Why is the Cooking in Quarantine guy sending me emails about a Namibian copper smelter and an American mortgage company?

TLDR: I started Hunterbrook Media

Hey CIQ family,

It’s me, Sam, and no, I’m not writing you about ramp season — although, well, I made a ramp pesto, cooked some eggs sunny side up on top of it, and it was mind blowing. (I didn’t have pine nuts, so I used cashews, which was kind of vegan coded and, unfortunately, landed the pesto on the green goddess dressing spectrum, but I also used Parmesan, because I haven’t changed that much.)

Anyway, I’m writing because I signed you up for the newsletter of a crazy company I started called Hunterbrook Media. The idea behind it is simple: Great reporting doesn’t have to be a bad business. You can read the New Yorker profile about it, published earlier this week, here. Their subtitle: The hybrid media-finance company wants to monetize investigative journalism in the public interest. Is it a visionary game changer or a cynical ploy?

The TLDR: Hunterbrook Media investigates under-scrutinized sectors and breaks news with reporters on the ground in under-covered regions. We publish without ads and paywalls. We pay for it, in part, by sharing certain stories with our affiliate Hunterbrook Capital, which may take financial positions based on our research. (Read more about how this works here.)

This is an experiment — and smarter people have tried and failed to find a sustainable model for funding investigative reporting. But our hypothesis is that if you recruit world-class reporters and OSINT analysts, pay people properly to analyze the universe of publicly available information, and monetize the facts they find instead of the eyeballs they reach, then you can tell truth, make money, and create change.

At the least, we’re going to report meaningful stories — and already, we’ve exposed what we believe is the biggest mortgage scandal since the financial crisis; a company we believe to be aiding the murderous junta in Myanmar; an effort to restart the pipeline that led to one of the largest oil spills in California history; and a copper smelter in Namibia that has allegedly brought environmental and health damage to the surrounding community.

I promise there will also be investigations related to cooking — like, maybe, why is there such a delta between the street cred of risotto and orzo?

But I also know this might not be for you. So feel free to unsubscribe the next time Hunterbrook Media emails you. But I’d love to have you. And I hope you’re having a very merry ramp season <3