From the New Editor: A Message From Emily Kopp

Welcome to Racket 2.0

Photo by Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Hello from Emily Kopp, the new Editor-in-Chief here at Racket. If you read Matt’s earlier piece, you might like to know more about me and our plans:

I had been convinced I was born to be a feared but low-key reporter on an investigative team at a metro paper — an utterly forgettable byline. I just like the work. I never wanted to be a name.

My generation of journalists includes the clout chasers (Taylor Lorenz), the objectivity destroyers (Wesley Lowery) and the Deep State sycophants (Natasha Bertrand). Watching reporters with little talent or integrity move to the front over and over has been dispiriting, but eventually it produced an indifference to prestige that proved useful when I tackled a story few others with my experience were taking on, one I worried would be the last of my career, about the U.S.-China scientific collaboration that created a pandemic virus and killed millions of people.

There’s a lot of irony in this moment. When I started in journalism through an unpaid internship (back when those were allowed) my supervisor gifted me one of Matt’s books as “payment.” “I know you like this guy’s work.” Now I get to mark up his copy (I’m checking to make sure he’s reading). In truth, I take the responsibility to steward Matt’s investment in the expansion of Racket very seriously. I can’t promise success, but I can promise two things: that I really do care about producing good journalism, and that I’m as angry about the sorry state of the media as you are.

Racket 2.0’s Revamped Mission Statement

Over the years we’ve helped pry open the Overton Window, releasing much needed fresh air. But it has released some turbulent winds too. Jostled between the barely disguised state propaganda and corporate press releases of old media and screenshot journalism and clip farmers of new media, the whiplash is beginning to take its toll.

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.

It was once fashionable for corporate media to prescribe what to think and for Big Tech to clamp down on free speech and debate. These days it’s in vogue to embrace a relativist attitude toward truth. No journalist can promise truth, a slippery metaphysical thing that’s especially elusive in the first moments of a crisis. The only thing we can promise is to try for it.

That’s why we’re bringing old school journalistic standards to the new school, wide-open Overton Window. If we do our jobs well, we’ll provide occasional relief from the cacophony.

Racket already had a few internal rules barring advertisers, hidden investors, and silent edits, and general guidelines about a few other things.

We’re hanging on to those, adding a few more, and preserving all of them on our website for accountability. Here they are:

1. No advertisers, sponsors, or hidden investors. Our content is our own.

2. No partisan restraints. While we support certain overarching principles, we won’t mold reporting to serve a political party or ideological project.

3. No predetermined narratives. Complexity should be embraced rather than soothingly papered over. We worry about being wrong, not about being unpopular.

4. 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.

5. No recycled content. We will always strive to do original reporting. Every story on Racket will have at least one phone call behind it.

6. 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.

7. No trepidation in the face of personal attacks and intimidation. Neither Matt nor I are stranger to these tactics.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. No axes to grind. We’ll try to be right and admit when we’re wrong. Corrections are announced and left published.

Finally, the audience should always be the imagined boss. Yes, it’s our job to give you bad news sometimes. But writing with readers in mind is good practice.

Welcome to the new Racket News.