Mission Statement
Our mission is to bring old-school journalistic standards to a new-school media environment. We want to give our audience relief from today’s noisy media landscape. Editor-in-Chief Emily Kopp put it this way in her first post for Racket:
Citizen journalists have pierced the priggish facade of the corporate press, revealing the hollowness inside. Document diggers, open-source intelligence sleuths, and YouTube stakeouts are fettering out the inconvenient facts that old media stifles. That’s exciting. But it’s a standards-light Wild West out there. Readers shouldn’t have to spend hours wading through social media slop and the hackneyed narratives of legacy media just to cobble together enough fragments of information to approximate a sense of reality.
Racket aims to provide a clearer sense of what’s real, what’s likely, and what’s still unknowable by holding ourselves to the following standards:
No advertisers, sponsors, or hidden investors. Our content is our own.
No partisan restraints. While we support certain overarching principles, we won’t mold reporting to serve a political party or ideological project.
No predetermined narratives. Complexity should be embraced rather than soothingly papered over. We worry about being wrong, not about being unpopular.
No reflexive dismissal of even outlandish sounding theories prior to examination. However, we reserve the right to dismiss (even ridicule) the outlandish theories that do not bear scrutiny.
No recycled content. We will always strive to do original reporting. Every story on Racket will have at least one phone call behind it.
Not politesse about taboos if it gets in the way of facts. But the transgression of taboos is also not something to be gratuitously courted for easy shock value.
No trepidation in the face of personal attacks and intimidation. Neither Matt nor I are strangers to these tactics.
No sacrifices on the altar of access journalism. Access to powerful people in government can facilitate reporting. But ultimately, they are bureaucrats who work for us. We’re not afraid to lose friends for an important story.
No coy sourcing. Anonymous sources may be used, but not as a matter of course. We’ll strive to connect readers to primary sources, archived as much as possible. Procuring original documents is to be a central focus.
No axes to grind. We’ll try to be right and admit when we’re wrong. Corrections are announced and left published.
We hold ourselves to these standards with the audience as our imagined boss. It’s our job to give you bad news sometimes, but we will report with readers in mind.
History
The roots of Racket News go back to 2018, when it was called Reporting by Matt Taibbi. It started as a platform for Matt to serialize books, and transitioned into commentary on the media and politics while Matt was still reporting for Rolling Stone magazine.
Matt left Rolling Stone in April 2020 and dedicated himself full-time to this Substack. The site soon took on a new name, TK News, with reporting and commentary with additional contributors and people who help behind the scenes. Another rebrand came in January 2023 when this site’s name changed to Racket News.
Racket 2.0
Matt fired himself as editor in February 2026 to focus on writing more long-form stories for the site, but not before making a significant investment in Racket’s future. He hired Emily Kopp as editor-in-chief and two additional reporters with a focus on investigative journalism. As Matt writes here, “The idea is to build Racket up into a home for reporters.” Our new slogan:
“We care if it’s true. We don’t care why.”
Racket has changed in leadership and expanded in its purpose. We’re also doubling down on what made Racket worth reading in the first place: independence, transparency, and a refusal to confuse confidence with accuracy.
Subscriptions
There are three options for subscribing to Racket News.
1. Annual: $70
2. Monthly: $7
All content is immediately available with both of these options, including full access to Racket’s archives dating back to 2018. The only difference is you save $14 with an annual subscription.
3. Free: Want to see what we’re about before financially supporting Racket? No problem. You’ll still get Racket email alerts with a story preview, but most (though not all) content will remain behind a paywall.
You must have a Substack account before subscribing, free or paid.
