: Betsy Reed served as editor-in-chief for years and oversaw much of the publication's most significant journalism, before Roger Hodge became editor-in-chief; Hodge was dismissed in February 2024 as part of cost-cutting layoffs that eliminated approximately one-third of the newsroom. The Semafor reporting that followed described an organization in acute financial crisis — running out of the funds that had sustained it since Omidyar's late-2022 decision to end his major financial support — and riven by internal conflict between factions with different visions of what the publication should become. Ken Klippenstein resigned in April 2024, citing the "suits" who he said had "abandoned its founding mission of fearless and adversarial journalism" and writing publicly that he left because "fear of funders is more important than journalism itself."
The Intercept spun off from First Look Media as a fully independent nonprofit in January 2023, following Omidyar's withdrawal of major funding. The transition to independence required building a reader-funded revenue model to replace the philanthropic subsidy that had supported the publication since its founding — a task made significantly harder by the editorial instability and staff departures that followed. The February 2024 layoffs, which eliminated editor-in-chief Roger Hodge and approximately 15 staff members — nearly one-third of the newsroom — were explicitly attributed to financial pressures and the need to "become sustainable." In June 2024, the unionized newsroom staff sent a public letter to the board calling for the termination of CEO Annie Chabel and Chief Strategy Officer Sumi Aggarwal and demanding organizational restructuring and donor transparency. The Intercept continues to publish investigative reporting, including in February 2025 publishing Elon Musk's government email address — not previously reported — and filing more than a dozen related FOIA requests into DOGE's operations. The Intercepted podcast (hosted by Scahill until his departure; continuing under other hosts) and the Deconstructed podcast continue to publish.
The Intercept publishes freely without paywall at theintercept.com. All investigative reporting, news analysis, and opinion is accessible without registration. Podcasts — Intercepted and Deconstructed — are available through all standard podcast platforms and through the website. Donations to support the publication's independent nonprofit journalism can be made at theintercept.com/donate. Tips can be submitted securely through SecureDrop, accessible via the Tor Browser at The Intercept's onion address listed at theintercept.com/source.
