Why I've Been Quiet
A quick explanation for the low output this month.
The good news is that I haven’t lost any enthusiasm here. I’ve been hard at work on a pretty bananas set of stories. It just happens that four unrelated things came up that collectively encouraged me to take a step back to reconsider my plan of attack.
To give the sense, a brief recap (apologies for some necessary vagueness):
Someone approached me with new details on a big story I covered back in 2018 (the Thai cave rescue). I’d been unhappy with how I’d left it, in that I felt that the press got off easy where their sins were many, profound, and impossible to defend. Well, I’ve now learned that there’s far more evidence of broken coverage than I was ever aware of (both on the Elon angle and the rescue itself). There’s enough to make a killer multi-part documentary, and deciding how to parse it all has become an enormous logistical issue to sort out.
I spoke to a NYT reporter a few weeks ago about my suspicion that they’d consciously withheld a pretty major detail from a big story back in July. While my suspicion was confirmed, the reporter, uh, didn’t share my sense of concern. This left me in a pickle. While I’d generate way more traffic/revenue by going for the throat with a negative view of all the evidence I’ve accumulated (on this and other stories), there’s value in maintaining a not-totally-adversarial relationship. They have their reasons for what they omit, and their justifications for what they get wrong and how they go about corrections. While I disagree fiercely with said positions, I’m hoping to chat more with editors over there this week to see if we can establish some terms of engagement. Maybe the right answer is to just light them up on Twitter. But blessed are the peacemakers, so we’re starting there.
While doing research on footnote fraud, I stumbled upon a series of health-related publications connected to two researchers so prominent that I struggled to believe that they could be as wrong as the data indicates they are (on an issue affecting a truly stunning number of people). Given that I have enough COVID-related content to fill a month’s worth of newsletters, I’ve been working with a team of experts to validate details and package the stories. More on this soon.
A few of the stories I’ve been chasing down involve well-known people likely to face non-trivial reputational damage. While I’m not easily cowed, being an independent creator with no fixed legal resources means I need to be extraordinarily careful in how I frame and do due diligence.
That all said, regular newsletters on smaller things will start flowing again this week. It will just take me a little more time to figure out how to handle the larger stuff.
Appreciate y’all.
Jeremy
PS - If anyone wants me to roll over their paid sub by a month to compensate for this unplanned hiatus, I’m certainly happy to do that.