404 Media

404 Media is a digital news outlet covering technology. Its own about page describes it as “a journalist-founded digital media company exploring the ways technology is shaping–and is shaped by–our world,” focused on “investigative reports, longform features, blogs, and scoops” about hacking, cybersecurity, cybercrime, sex, artificial intelligence, consumer rights, surveillance, privacy, and what it calls “the democratization of the internet.”

Founders

The site names four founders, all previously at Vice Media’s Motherboard: Jason Koebler, who was Motherboard’s editor-in-chief for six years after four years as a staff writer; Samantha Cole, who the site states was in 2017 “the first journalist to uncover deepfakes” and who covers the adult industry, fandoms and online subcultures; Joseph Cox, who covers technology, crime and surveillance; and Emanuel Maiberg.

Products

Alongside the website the outlet publishes member newsletters, a podcast, a merchandise store, and a “FOIA Forum” — a recurring session on freedom-of-information requests. It sells subscriptions directly.

Sourcing Note

This page previously had a formatting defect as well as a sourcing one: its body text was hard-wrapped mid-word in several places (“outl / et,” “technol / ergy editor”), producing broken words in the rendered page. Rewriting has fixed it.

The founded: 2023 value is removed, along with the statement that the outlet “launched in August 2023 after a core team of Motherboard editors departed Vice Media amid corporate restructuring”: the about page gives no founding date and does not mention Vice’s bankruptcy. The reach line is removed as it described a business model rather than a reach.

Also removed as unsourceable: the summaries of specific early reporting (data brokers selling licence-plate and location data to police, AI worker monitoring, marketplaces for compromised data); the description of the business model’s licensing and broadcast partnerships and of “custom publishing tools optimized for lean operations”; and an “Impact on Digital Policy Debates” section claiming the outlet’s work “informed oversight inquiries and sparked legislative interest” and made it “a reference point for researchers, civil liberties groups, and policymakers.” 404 Media’s own about page does make impact claims of this kind on Joseph Cox’s behalf — that his investigations “triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines against major telecoms” and “pushed lawmakers to write new privacy legislation” — but those are the outlet’s claims about itself and are not restated here as fact.

The jason-koebler, joseph-cox, samantha-cole and emanuel-maiberg connections are removed because none of those slugs resolves to a page in this knowledge base; the founders are named and sourced in the body instead.