When institutions fail their star reporters
Kat Tenbarge is taking her digital culture investigations independent.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
“No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only Industry Where This Regularly Happens. —Kate
Today’s ICYMI is about Bon Appétit’s latest controversy, and a battle of the institution vs. the influencer.
If you can think of an internet culture controversy, chances are, journalist Kat Tenbarge probably broke the story. Her coverage of the sexual assault allegations against Jeffree Star, the allegation of rape within David Dobrik’s Vlog Squad, and the social media reaction to Depp v. Heard all bear the writer’s hallmark of holding the internet’s biggest voices to account.
Last month, however, Tenbarge was laid off along with 40 of her colleagues at NBC. After being immersed in the creator economy for five years, Tenbarge is now taking her own brand independent.
This month, she’s preparing to launch Spitfire News, a newsletter that’s part of Beehiiv’s new Media Collective. The chance to do reporting on her own terms is something Tenbarge had been working towards for some time. Too often, her work made her a character, or even a target, in certain online communities, and she found it frustrating to navigate the fallout while respecting the rules and policies of the outlets she wrote for.
In many ways, Tenbarge’s story acutely represents the tension that’s been rising between journalists and the institutions that employ them. Here she and I talk about what independence means for her reporting, how institutions can adapt to the creator-first media landscape, and the story she’ll be debuting when Spitfire News officially launches on February 24.
How long had you been thinking about going independent? Was it always in the back of your mind?
Yes, it definitely, definitely was. It felt almost like fate because the night before I got laid off, I had been drafting a piece that ended up becoming the first piece that I’ll release for my newsletter. And at the time I didn't want to quit unless I had something that felt like stability. So I had been applying for worker-owned media, I had been looking into different options that were out there. But I absolutely really, really, really wanted to go, and that feeling had been growing and growing and growing. So when I found out that I was getting laid off, it was obviously very shocking, but it felt like a moment where I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
Your newsletter is part of the Beehiiv Media Collective. Can you share a bit about that?
Yes. So I was familiar with Beehiiv and when I had started thinking about going independent, I figured that I would want to do a newsletter. And I had used Substack in the past, like several years ago when I still worked at BI. And it was always a very contentious issue. I eventually stopped writing them because BI would only let me write for Substack if my editor at BI edited my Substack.
Whoa.
And I did that for a couple of pieces and then I was like, this is so stupid. It's just work for no money. So I stopped doing Substack back in 2021, and today obviously Substack has become much more controversial. And I had seen people in the newsletter space do price comparison—Substack takes 10% if you have this many subscribers, etc. And so I was looking at Beehiiv as one that I felt would be a good fit. And then the day that I got laid off, I found out about the Media Collective. So I immediately applied, and they are so great—they brought me on right away. And it was really the answer to my prayers in a lot of ways. Because the two things I was most worried about with going independent were legal support and health insurance. And so the Media Collective, they give you stipends for health insurance. They give you eight hours a month with a lawyer for review, and a bunch of other things. And they get you set up with their top newsletter plan. So with all of that together, it really felt like a moment where the world was answering my prayer.
Now that you're independent, are there types of stories you're looking to cover? What freedom does this give you as opposed to being on staff?
There are several things, but one: It felt like taking the ceiling off of what was possible for me in terms of, not only would I have autonomy over my journalism, but I could also do things that had always been limited when I worked at a corporate media institution. So being able to do podcasts, being able to have more time to focus on writing a book, doing all of these outside things where, understandably, you have to go through PR, you have to go through standards, you have to do all of these things in a mainstream institution. And my style of communicating with the public has always caused tension for me within institutional workplaces, because I have just always followed along in the footsteps of influencers, but also people who probably wouldn't consider themselves influencers, but just have really big social media followings.
In college I was so obsessed with media Twitter and the opinionated style that a lot of big writers had cultivated. So that was always very me and I'm excited to be able to do more of a first person, opinionated, analytical style in my own work. And then the other really big thing is that when it came to covering influencers, I always had to convince sometimes multiple people that these stories were important, and it took a lot of time that could have been spent reporting, been spent writing, to just get these stories through the bureaucracy of traditional media. And so going independent, it was like, "Oh, I can finally call the shots. I don't need to convince anyone other than myself." These are stories that are worth pursuing and these are things worth covering.
When it comes to influencer drama and online discourse, I've always been really interested. And I think audiences are really interested in extreme levels of detail. When I worked at BI I had more of an opportunity to do this because we would do these slideshows—you could make like 70 slides, and I literally would do that. I did a slideshow about Jeffree Star and Shane Dawson at BI that, over the course of at least a year, I would just add to it and add to it. So it became this mountain of information and that article got so much traffic. And when you go on YouTube and you watch videos about drama, about discourse, they're often, especially now, over an hour long. People do have an appetite for the most minute lore, and I love minute lore.
I was actually talking last night to some people about what publications we pay for, and I pay for BI because it has that really granular history of any online event that has happened in the past 10 years. It is so necessary to have someone keeping that record, and I'm sure you wrote like half of them.
BI is a treasure trove. When I'm doing research, I'm looking at BI all the time.
One reason why it makes sense for you to go independent is because I think to a lot of people in the creator world, you are a character already as someone who reports and exposes the darker side of the industry. What has that been like, and do you feel like you have more freedom to navigate it now that you're independent?
I definitely think that is one of the things that traditional media institutions have really struggled with, and it's going to just continue to get more and more pervasive. As a reporter, whether you want to or not, people who you write about, especially people with bad intentions, are going to make you a character in their meta narrative around your reporting no matter what. And I think with going independent, it definitely gives me the ability to defend myself to the best of my ability, whereas [on staff] I had to be very careful and go along with whatever the entire organization wanted me to do. And in my experience, saying nothing or not engaging with it is often not the best way to address controversy.
I also have found that it's a fine line to walk and I think that it helps to have journalistic training and journalistic sensibilities from working in the industry, but sometimes being a part of the story can help the story get legs. I really found that with the David Dobrik reporting, because going into it, I had no intention of being a part of the story at all. But what ended up happening is after the story was published, people who I had spoken to started trying to flip the narrative and be like, “Kat didn't do her job. She misquoted me.” So I had to defend myself and release audio of interviews. I remember sending the reporting to really big YouTubers who ended up defending me with their giant platforms that I didn't have. And that made a huge difference in the story's credibility and the story's influence. It is something that I've had to learn through experience, but I feel like today it's gonna happen whether you want it or not. So being able to have the freedom to navigate it how you choose is really important to me.
In one of my early jobs, a random piece I was assigned to write that was published with a headline I didn't write made people mad. And someone on Twitter led this whole campaign against me. I was just getting bombarded. The only direction we got was broadly just, “No one say anything.” But it was me who, every time I woke up and opened Instagram, was being flooded with comments. And internally, it was almost like I was radioactive. No one said anything to me and no one acknowledged it. I think it is scary to them because I think it means acknowledging that maybe these institutions don't have the same power anymore.
I think that's a big part of it. And like I've found in my own experience and from talking to other young journalists, especially young women and women of color, that institutions will often, even if they say they won't, they will often take a punitive approach to address controversy that their reporters end up in, even if their reporters did absolutely nothing wrong. And I think that what you just said, it kind of is like a power play. I absolutely think that's the case. And I think it's really unfortunate because I think being a reporter today and navigating the internet landscape, it's actively disempowering. So you need all of the support you can get. And that a lot of media institutions aren't providing that support is so frustrating. But on the flip side, I have been more empowered by defending myself online and engaging with these things head on, which is what they tell you not to do.
It's for similar reasons that it can be difficult convincing creators to allow mainstream institutions to cover them. There's really not much an institution can offer a big creator that they can't just do themselves. Like they don't need to give an outlet a tell-all—they can just put it on their own platform and reach way more people and reach people who already like them and not people who are gonna comment, like, "Who is this?" on everything. They don't need you in the same way that traditional celebrities do. Creators control their own image. And so it makes their relationship with press a lot different.
Definitely. I found when I was at Insider, when I would cover creators in a more neutral to positive light, a lot of times creators would share that stuff and I had a really good relationship with a bunch of creators. I still felt like that work was important, but it wasn't until I started doing accountability reporting that it was like, “Oh, this is the utility that the mainstream can provide.” And even that has now shifted more because there's so much accountability work done in the YouTube space. And something that I've always felt that frustrated me from the very beginning of my career was that if I did a reported article and posted it on Business Insider's website, all these YouTubers would make content of the article.
I was of two minds about it because to some degree I loved that and it was really good. Ultimately if I'm trying to tell a story to reach a big audience and people are helping that happen, I'm not gonna be mad about it. But I did pick up on the fact that they were monetizing Business Insider's reporting more than Business Insider was able to, and they were reaching people with Business Insider's reporting that Business Insider wasn't able to, and from that moment I was always like, I should own the means of production, like my own reporting. I remember I went to BI like five plus years ago and was like, "We should start our own drama channel." And they were sort of like, okay, no.
And then there's the other side of the argument, and I'm still trying to figure out where I fall on this, of what counts as plagiarism. YouTube videos do a really good job of crediting the source and you can link out, but on TikTok, the kind of thing that people do—Franchesca Ramsey made a really funny video where behind her was a mocked up article and it was like, “when you just read verbatim an article with it behind you that is plagiarizing.” Technically the article is behind them and if they're not standing in front of it in the green screen, you can see who wrote it and things like that. But it's still throwing it up there and then just regurgitating it. That relationship is the next thing where it's like, until we figure that out, BI or whoever should be the one making those videos. Because otherwise, they're just handing free content to other people, whether or not it's fair to use it.
A hundred percent. Did you follow the hbomberguy/James Somerton plagiarism YouTube scandal?
This sounds familiar.
The centerpiece was a multi-hour long video. That video was so good and it tackled this head on. James Somerton, he had plagiarized all kinds of things, but in particular he had plagiarized various articles and taken things verbatim from them without crediting. And it was such a good YouTube essay because it is such a rampant issue on the platform. And it called out multiple people who engaged in it and as amazing as it was, it is such a cornerstone of the culture now in a way that I don't think we can come back from. What happens if the mainstream media continues to erode and these creators continue to be given prominence and being able to profit off of this reporting? If the reporting goes away, then what do they do? I feel like we're still at this point, fingers crossed, far away from that apocalyptic scenario, and of course independent journalists are building their own kind of separate infrastructure. However, I do think that a lot of these creators, because they just essentially plagiarize, they've already displayed a lack of moral character. If they were to run out of news coverage, I think they would just, like, use AI.
Right. At least when they're sourcing it from a journalist's reporting, that's been verified. Now that you have your own publication, what are you interested in looking into? What are you keeping an eye on?
My last day at NBC is technically the 24th, so that's when I'm planning to officially launch with my first piece. And I've been looking into the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni case for the past several months. I cared a lot about this topic and I knew it was stuff that would never run at NBC because it was too niche, too in the weeds. So I'm looking at that and I think that a pillar of my work over the past several years that will continue to be is looking at the way sexual harassment, sexual abuse, violence allegations are made within the public eye and then disseminated and discussed online, smear campaigns, et cetera.
And then one thing I want to do that I feel like is a big thing in newsletter culture that I really love is being able to focus on books. I've very rarely been able to do book coverage. It's not prioritized at click-driven publications because it doesn't always click well. But I'm planning to interview authors about some of my favorite nonfiction books, especially women authors. And the other thing that I want to do is when I release my paid tier, I wanna put all of the most important reporting, like the Blake Lively stuff, in front of the paywall 'cause it's in the public interest and I don't want to make it so that people have to pay to get this information. But for behind the paywall, I'm gonna be sharing more stuff about the behind the scenes of reporting. Next week I'm going on Adam McIntyre's YouTube tour, so I'm gonna have a tour diary, a very in-depth piece about him and about the tour, and that'll go behind the paywall. I'm very excited with this model to see what people are interested in. But being able to write things with a personal and relaxed and strong perspective has been so refreshing. For so long I've been writing from the view from nowhere, and if anyone follows me on social media, they know how I really feel. Being able to combine the two things in my work is what I've always wanted.
Welcome to the weekly scroll, a roundup of articles, links, and other thoughts from being on the internet this week!
What I’m consuming…
Why the new Bridget Jones movie was so good
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Embedded to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.