Top Reporter at The Intercept Quits, Slamming ‘Dysfunction’ at Outlet on the Way Out

A reporter for The Intercept quit and dropped a bombshell on the way out in the form of a piece slamming the nonprofit news outlet for mismanagement and dysfunction.

Ken Klippenstein, an investigative reporter at the outlet and prominent progressive voice on Twitter, published a piece on Substack Tuesday headlined, “Why I’m Resigning From The Intercept.”

“The Intercept has been taken over by suits who have abandoned its founding mission of fearless and adversarial journalism, and I can’t continue in an environment where fear of funders is more important than journalism itself,” he wrote.

Klippenstein said he would be moving from Washington D.C. to Wisconsin, from where he will be writing a newsletter for Substack.

He went on to lay out a series of allegations against The Intercept’s management, which he said had fueled the “corporatization” of the site that has seen its management team grow at the expense of the editorial team.

“In my time at The Intercept, I’ve watched the newsroom increasingly become dominated by management and bureaucrats whose numbers continue to swell as the number of people who actually produce news dwindles,” he wrote. “While the Intercept now has one poor copy editor for the entire website, it employs two staff attorneys, as well as a legal fellow, a chief strategy officer, a chief digital officer, a business coordinator, a senior director of development and an associate director of development, a product manager, a senior director of operations, a chief of staff, and a chief operating officer. And for the first time in The Intercept’s history, as of Monday, the new editor-in-chief now answers to the CEO.”

Klippenstein detailed an episode in which a piece about billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos faced internal scrutiny from Intercept general counsel David Bralow, who thought its premise was “naive” and told an interim editor at the site, William Arkin, during a heated call that he was “killing the story.”

Arkin and Klippenstein threatened to resign if the story, which criticized a charity grant from Bezos to retired Admiral William McRaven, was indeed killed. Bralow apparently backed down, and the piece was published.

According to Klippenstein, Arkin was fired by The Intercept on Friday. Arkin, a veteran national security journalist, said he will be editing Klippenstein’s Substack.

In another episode, Klippenstein claimed that Intercept executive Nikita Mazurov was overzealous in vetting a leaked membership list for the Bohemian Grove that they wanted to publish, to the point that Arkin called him “a fucking idiot” in a tense meeting.

The Intercept, which was founded by the journalists behind the Snowden leak and backed by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar until he pulled out in 2022, has fallen on tough times in recent years. Semafor reported earlier this month that its cash flow is dwindling and the company is on track to go broke by May 2025.

Current Intercept editor Ali Gharib, who Klippenstein mentioned in his piece as one of the “passionate editors and writers left who still want to do news,” defended Bralow on Twitter. “David Barlow is one of the finest people I have ever worked with. A top-notch First Amendment lawyer and a tireless (literally never sleeps) advocate for good journalism. Anyone serious about this craft would be lucky to have him by their side. I’d certainly follow him to hell and back.”

Intercept columnist Natasha Lennard also defended Bralow on Twitter and threw some shade at Klippenstein.

“Well I love our attorney David Bralow,” she wrote. “I hate top-heavy [management], too. But I’ll ignore any ego trips and continue writing for one of the few outlets publishing against Israeli-US propaganda during a genocide, as long as I can, w[ith] my overworked beloved editor @Ali_Gharib.”

Gharib told Mediaite on Tuesday that he is “always sad to lose talented colleagues, but plenty of journalists who remain at The Intercept have never and would never compromise their integrity. Our work speaks for itself.”

Mediaite did not receive comment from Ken Klippenstein, David Bralow, or The Intercept at the time of this piece’s publication.

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