We here at Confider bring you saucy scooplets every week. We’d like to ring in 2024 by looking back on some of our favorite scoops that had certified impact over the past year. Tell all your friends: You read it here first!
—THE SILVER BULLET: In January, we reported that stats guru Nate Silver was on the chopping block at ABC News as Disney overlords looked to cut costs, and that the future of his website, FiveThirtyEight, was under review. Four months later, Silver announced his exit from ABC, but the Mouse House-owned network decided to keep the famed politics, economics, and sports analysis website—although in a heavily pared-down state that resulted in more job losses. Read the full Confider scoop here.
—POLITICO FRACAS: Confider first broke the news in February that Dafna Linzer, Politico’s executive editor, left a congressional reporter in tears at the outlet’s 118th Congress kickoff event, publicly berating her in front of colleagues and top lawmakers over the rising star journo’s decision to defect to a rival publication. According to our sources, Linzer questioned the reporter’s judgment to jump ship and made disparaging remarks about her new employer, The Washington Post. By March 9, Linzer was out at Politico. Read the full story here.
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—WTF WOOTTON: Over the summer we brought you the truly bizarre tale of star tabloid journalist Dan Wootton, who stands accused of leading a twisted double life in which he created bogus online identities to trick and bribe men into sending him sexually compromising images. In August, Wootton was suspended by the Daily Mail, where he was a columnist, over the allegations. A month later, he was canned after a guest on his GB News program was allowed to go on a wildly misogynistic rant. That was apparently the last straw for Wootton at his TV job, too, as he’s been off the air ever since and his name’s been scrubbed from the British outlet’s roster. Read the full Confider scoop here.
—LA MAG FAULT LINE: Esteemed magazine Los Angeles recently came under new ownership and, as we reported in August, those new bosses quickly found creative ways to stiff writers past and present. The magazine, now under celebrity attorneys Mark Geragos and Ben Meiselas, seemed to shift into a vehicle for promoting ownership’s outside interests, often blurring the lines between editorial and advertorial, as insiders told Confider. Moreover, management owed thousands of dollars’ worth of payments to freelancers, as we reported. But that problem was quickly fixed when Confider went for comment and Los Angeles brass suddenly began doling out the cash. Read the full scoop here.
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—CRYING WOLFF: Earlier this fall, Confider first broke some salacious claims reported in Michael Wolff’s new tome on Rupert Murdoch before raising questions about those allegations and many others in the book when the full text came out. We called out how the notorious gossip writer appeared to print a number of spurious claims based on threadbare sourcing and failed to do some basic fact-checking. We later obtained sales figures for the nonfiction book, and it turned out that despite Wolff’s relentless self-promotion, The Fall had sold a measly 3,219 copies in its first week. Read the full Confider scoop here.
—THE MEEK SAGA: In late 2022, we reported that an FBI raid on top ABC News producer James Gordon Meek wasn’t tied to his journalistic work after Rolling Stone suggested the raid on Meek’s home may have been an attack on the press. Months later it was revealed that he’d been arrested on child porn charges. And in September 2023, Meek was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to the transportation and possession of child pornography. Read the original Confider scoop here.
—PUSHKIN AND PULL: Two months ago, Confider obtained audio recordings from inside Malcolm Gladwell’s podcasting empire Pushkin Industries, revealing a fractured culture, an uncomfortable back-and-forth over diversity efforts, and concerns about mismanagement by both Gladwell and his co-founder Jacob Weisberg. Staffers who spoke with Confider blamed Weisberg for the company’s rapidly dwindling profits and suggested he gave podcasts to his friends instead of pursuing more lucrative deals with big names. And in one all-hands Q&A, Gladwell awkwardly deflected concerns about diversity by suggesting it’s a subjective concept, and then adding, as a half-Black man, “Hello, I don’t count?!” Just days after we published our yarn, it was announced that Pushkin employees had formed a union under the Writers Guild of America. Read the full Confider scoop here.
—JEZEBEL ROSE AGAIN: Confider was on top of the rise and fall and resurrection of famed feminist website Jezebel. In August, we first broke the news that then-EIC Laura Bassett had quit after clashes with G/O Media boss Jim Spanfeller, lashing out in her exit note about management blocking pathways for Jezebel’s growth. She was G/O Media’s seventh EIC in a portfolio of 10 websites to bail in eight months. In November, G/O laid off Jezebel’s entire staff and shuttered the long-running site because G/O Media’s “business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s,” Spanfeller wrote in a memo to staff. Less than two weeks later, however, Confider first reported that Jezebel was set to be resurrected under new ownership, with multiple companies trying to get in on the action. Just days later, the news was confirmed: Atlanta-based Paste purchased Jezebel. Read the full Confider scoop here.
