This week, The Intercept launched our end-of-quarter fundraising drive, and we want to be brutally honest: This is an incredibly difficult time for digital news media, and The Intercept is not immune.
In fact, right now the entire journalism industry is facing overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises that are threatening the financial viability of newsrooms all over the country.
As a result, hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear about some news outlet laying off staff, filing for bankruptcy, or shutting down entirely.
We’re proud that The Intercept has continued to produce groundbreaking investigative journalism in this environment. And we’re urgently counting on readers like you to step up and support our work so we can keep going.
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Newsrooms across the country have been struggling against a harsh economic reality for years. But today, we’re facing a new series of challenges that are threatening even the digital outlets once thought to be the future of journalism:
- Like everyone else, our costs have risen across the board due to inflation.
- In 2022, total donations to nonprofit organizations in the U.S. fell by one of the largest margins ever recorded — and 2023 is expected to be similarly dire.
- Facebook, once the biggest driver of traffic to online news sites, has begun actively suppressing links to legitimate news sites, making it harder than ever for new readers to find us.
- Billionaires like Peter Thiel and Erik Prince are weaponizing libel law to bully news outlets with harassing lawsuits that drive up costs — lawsuits that don’t have to be successful in the courtroom to leave newsrooms with devastating losses.
- Fewer Americans are consuming news at all due to a growing trend of news avoidance. In fact, 4 in 10 Americans now say they regularly go out of their way to avoid the news, and less than half say they are “very” or “extremely” interested in the news, down from 67% in 2015.
We believe the best days are ahead for journalism. Thanks largely to the generosity of our readers, we have a plan for The Intercept to expand our coverage and remain financially sustainable well into the future.
But there’s no sugarcoating it: This is a difficult period of transition. We’re counting on your support to help keep our nonprofit newsroom strong during this challenging time.
