Sarah Scire of The Nieman Lab profiles Molly White, whose “Citation Needed” newsletter currently has about 29,000 subscribers and about 2,400 (around 8%) pay up despite the lack of a paywall.
Scire writes, “If you were looking for a single journalistic catchphrase, you could do worse than ‘follow the money.’ Investigating and documenting the flow of cash and other resources is almost always a worthwhile pursuit for someone trying to get to the bottom of things.
“Molly White, an independent journalist, software engineer, and one of the sharpest technology critics around, knows this well. She’s been tracking cryptocurrency industry spending — which rivaled spending from the energy sector and big pharma during the 2024 election cycle — on Follow the Crypto for more than a year now.
“White writes about cryptocurrency and the broader tech industry in her newsletter Citation Needed and an extensive timeline project called Web3 is Going Just Great. There’s been no shortage of material, from Donald Trump’s web of crypto projects (“All the President’s tokens”) to the dismantling of federal cryptocurrency regulators to the right’s war on Wikipedia. For people who want to keep tabs on the crypto industry without drinking directly from the firehose, White offers regular recap issues. She also takes a step back and writes about building your own newspaper with RSS, what it’s like being your own legal department, and why the truth matters. Every Citation Needed article has an audio version that’s read by White — not an AI-generated voice. Most have generous footnotes and references.”
Read more here.
