Business
Column: Molly White's message for journalists going freelance — be ready for the pitfalls
Molly White is the model of an indefatigable and intrepid journalist. Through her website Web3 is Going Just Great and newsletter Citation Needed, she keeps tabs on the hacks, scams, failures, hype and assorted legal difficulties swirling about the cryptocurrency world.
She’s also independent, which means she’s unprotected by the fortification of lawyers and resources erected by the owners of newspapers such as The Times to fend off legal threats, frivolous and otherwise, that are part of the arsenal of people and firms we write about.
So she has some advice for journalists tempted by the burden of having bosses to “just go independent,” enticed, say, by the siren call of freelancing: “Just do a substack! It’s the future of journalism.”
I am the legal team. I am the fact-checking department. I am the editorial staff. I am the one responsible for triple-checking every single statement I make in the type of original reporting that I know carries a serious risk of baseless but ruinously expensive litigation regularly used to silence journalists, critics, and whistleblowers.
— Molly White
White’s warning is, in a nutshell: “It’s not for everyone.”
Anyone who follows crypto scams is familiar with White’s work. A software engineer by training, she is a longtime Wikipedia editor who got interested in the dark underbelly of crypto when she tried to write a Wikipedia article about it.
She doesn’t find much if anything to like about the field, which she sees as a hive of people aiming to take advantage of the innocent and unwary — the facetious subtitle of her Web3 website calls it “definitely not an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.”
But she does it all by herself.
“As an independent writer and publisher,” White wrote recently, “I am the legal team. I am the fact-checking department. I am the editorial staff. I am the one responsible for triple-checking every single statement I make in the type of original reporting that I know carries a serious risk of baseless but ruinously expensive litigation regularly used to silence journalists, critics, and whistleblowers…. I am the one who ultimately could be financially ruined by such a lawsuit. I am the one in charge of weighing whether I should spring for the type of insurance that is standard fare for big outlets to protect themselves and their staff, but often prohibitively expensive for independent writers.”
In recent weeks, White has had to fend off a couple of fatuous legal threats stemming from her work — one from a putative lawyer demanding that she take down a post for infringing a copyright under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (it wasn’t an infringement), and some sinister legalistic-sounding noise from the crypto platform Coinbase. We’ll return to both in a moment.
Experts in the potholes and pitfalls facing writers — especially investigation-minded or merely activist journalists — say they’ve received a rising number of inquiries from those considering launching a freelance career. Lloyd Jassin, a New York lawyer specializing in publishing law — including copyright and libel law, among other issues important to independent writers — says he’s referred several clients to brokers who represent insurance firms for writers in the last few months.
Curiosity about the freelance life is rising for several reasons. Mass layoffs in the media industry have put thousands of journalists on the street, forcing them to ponder new ways to exercise their professional skills.
Substack and other such platforms purport to offer writers a way to acquire followers of their own, building their personal brands. And the performance of established news media in the recent election, including the decision of the owners of The Times and the Washington Post not to endorse a presidential candidate, may have inspired established staffers to consider an exit from corporate media.
Independent writers’ works are protected, if theoretically, by U.S. libel laws, which discourage defamation lawsuits by public figures, and by so-called SLAPP laws, which discourage “strategic lawsuits against public participation” — that is, lawsuits designed chiefly to intimidate or silence critics. But exercising one’s rights under those laws can require hiring a lawyer, sometimes at considerable expense. Plaintiffs deemed to have filed a SLAPP lawsuit can be required to cover the defendant’s legal costs, but that would happen only after motions in court.
White is no stranger to efforts to intimidate her. The most concentrated pushback she has received recently has come from Coinbase. The crypto platform is irked at White’s reporting that it may have violated federal law by making political contributions while negotiating for and subsequently holding a federal contract.
In conjunction with the watchdog group Public Citizen, White filed a formal complaint against Coinbase with the Federal Election Commission on Aug. 1. In her reporting, White has shown that some of its contributions to the crypto industry super PAC Fairshake were made within the period in which political contributions are barred, which extends from the start of a contributor’s contract negotiations through the completion of the contract. The U.S. Marshals Service awarded Coinbase the $7-million, one-year contract to help manage the government’s hoard of seized crypto assets in July.
Coinbase hasn’t responded directly to White. Its response to the accusation has come through a series of tweets by its chief legal officer, Paul Grewal.
The gist of Grewal’s argument is that the funding for Coinbase’s contract comes from seized crypto assets in the Justice Department’s Assets Forfeiture Fund, not from congressional appropriations. Therefore, he contends, Coinbase didn’t violate the law prohibiting political contributions by contractors paid from “funds appropriated by the Congress.”
“Seized crypto assets are not Congressionally appropriated funds, period,” Grewal wrote.
As it happens, the legal question is far from being so cut and dried. In fact, the definition of “appropriated” was settled conclusively by the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision handed down in May and written by Justice Clarence Thomas. The only dissenters were justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch.
In that case, the justices turned away a challenge to the funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which derives from the Federal Reserve System. (The plaintiffs made an elaborately legalistic argument that such funding violates the “appropriations clause” of the Constitution and therefore the CFPB is unconstitutional.)
Thomas wrote that the plaintiffs had offered “no defensible argument” that the appropriations clause requires more than a congressional law authorizing “the disbursement of specified funds for identified purposes,” as was the funding for the CFPB.
By extension, so is the funding for the Coinbase contract. Indeed, the Congressional Research Service, in a close examination of the Assets Forfeiture Fund in 2015, found that for most purposes, the fund was the beneficiary of “a permanent appropriation” by Congress.
Grewal went further. Noting that he had placed his interpretation of the law on the record, he wrote that “repeating misrepresentations of facts after previously being put on notice is …. unwise.”
That sinister ellipsis is Grewal’s.
Grewal told me by email that no legal threat was implied by his tweet, and that Coinbase “certainly would make plain if it were our intent” to progress to a lawsuit.
Still, White interpreted Grewal’s tweet as “certainly a threat of something. I don’t think Coinbase is going to come and break my kneecaps, so a legal threat is the most obvious interpretation. It seems like a pretty clear threat to stop writing about this, or else.”
Public Citizen is sanguine about Coinbase’s swaggering. “Whenever corporate misconduct is pointed out, they always say ‘We didn’t really break the law, or the law doesn’t apply to us the way you think it does,’” says Rick Claypool, a research director at Public Citizen who co-filed the complaint with White. “It would be surprising if they said, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re right, whoops.’ Going up against a Goliath, they have a lot of strength to squish the Davids coming after them.”
Separately, White fielded a “takedown” notice from supposed representatives of Roman Ziemian, a co-founder of the alleged crypto pyramid scheme FutureNet. In an Aug. 19 post on Web3 is Going Just Great, White posted news reports that Ziemian had been arrested in Montenegro, and that he faces international warrants from authorities in Poland and South Korea.
The representatives tried to bribe her $500 to take down the post. When she refused, they copied the post to a blogging website, backdated it, and then claimed she had plagiarized it in an example of copyright infringement. She posted the notice, which came from a purported lawyer named Michael Woods with a Los Angeles address that doesn’t exist in Postal Service records. He didn’t respond to a message I left at the telephone number he listed.
How can independent journalists keep intimidation efforts like these at arm’s length? The goal of those threatening legal action, no matter how frivolous, is “to suppress criticism,” Jassin says. “Being a good journalist is the first defense,” he adds, so getting the facts right is indispensable.
White doesn’t keep a lawyer on retainer, but she knows lawyers who are “willing to glance at something I’ve received in my email inbox and reach out to offer support should one of those threats escalate into something more tangible” — which hasn’t yet happened.
“In a perfect world, reporting the facts would be enough to avoid frivolous lawsuits,” she told me. “But obviously, companies and people with resources are willing to file frivolous lawsuits regardless. That is a risk I take on, with hopes that being cautious and being very careful about fact-checking will at least stave off the worst.”
She advises journalists thinking about going independent to “think through if it would be life-altering to be on the risky end of an actual lawsuit.” There are ways, she notes, to “structure your business so you’re not risking your personal assets,” including finding insurance to cover one’s legal defense.
“Legal threats are only one component” of life as a freelancer. “There are a lot of other challenges — you don’t have employer-sponsored healthcare, or a 401k. A lot of readers think it’s an easy decision to quit a job and go independent. But despite all the challenges, I really love being independent.”
Public health researchers at UC San Diego tested whether 78 online retailers complied with federal and local rules on flavored vaping products. For most, the answer was no.
To try to keep young people from becoming addicted to tobacco, Congress took two steps in 2020 to keep minors from posing as adults to buy vaping products online: It barred e-cigarette sites from delivering through the U.S. Postal Service, and it required whatever delivery service they did use to check the recipient’s ID.
The state of California added its own twist that year, banning most flavored tobacco products. That prohibition did not explicitly cover online sales, but the city of San Diego is one of a number of local governments that adopted laws to eliminate any potential loophole.
Researchers at UC San Diego, Cal State San Marcos and Stanford decided to test how well those protections were working. If the results in San Diego are any indication, they’re hardly working at all.
The team lined up eight pairs of adults to try to buy flavored nicotine vaping products from 78 online retailers in October 2023. Each team made two identical orders from each retailer, with one buyer ordering from within the city of San Diego and the other in a different city in San Diego County with no explicit restrictions on online delivery of flavored vapes. In each order, they asked for delivery by the Postal Service if it was offered.
Ideally, the researchers would have struck out completely — none of the 156 orders delivered, given the state’s ban on the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, and certainly none delivered by the Postal Service. Failing that, at least the purchasers within the city of San Diego should have come up empty, considering the city’s explicit ban on online sales of flavored vapes.
And even if those measures failed, at the very least, each buyer’s ID should have been checked upon delivery to make sure they weren’t minors.
The results of the study, which were published online Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., showed that more than two-thirds of the buyers successfully obtained flavored vapes, including almost 70% of the buyers in the city of San Diego — again, where those sales are explicitly prohibited, the study said.
Of the successful deliveries, 80% were handled by the Postal Service, which shouldn’t have carried any of them, the study found. An additional 9% came from services such as UPS and FedEx that have policies against delivering tobacco products.
Finally, 93% of the deliveries were completed with no attempt to verify the buyer’s age. In the vast majority of cases, the products were dropped off without any interaction between the buyer and the delivery person, according to the study. And in only one case did the delivery person scan the buyer’s ID, as required by federal law.
“These results demonstrated pervasive nonadherence to age verification, shipping, and flavored tobacco restrictions among online tobacco retailers,” the study’s authors wrote.
The authors also acknowledged that they examined sales in just one county. But that county has some of the toughest anti-tobacco measures in the country.
Eric Leas, an assistant professor at UCSD and director of the Tobacco E-commerce Lab, said in a statement that online sales of e-cigarettes are the largest and fastest growing sector of the tobacco industry.
“There are longstanding surveillance systems in place that help implement laws at brick-and-mortar stores, but we do not have a system in place for online retailers,” Leas said, adding, “The results of this study highlight the need for greater oversight and enforcement of online tobacco retailers.”
A top official at the Vapor Technology Assn., a trade group for the e-cigarette industry, said the study raised “an academic issue that is interesting, but not particularly relevant to what is really happening in this country with respect to youth and vaping products.”
Tony Abboud, the association’s executive director, said vaping by youth has plummeted since the age to purchase these products was raised to 21 in 2019. “The daily use of vaping products by youth is almost negligible,” he said, especially compared to other products that are banned for minors, such as alcohol and marijuana.
Abboud also said the UCSD research didn’t examine the age-verification systems used by online retailers. “There is no reason to believe youth are accessing vaping products online,” he said.
The latest survey by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration found that although vaping remains the most popular form of tobacco use among minors, the number of middle- and high-school students who said they were currently vaping dropped sharply from 2023 to 2024.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “No tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, are safe, especially for children, teens, and young adults.”
John Mayer and movie director McG have agreed to buy the Jim Henson Company Lot, a legendary studio in Hollywood founded by Charlie Chaplin.
Singer-songwriter Mayer occupies an office on the lot and has been working for months to buy it from the family of the famed Muppets creator, according to a real estate industry source with knowledge of the deal who is not authorized to speak about it publicly. Mayer and McG recently agreed to pay more than $40 million for the property, the source said.
The pending sale was confirmed by Mayer’s representative Larry Solters, who said in an email: “John Mayer and McG are under contract to purchase Henson Studios.”
McG is the professional name of Joseph McGinty Nichol, a former record producer who is now a movie producer and director known for “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” “Terminator Salvation” and “Uglies.”
It’s unclear when the sale will close and Solters did not elaborate on what the buyers’ plans are for the property at 1416 N. La Brea Ave., which has a history as a movie and television studio but now functions primarily as a music recording studio.
Comic and actor Chaplin, who was born in London, chose the Tudor Revival style to create an ersatz English village at Sunset and La Brea when he built his own movie studio complex starting in 1917. The property was declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1969.
Some of Chaplin’s best-known films were shot there, including “The Kid,” “The Gold Rush” and “The Great Dictator.” After Chaplin left the country in 1952, the studio was used for television production. Its later owners included comedian Red Skelton and CBS, which shot the “Perry Mason” television series there in the 1960s.
The property was purchased in 1966 by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, who converted old soundstages to luxurious recording studios and made it the headquarters of A&M Records. The Henson family purchased it in 1999 and erected a statue of Kermit the Frog dressed as Chaplin’s famous character the Tramp at the entrance.
This year the family announced its intention to sell the property as part of a plan to have Jim Henson Co., which makes several children’s television programs, and Burbank-based Jim Henson’s Creature Shop under one roof. A representative for Jim Henson Co. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the sale.
As people wind through the queue of the new Tiana’s Bayou Adventure ride, they’re greeted by a chalkboard message left by the princess.
“Don’t forget! Celebration at my house tonight! Everybody’s welcome!”
That message shows up again, both in signage and song, throughout the ride, which replaced Splash Mountain at Anaheim’s Disneyland Resort and is inspired by the 2009 film “The Princess and the Frog,” which features Disney’s first Black princess.
The ride represents a new chapter for Walt Disney Co., as the Burbank media and entertainment giant looks to increase investment in its lucrative parks business, fend off new theme park rivals and project a more inclusive message to attendees.
“We wanted to give that feeling for everyone coming off of [the ride], we are better together,” said Josef Lemoine, senior story editor at Walt Disney Imagineering. “The story as a whole, it’s all about getting everybody together and also to find those individuals who might be overlooked.”
For the record:
12:15 p.m. Nov. 15, 2024An earlier version of this article misstated the title of the 1946 Disney movie “Song of the South.”
The ride, which opens to the public Friday, has been five years in the making. In 2020, Disney said it would remove references to the racist 1946 film “Song of the South” from Splash Mountain, amid the nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd.
Company officials said work on the Tiana concept actually began in 2019.
“Then the world changed,” said Carmen Smith, a senior vice president who heads inclusion strategies for Disney Imagineering, referring to both the Floyd killing and the COVID-19 pandemic. “Life kind of lets you know when it’s time for something to give birth to a concept, and it was without hesitation that leadership came together and said, ‘You’ve been working on it, you’ve got a good idea. Let’s move forward on this.’”
The ride continues the story of “The Princess and the Frog” and focuses on a party Tiana is throwing for family and friends in New Orleans, where the movie is set.
Riders journey through the bayou in search of the perfect band to perform before plunging down the attraction’s signature 50-foot drop. (In addition to the ride, Disney recently added two nearby stores that sell “Princess and the Frog” merchandise, created a Tiana-themed restaurant and re-themed the area around the ride as “Bayou Country.”)
The revamped ride follows other changes to offensive tropes in Disney attractions.
In 2017, Disney removed the bridal auction scene from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and changed one of the women formerly being auctioned into a pirate leader. In 2021, the company eliminated “negative depictions of native people” from the Jungle Cruise ride, including racist scenes of people waving spears.
This summer, Disney said it would update Peter Pan’s Flight, one of the theme park’s original attractions, to remove a scene involving caricatures of Native Americans.
Updating the rides’ objectionable elements is challenging, but the company is “doing it sensitively and making sure that we keep things relevant,” said Kim Irvine, executive creative director for Disney Imagineering.
Adding popular intellectual property such as “The Princess and the Frog” to a ride fits with Disney’s virtuous cycle strategy of using its film and TV characters to drive attendance to the parks, merchandise sales and vice versa, said Gavin Doyle, founder of MickeyVisit.com, an independent trip-planning website focused on Disney and Universal theme parks.
“It’s more reinforcing,” said Doyle, who is also a small shareholder in Disney. “Having a known princess on the ride is better than unknown characters.”
The animated film received mostly positive reviews when it came out and was a modest box office success, grossing $267 million worldwide.
Changes to the theme parks are also part of Disney’s business strategy to keep its main economic engine humming. The company’s so-called experiences division, which consists of its theme parks, cruise line, luxury travel experiences and merchandise, contributed nearly 60% of Disney’s operating income this fiscal year.
Disney has promised to invest $60 billion over 10 years in the experiences division, highlighting its importance for future performance. At Disneyland Resort, that will mean a cash infusion of at least $1.9 billion into an expanded footprint with additional attractions, shopping, dining and entertainment options.
That’s important as the company prepares to face a new rival in Florida, when Universal opens its Epic Universe theme park in May in Orlando, Fla. Analysts have been carefully watching Disney’s theme park finances in anticipation of the new arrival.
Even with the new competition, Disney said it expects to see 6% to 8% growth in operating income next year in its experiences division.
During the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday, Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston said that early bookings for next summer were “positive” and that other theme parks and attractions opening up in Florida had “generally been beneficial to us.”
Adding rides like Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which is also open in Orlando, helps Disney keep up with the competition, said Andi Stein, a communications professor at Cal State Fullerton who wrote a book about the Disney brand.
“Competition is a big part of the success of theme parks … making sure that you have the latest and greatest attraction before your competitor does,” she said. “And Disney wants to stay at the forefront of the theme park market, both in California and in Florida.”
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