How big is the market for rigorous reporting on misinformation? This new newsletter will be an Indicator
If you’ve been paying attention to the world of misinformation and disinformation for the past decade, you know the names of Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis. First at BuzzFeed News R.I.P. and then at ProPublica, Silverman has been one of the top reporters on the beat, uncovering Macedonian fake-news mills, Facebook malfeasance, Google ad shenanigans, and insider ad fraud. And Mantzarlis, through his work at Poynter, the International Fact-Checking Network (which he ran), and the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, has been at the forefront of discussions about battling misinfo.
So it was quite something this week when the two announced they’d be teaming up, like some very space-limited version of The Avengers, for a new project called Indicator. At one level, it’s a merger of the two newsletters that they’ve been producing independently for some time: Silverman’s Digital Investigations and Mantzarlis’ Faked Up. (Silverman’s was focused more on OSINT and investigatory tools; Mantzarlis’ more straightforwardly about disinformation and “digital deception.”)
But those newsletters were both side gigs to their day jobs at ProPublica and Cornell Tech. While Mantzarlis is remaining at Cornell Tech and devoting about 20% of his time to Indicator, Silverman left his job at ProPublica to create it. (In this economy?!) They say their goal is to serve “the global community of investigators and researchers” — a group that’s been the target of a typhoon of attacks from the Trump administration and its allies in and out of government.
Silverman and Mantzarlis plan to publish several times a week (two stories so far this week). And while it’s become de rigeur for newsletter subscriber benefits to involve video calls with the creator, Indicator plans monthly workshops for subscribers that go farther than most, featuring skills tutorials or walkthroughs of a tool or an investigation — something of interest to investigative reporters more broadly, not just those on the information beat. I asked the pair some questions about their new outfit over email; here’s our lightly edited exchange.
That’s not because the public wants them to lay off false information; au contraire, RISJ found majorities globally think platforms should be held responsible for this type of content. It’s just politically expedient in this climate to lay low. And so this manifests in record levels of digital scams, AI slop everywhere, and entire chatbots dedicated to fringe conspiracy theories.
But this is a much bigger field, encompassing scams and fraud, search engine manipulation, threat actors attacking platforms, abuse of AI tools and systems, etc. Digital deception has a cross-societal impact and it needs to be covered as such. We aim to be a must-read resource for people across academia, the public and private sector, and in journalism. Hopefully, we can grow the field of people doing this work and empower members of the public who care about information quality.
Our first workshop could focus on the tools and techniques I used for the story, and that I outlined in the guide. We also give members a chance to ask questions and share their own knowledge. There may be months when I use the workshop to demo some of the new or updated tools we’ve shared in our weekly roundups. And I would love to have (paid) guests as we grow!
I think it’s a big value-add to give people the chance to see things live and to ask questions. It speaks to one of the central ideas of Indicator, which is that everyone — professionals and the public — needs to be equipped to navigate our risky and chaotic information environment. Workshops are a direct and interactive way to do that.
The company also generously onboarded us to the Media Collective, which has additional benefits like access to Getty Images, legal review for articles, and free access to the platform. Having taken many a struggle bus to find relevant stock images for my pieces, I think Getty may have been my personal clincher.