You don’t usually hear from me, but my name is Michael Sherrard, and as membership director, my job is to build the base of grassroots donors that sustains The Intercept’s groundbreaking investigative journalism.
Every time I join an editorial meeting, I hear about exciting new ideas for stories. Tips about potential corporate wrongdoing. Leads that need tracking down. New sources with inside info to confirm.
There are always more good ideas than we can afford to take on, and I leave each meeting with a new sense of urgency about raising the money to allow my colleagues on the editorial team to greenlight as many investigations as possible.
But here’s the challenge: After four years of President Donald Trump’s chaos, capped off by the pandemic, a lot of people are exhausted and taking a break from the news. As a result, donations and web traffic have gone down sharply across all news outlets since President Joe Biden took office, including at The Intercept.
But corporate greed and government corruption never take a break. Those stories need to be told and those investigations need to be done.
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For four years, with an openly racist, massively corrupt and incompetent demagogue in the White House, the urgent importance of hard-hitting, adversarial journalism was obvious.
But the need for investigative reporting has not declined one bit under the new administration. In fact, with too many mainstream media outlets acting like the crisis is over and things have returned to “normal,” The Intercept’s unique role in challenging the status quo is even more essential.
Even outlets that share our commitment to dogged reporting are struggling to keep up, as ratings and revenue have declined sharply in recent months.
This president inherited a government armed with the most sweeping and invasive surveillance technologies the world has never seen, built over decades by Republicans and Democrats alike.
Our reporters have investigated Biden’s nearly five-decadelong history of supporting American imperialism and how his administration is filling key positions with corporate lobbyists.
Biden is a full-throated supporter of the same bloated Pentagon budgets that Congress has passed for decades, and we remain cognizant that the Obama-Biden administration was one of the most hostile toward whistleblowers and journalists that we’ve ever seen.
I'm incredibly proud to say that since we launched our membership program, more than 70,000 people have chipped in. Those donations not only power our journalism but also provide concrete validation that our readers want us to keep digging for the truth and standing up to the powerful.
