404 Media

2025-11-07 05:00:00

A Small Town Is Fighting a $1.2 Billion AI Datacenter for America's Nuclear Weapon Scientists

Ypsilanti, Michigan resident KJ Pedri doesn’t want her town to be the site of a new $1.2 billion data center, a massive collaborative project between the University of Michigan and America’s nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) in New Mexico.

“My grandfather was a rocket scientist who worked on Trinity,” Pedri said at a recent Ypsilanti city council meeting, referring to the first successful detonation of a nuclear bomb. “He died a violent, lonely, alcoholic. So when I think about the jobs the data center will bring to our area, I think about the impact of introducing nuclear technology to the world and deploying it on civilians. And the impact that that had on my family, the impact on the health and well-being of my family from living next to a nuclear test site and the spiritual impact that it had on my family for generations. This project is furthering inhumanity, this project is furthering destruction, and we don’t need more nuclear weapons built by our citizens.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
At the Ypsilanti city council meeting where Pedri spoke, the town voted to officially fight against the construction of the data center. The University of Michigan says the project is not a data center, but a “high-performance computing facility” and it promises it won’t be used to “manufacture nuclear weapons.” The distinction and assertion are ringing hollow for Ypsilanti residents who oppose construction of the data center, have questions about what it would mean for the environment and the power grid, and want to know why a nuclear weapons lab 24 hours away by car wants to build an AI facility in their small town.

“What I think galls me the most is that this major institution in our community, which has done numerous wonderful things, is making decisions with—as I can tell—no consideration for its host community and no consideration for its neighboring jurisdictions,” Ypsilanti councilman Patrick McLean said during a recent council meeting. “I think the process of siting this facility stinks.”

For others on the council, the fight is more personal.

“I’m a Japanese American with strong ties to my family in Japan and the existential threat of nuclear weapons is not lost on me, as my family has been directly impacted,” Amber Fellows, a Ypsilanti Township councilmember who led the charge in opposition to the data center, told 404 Media. “The thing that is most troubling about this is that the nuclear weapons that we, as Americans, witnessed 80 years ago are still being proliferated and modernized without question.”

It’s a classic David and Goliath story. On one side is Ypsilanti (called Ypsi by its residents), which has a population just north of 20,000 and situated about 40 minutes outside of Detroit. On the other is the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL), American scientists famous for nuclear weapons and, lately, pushing the boundaries of AI.

The University of Michigan first announced the Los Alamos data center, what it called an “AI research facility,” last year. According to a press release from the university, the data center will cost $1.25 billion and take up between 220,000 to 240,000 square feet. “The university is currently assessing the viability of locating the facility in Ypsilanti Township,” the press release said.
Signs in an Ypsilanti yard.
On October 21, the Ypsilanti City Council considered a proposal to officially oppose the data center and the people of the area explained why they wanted it passed. One woman cited environmental and ethical concerns. “Third is the moral problem of having our city resources towards aiding the development of nuclear arms,” she said. “The city of Ypsilanti has a good track record of being on the right side of history and, more often than not, does the right thing. If this resolution passed, it would be a continuation of that tradition.”

A man worried about what the facility would do to the physical health of citizens and talked about what happened in other communities where data centers were built. “People have poisoned air and poisoned water and are getting headaches from the generators,” he said. “There’s also reports around the country of energy bills skyrocketing when data centers come in. There’s also reports around the country of local grids becoming much less reliable when the data centers come in…we don’t need to see what it’s like to have a data center in Ypsi. We could just not do that.”

The resolution passed. “The Ypsilanti City Council strongly opposes the Los Alamos-University of Michigan data center due to its connections to nuclear weapons modernization and potential environmental harms and calls for a complete and permanent cessation of all efforts to build this data center in any form,” the resolution said.

Ypsi has a lot of reasons to be concerned. Data centers tend to bring rising power bills, horrible noise, and dwindling drinking water to every community they touch. “The fact that U of M is using Ypsilanti as a dumping ground, a sacrifice zone, is unacceptable,” Fellows said.

Ypsi’s resolution focused on a different angle though: nuclear weapons. “The Ypsilanti City Council strongly opposes the Los Alamos-University of Michigan data center due to its connections to nuclear weapons modernization and potential environmental harms and calls for a complete and permanent cessation of all efforts to build this data center in any form,” the resolution said.

As part of the resolution, Ypsilanti Township is applying to join the Mayors for Peace initiative, an international organization of cities opposed to nuclear weapons and founded by the former mayor of Hiroshima. Fellows learned about Mayors for Peace when she visited Hiroshima last year.

0:00
/1:46
1×

This town has officially decided to fight against the construction of an AI data center that would service a nuclear weapons laboratory 1,500 miles away. Amber Fellows, a Ypsilanti Township councilmember, tells us why. Via 404 Media on Instagram

Both LANL and the University of Michigan have been vague about what the data center will be used for, but have said it will include one facility for classified federal research and another for non-classified research which students and faculty will have access to. “Applications include the discovery and design of new materials, calculations on climate preparedness and sustainability,” it said in an FAQ about the data center. “Industries such as mobility, national security, aerospace, life sciences and finance can benefit from advanced modeling and simulation capabilities.”

The university FAQ said that the data center will not be used to manufacture nuclear weapons. “Manufacturing” nuclear weapons specifically refers to their creation, something that’s hard to do and only occurs at a handful of specialized facilities across America. I asked both LANL and the University of Michigan if the data generated by the facility would be used in nuclear weapons science in any way. Neither answered the question.

“The federal facility is for research and high-performance computing,” the FAQ said. “It will focus on scientific computation to address various national challenges, including cybersecurity, nuclear and other emerging threats, biohazards, and clean energy solutions.”

LANL is going all in on AI. It partnered with OpenAI to use the company’s frontier models in research and recently announced a partnership with NVIDIA to build two new super computers named “Mission” and “Vision.” It’s true that LANL’s scientific output covers a range of issues but its overwhelming focus, and budget allocation, is nuclear weapons. LANL requested a budget of $5.79 billion in 2026. 84 percent of that is earmarked for nuclear weapons. Only $40 million of the LANL budget is set aside for “science,” according to government documents.

💡
Do you know anything else about this story? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 347 762-9212 or send me an email at matthew@404media.co.

“The fact is we don’t really know because Los Alamos and U of M are unwilling to spell out exactly what’s going to happen,” Fellows said. When LANL declined to comment for this story, it told 404 Media to direct its question to the University of Michigan.

The university pointed 404 Media to the FAQ page about the project. “You'll see in the FAQs that the locations being considered are not within the city of Ypsilanti,” it said.

It’s an odd statement given that this is what’s in the FAQ: “The university is currently assessing the viability of locating the facility in Ypsilanti Township on the north side of Textile Road, directly across the street from the Ford Rawsonville Components plant and adjacent to the LG Energy Solutions plant.”

It’s true that this is not technically in the city of Ypsilanti but rather Ypsilanti Township, a collection of communities that almost entirely surrounds the city itself. For Fellows, it’s a distinction without a difference. “[Univeristy of Michigan] can build it in Barton Hills and see how the city of Ann Arbor feels about it,” she said, referencing a village that borders the township where the university's home city of Ann Arbor.

“The university has, and will continue to, explore other sites if they are viable in the timeframe needed for successful completion of the project,” Kay Jarvis, the university’s director of public affairs, told 404 Media.

Fellows said that Ypsilanti will fight the data center with everything it has. “We’re putting pressure on the Ypsi township board to use whatever tools they have to deny permits…and to stand up for their community,” she said. “We’re also putting pressure on the U of M board of trustees, the county, our state legislature that approved these projects and funded them with public funds. We’re identifying all the different entities that have made this project possible so far and putting pressure on them to reverse action.”

For Fellows, the fight is existential. It’s not just about the environmental concerns around the construction project. “I was under the belief that the prevailing consensus was that nuclear weapons are wrong and they should be drawn down as fast as possible. I’m trying to use what little power I have to work towards that goal,” she said.

Planned Nuclear Weapons Activities Increase to 84% of Lab’s Budget; All Other Programs Cut - NukeWatch NM

The Department of Energy and Los Alamos National Laboratory have released the LANL congressional budget request for the upcoming fiscal year, 2026, which begins on October 1, 2025.

^{Sophia Meryn (Nuclear Watch New Mexico)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 16:56:04

Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human

I woke up restless and kind of hungover Sunday morning at 6 am and opened Reddit. Somewhere near the top was a post called “TIL in 2002 a cave diver committed suicide by stabbing himself during a cave diving trip near Split, Croatia. Due to the nature of his death, it was initially investigated as a homicide, but it was later revealed that he had done it while lost in the underwater cave to avoid the pain of drowning.” The post linked to a Wikipedia page called “List of unusual deaths in the 21st century.” I spent the next two hours falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, clicking through all manner of horrifying and difficult-to-imagine ways to die.

A day later, I saw that Depths of Wikipedia, the incredible social media account run by Annie Rauwerda, had noted the entirely unsurprising fact that, behind the scenes, there had been robust conversation and debate by Wikipedia editors as to exactly what constitutes an “unusual” death, and that several previously listed “unusual” deaths had been deleted from the list for not being weird enough. For example: People who had been speared to death with beach umbrellas are “no longer an unusual or unique occurrence”; “hippos are extremely dangerous and very aggressive and there is nothing unusual about hippos killing people”; “mysterious circumstances doesn’t mean her death itself was unusual.” These are the types of edits and conversations that have collectively happened billions of times that make Wikipedia what it is, and which make it so human, so interesting, so useful.

recently discovered that wikipedia volunteers have a hilariously high bar for what constitutes "unusual death"
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-10-27T12:38:42.573Z

Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man. As others have already pointed out, Grokipedia seeks to be a right wing, anti-woke Wikipedia competitor. But to even call it a Wikipedia competitor is to give the half-assed project too much credit. It is not a Wikipedia “competitor” at all. It is a fully robotic, heartless regurgitation machine that cynically and indiscriminately sucks up the work of humanity to serve the interests, protect the ego, amplify the viewpoints, and further enrich the world’s wealthiest man. It is a totem of what Wikipedia could and would become if you were to strip all the humans out and hand it over to a robot; in that sense, Grokipedia is a useful warning because of the constant pressure and attacks by AI slop purveyors to push AI-generated content into Wikipedia. And it is only getting attention, of course, because Elon Musk does represent an actual threat to Wikipedia through his political power, wealth, and obsession with the website, as well as the fact that he owns a huge social media platform.

One needs only spend a few minutes clicking around the launch version of Grokipedia to understand that it lacks the human touch that makes Wikipedia such a valuable resource. Besides often having a conservative slant and having the general hallmarks of AI writing, Grokipedia pages are overly long, poorly and confusingly organized, have no internal linking, have no photos, and are generally not written in a way that makes any sense. There is zero insight into how any of the articles were generated, how information was obtained and ordered, any edits that were made, no version history, etc. Grokipedia is, literally, simply a single black box LLM’s version of an encyclopedia. There is a reason Wikipedia editors are called “editors” and it’s because writing a useful encyclopedia entry does not mean “putting down random facts in no discernible order.” To use an example I noticed from simply clicking around: The list of “notable people” in the Grokipedia entry for Baltimore begins with a disordered list of recent mayors, perhaps the least interesting but lowest hanging fruit type of data scraping about a place that could be done.

On even the lowest of stakes Wikipedia pages, real humans with real taste and real thoughts and real perspectives discuss and debate the types of information that should be included in any given article, in what order it should be presented, and the specific language that should be used. They do this under a framework of byzantine rules that have been battle tested and debated through millions of edit wars, virtual community meetings, talk page discussions, conference meetings, inscrutable listservs which themselves have been informed by Wikimedia’s “mission statement,” the “Wikimedia values,” its “founding principles” and policies and guidelines and tons of other stated and unstated rules, norms, processes and procedures. All of this behind-the-scenes legwork is essentially invisible to the user but is very serious business to the human editors building and protecting Wikipedia and its related projects (the high cultural barrier to entry for editors is also why it is difficult to find new editors for Wikipedia, and is something that the Wikipedia community is always discussing how they can fix without ruining the project). Any given Wikipedia page has been stress tested by actual humans who are discussing, for example, whether it’s actually that unusual to get speared to death by a beach umbrella.

Grokipedia, meanwhile, looks like what you would get if you told an LLM to go make an anti-woke encyclopedia, which is essentially exactly what Elon Musk did.

As LLMs tend to do, some pages on Grokipedia leak part of its instructions. For example, a Grokipedia page on “Spanish Wikipedia” notes “Wait, no, can’t cite Wiki,” indicating that Grokipedia has been programmed to not link to Wikipedia. That entry does cite Wikimedia pages anyway, but in the “sources,” those pages are not actually hyperlinked:

I have no doubt that Grokipedia will fail, like other attempts to “compete” with Wikipedia or build an “alternative” to Wikipedia, the likes of which no one has heard of because the attempts were all so laughable and poorly participated in that they died almost immediately. Grokipedia isn’t really a competitor at all, because it is everything that Wikipedia is not: It is not an encyclopedia, it is not transparent, it is not human, it is not a nonprofit, it is not collaborative or crowdsourced, in fact, it is not really edited at all. It is true that Wikipedia is under attack from both powerful political figures, the proliferation of AI, and related structural changes to discoverability and linking on the internet like AI summaries and knowledge panels. But Wikipedia has proven itself to be incredibly resilient because it is a project that specifically leans into the shared wisdom and collaboration of humanity, our shared weirdness and ways of processing information. That is something that an LLM will never be able to compete with.

Wikipedia Prepares for 'Increase in Threats' to US Editors From Musk and His Allies

The Wikimedia Foundation says it will likely roll out features previously used to protect editors in authoritarian countries more widely.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-16 14:00:39

Viral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles

A number of easy to access websites use facial recognition to let partners, stalkers, or anyone else uncover specific peoples’ Tinder profiles, reveal their approximate physical location at points in time, and track changes to their profile including their photos, according to 404 Media’s tests.

Ordinarily it is not possible to search Tinder for a specific person. Instead, Tinder provides users potential matches based on the user’s own physical location. The tools on the sites 404 Media has found allow anyone to search for someone’s profile by uploading a photo of their face. The tools are invasive of anyone’s privacy, but present a significant risk to those who may need to avoid an abusive ex-partner or stalker. The sites mostly market these tools as a way to find out if their partner is cheating on them, or at minimum using dating apps like Tinder.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

Viral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles

Videos demoing one of the sites have repeatedly gone viral on TikTok and other platforms recently. 404 Media verified they can locate specific peoples' Tinder profiles using their photo, and found that the viral videos are produced by paid creat…

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-03 02:19:17

ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’

The developer of ICEBlock, an app that lets people crowdsource sightings of ICE officials, has said he is determined to fight back after Apple removed the app from its App Store on Thursday. The removal came after pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox which first reported the removal. Apple told 404 Media it has removed other similar apps too.

“I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” Joshua Aaron told 404 Media. “ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple's own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution.”

💡
Do you know anything else about this removal? Do you work at Apple or ICE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’

Apple removed ICEBlock reportedly after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials. “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” the developer said.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-24 13:00:44

Podcast: We're Suing ICE. Here's Why

We start this week with some news: we are suing ICE for access to its $2 million contract with a company that sells powerful spyware. Paragon sells tech for remotely breaking into phones and reading messages from encrypted chat apps without a target even clicking a link. After the break, we talk about a couple of stories about AI ‘workslop’ and the engineers who fix peoples’ vibe coding. In the subscribers-only section, we start with a malicious game on Steam stealing cryptocurrency from a cancer patient, then we talk about Silk Song.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA2…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/NWuDzmKE8kg?…

• We’re Suing ICE for Its $2 Million Spyware Contract
• AI ‘Workslop’ Is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable
• The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes
• Steam Hosted Malware Game that Stole $32,000 from a Cancer Patient Live on Stream
• Does Silksong Seem Unreasonably Hard? You Probably Took a Wrong Turn

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-08-22 15:56:28

404 Media at Two Years: How We've Grown, and What's Next

Last week, we were talking to each other about the fact that we were about to hit the second anniversary of 404 Media. The conversation was about what we should say in this blog post, which obviously led us to try to remember everything that has happened in the last year. “I haven’t considered a thing beyond what’s been five seconds behind or in front of me for the last year,” Sam said.

The last year has been a whirlwind not just for us but for, uhh, the country and the world. And we’ve been trying our absolute best to bring you stories you can’t find anywhere else about the wildest shit happening right now, which includes the Silicon Valley-led dismantling of the federal government, the deployment of powerful surveillance against immigrants and people seeking abortions, the algorithmic, AI-led zombification of “social” media, the end of anonymity on the internet, and all sorts of weird stuff that we see on our travels through the internet. As Sam noted, we have largely had our heads down trying to bring you the best tech journalism on the internet, which hasn’t left us a ton of time to think about long-term projects, blue-sky ideas, or what the best business strategies for growing this company would be.

Our guiding principle is something we said we would do on day one of starting this company: “We believe it is possible to create a sustainable, profitable media company simply by doing good work, making common-sense decisions about costs, and asking our readers to support us.” What we have learned in two years of building this company is that there is no secret to building a media company, and that there are also no shortcuts. When we work hard to publish an important article, more people discover us and more people subscribe to us, which helps solidify our business and allows us to do more and better articles. As our stories reach a larger audience, the articles often have more impact, more potential sources see them, and we get more tips, which leads to more and better articles, and so on.

In our second year as a media outlet, we’ve done too much impactful reporting to list out in this post. But to summarize some of the big ones:

• We revealed that ICE was tapping into Flock, a nationwide AI-enabled camera network, thanks to local cops. Since then, a police department shut off external access to its cameras after learning they were being searched for immigration related offenses and Austin banned Flock in its city and specifically cited our reporting. The company now says it has severed access to Illinois data for 47 agencies. In response to our story about a Texas cop who searched Flock cameras nationwide for a woman who had a self-administered abortion, the Illinois Secretary of State is investigating the respective suburban Chicago police department because this data sharing violates state law. Congress opened a formal investigation into Flock because of our reporting.
• Meta sued a nudify app that 404 Media reported bought thousands of ads on Instagram and Facebook.
• We broke the news that TeleMessage, a Signal-clone used by the Trump administration, was hacked. Lawmakers demanded answers from the DOJ, and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which used TeleMessage, paused its use of the tool. TeleMessage itself suspended operations too.
• Civitai, a site 404 Media has repeatedly shown was used to generate nonconsensual adult content, banned all AI models designed to generate the likeness of real people.
• After we found Meta's AI Studio chatbots were posing as therapists with fake license numbers and credentials, four senators demanded answers from Meta and a digital rights organizations filed a complaint with the FTC.
• We uncovered that 100,000 people were using a Telegram bot that made non-consensual AI sex videos of anyone. After we covered it, Telegram shutdown the bot.
• We found that Coca Cola was running an AI-powered ad that got basic facts wrong and fabricated quotes from authors. Coca Cola pulled down the ad in response.
• A public library ebook service said it was going to cull AI slop after we found low quality books were flooding libraries.
• Nvidia was sued after we revealed the company scraped YouTube and other sites en masse to build its own AI systems.
• Congress repeatedly grilled Apple and Meta over their association with nonconsensual nudify and deepfake apps after we exposed the connections.

On top of all of these, we’ve published some of the most moment-defining stories that, as Jason has said many times, are the types of things people talk about at the bar after work. Those include:

• Discovering that anyone could push updates to the DOGE website
• Establishing and defining “AI Slop” as a genre (Shrimp Jesus anyone?) and uncovering the economics that make slop popular and profitable
• Following the creep of age verification and censorship across the U.S.
• The leaked plans from Palantir that outline how the company helps deport people
• The “total chaos” at Meta after Trump took office and Zuck went anti-DEI
• Breaking the news of the Tea hacks and continuing to publish new scoops on that saga

It has been a relief that this business strategy of “publish good articles and ask people to pay for journalism” still works, despite the fracturing of social media, the slopification of every major platform, AI being shoved into everything, and the rich and powerful trying to destroy journalism at every turn. That it is working is a testament to the support of our subscribers. We have no real way of knowing exactly where new subscribers come from or what ultimately led them to subscribe, but time and time again we have learned that the most important discovery mechanism we have is word of mouth. We have lost count of the number of times a new subscriber has said that they were told about 404 Media by a friend or a family member at a party or in a group text, so if you have told anyone about us, we sincerely thank you.

Photos by Sharon Attia

It wasn’t obvious when we started this company that it would actually work, though we hoped that it would.

In our post last year, we wrote, “We don’t have any major second-year plans to announce just yet in part because we have been heads down working on some of the investigations and scoops you’ve seen in recent days. The next year holds more scoops, more investigations, more silly blogs, more experiments, more impact, and more articles that hold powerful companies and people to account. We remain ambitious and are thinking about how to best cover more topics and to give you more 404 Media without spreading ourselves too thin.”

But we did take a moment to think about what has changed in the last year, and it turns out that quite a lot is different now than it was a year ago.

For one, we have cautiously begun to expand what we do. In the last year, we launched The Abstract, which is Becky Ferreira’s Saturday newsletter about science, which many of you have said you love and which helps us provide a sense of wonder and discovery when so much of what we report on is pretty bleak. We have been getting part-time (but very critical) help from Case Harts who is running and growing our social media accounts, which is helping us put our stories more natively on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms that we do not control but which nonetheless remain important for us to be on. Matthew Gault has started covering the military industrial complex, AI, weird internet, and dad internet beat for us, and has done a remarkable job at it. Rosie Thomas is our current intern who has published critical reporting about the sale of GPS trackers on TikTok, protests at the Tesla Diner, and the difficult decisions voice actors need to make about whether they should let AI train on their voices.

All of this has changed what 404 Media looks like, a little bit. We have spent a lot of time thinking about what it would look like to expand beyond this, why people subscribe to us, what it would mean to go further, and what the four of us are actually capable of handling outside of the journalism. Because of your support we are in a place where we’re able to ask questions beyond “Can we survive?” We’re able to ask questions like: “Should we try to make this bigger, and what does that look like?”

We feel incredibly lucky that we are now able to ask ourselves these questions, because there was no guarantee that 404 Media would ever work, and we are forever grateful to everyone who has supported us. You have helped us prove that this model can work, and every day we are delighted to see that other journalists are striking out on their own to create their own publications.

Tip Jar

We are still DIYing lots of things. Emanuel is still doing customer support. Jason is still ordering, packing, and mailing merch. Sam is putting together events and parties. Joseph is doing an insane number of things behind the scenes, managing the podcast, working closely with one of our ad partners, and fixing technical issues. As we have grown, these tasks have started to take more and more time, which raises all sorts of questions about when and if we should get help with them. Should we do more events? Should we get someone to help us with them? What does that look like logistically and financially? These are the things that we’re working out all the time. It becomes a question of how much can we juggle while still having some semblance of work/life balance, and while making sure that we’re still putting the journalism first.

Other things that have happened:

• We began a republication partnership with WIRED that recently evolved to include a few coreported collaborations that have allowed us to team up on investigations we may not have been able to do by ourselves.
• We were subpoenaed for our sources on an article by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. We successfully fought off this subpoena with the help of our lawyer, which was expensive but which we were able to do because of your support. We are very proud of this.
• We have been invited to talk about 404 Media and our journalism at conferences and events around the world. Emanuel gave a journalism training in Costa Rica, Jason taught a group of Norwegian journalists how to file FOIA requests and gave a presentation at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Joseph spoke at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference, Sam went to Perugia, Italy to join a panel at the International Journalism Conference, and Sam and Jason talked about indie media at the last XOXO in Portland.
• We threw a party and live panel at SXSW (with the help of our friends at Flipboard), a DIY party at RIP.SPACE in Los Angeles, and we threw an anniversary party and podcast recording last night in Brooklyn.
• After the Trump administration took office, we got to work documenting all of the ways the internet and broader policy started shifting and how tech, surveillance, and immigration intersected, and continued years of holding power accountable through our journalism.
• We had much of our ICE and immigration coverage professionally translated into Spanish and republished without a paywall, which helps communities that benefit the most from our reporting on those topics get it as easily and accurately as possible.
• We took our first-ever break!
• We have moved to Ghost 6.0, which is not something we really did, but it’s important to point out that the new version of our CMS is built with native ActivityPub support, meaning our articles are automatically going into the Fediverse and are being mirrored directly onto Bluesky. We are very excited about the possibilities here as we continue to believe that the healthiest future of journalism and the internet is one where we create direct relationships with our readers that have as little algorithmic friction as possible. Ghost is an open-source nonprofit whose mission is very similar to 404 Media’s.

Like last year, we don’t have anything crazy to announce for year three. But we hope that you will continue to support us (or, if you’re finding us through this post, will consider subscribing). We discussed some of our hopes and dreams for year three in our latest bonus podcast that went out to supporters this week. We are all trying our very best to bring you important, impactful work as often as possible, and we are trying to be as clear as possible about what’s working, what’s not, and how we’re trying to build this company. So far, that strategy has worked really well, and so we don’t intend to change it now.

Gone Fishin': 404 Media Summer Break 2025

404 Media is closed this week. School's out.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}