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.”
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
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