Behind the Blog: Winning Awards and Leaking Documents

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss winning awards, sim swapping dumpster fires, and push notifications for infants.

JASON: This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that 404 Media won the “EFF Award for Fearless Journalism.” Here is what the EFF wrote about us in its announcement: “As the media landscape in general and tech media in particular keeps shrinking, 404 Media—launched in August 2023—has tirelessly forged ahead with incisive investigative reports, deep-dive features, blogs, and scoops about topics such as hacking, cybersecurity, cybercrime, sex, artificial intelligence, consumer rights, government and law enforcement surveillance, privacy, and the democratization of the internet.”

I’m proud and humbled that we’re being recognized for our work—not just by our subscribers (who we could not do this without) and colleagues but also by major organizations like the EFF. When someone says something nice about us or when we win an award or when something good happens to us, I think my first impulse is to be happy internally but to not make a big deal about it publicly. People don’t like self-promoters and egocentric people and on social media it feels like we are surrounded by both at all times, always. So I still feel sheepish about celebrating our success even though it means a lot to me. Emanuel and I will be going to the awards ceremony in San Francisco in September. 

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