@ben @ProPublica

Nothing like being told it's only my money that matters. Mastodon only matters to you if it means your "team" doesn't need to work hard to fund it.

Swallow your pride—sell some steak knives or whatever. The corruption of the Supreme Court is well and heavily covered by all your competitors. For free.

@_chris_real Hey! Our journalism is free to access. And I'm a decades-long part of the open social web movement - Mastodon is very important to me indeed. I didn't mean to offend with my framing.

We're on a funding drive because it's a non-profit (like other public media outlets). Nobody pays to read what we do.

And others may be covering it, but it was our investigation that broke the story.

@ben

You told me that your opinion of Mastodon depended on how much money they sent you. You can't squirm out of that judgement by claiming you're a non-profit—but you "really need" money.

Did you —really— "break a story" though? Or were you the first who published what was well-known, but many were struggling to make known?

Your whole "but still—Capitalism?!?" reeks of the monarchists who infest post-capitalist marketplaces. We also call them magats and fascists.

Stick to steak knives (at least it's honest), although I hear silver-infused bedsheets also do well.

Read Marcy Wheeler/emptywheel for examples of 'actual' no-one-pays journalism.

I am a musician. You've got nothing to school me with about working for free.

@_chris_real *I* didn’t do anything. But yeah, the journalists broke the story. By doggedly following it for a long time. That’s what ProPublica does: actual investigative journalism that takes a lot of resources to produce. There’s a pretty good article about what it took here. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-propublica-biggest-supreme-court-story.html

My Mastodon comment was really a flippant way of saying that I’d like Mastodon to show up in our stats.

But I seem to have got your goat,so I’d like to suggest we go our separate ways. Bye.

@ben

Of course. Troll for more money. Our ways are not separate, but our means to our ends define us.

I will match your barely adequate investigating with Marcy Wheeler's any day. Your 'breaking' claims are pretty irrelevant. The truth was there—it matters not who was first, but who made it MATTER.

You come to us with hat in hand, but suggesting that getting my goat is a discourse ender. Maybe my goat was got when you decided to monetize your virtue. I suggest you re-evaluate your 'yeah-but-ish' mentality.

Yeah, just walk away. . .