For the past year, the investigative journalist Julia Angwin has been busy building The Markup, a nonprofit news site dedicated to scrutinizing technology and its effects on society. The Markup raised more than $23 million in funding, a testament to the reputation that Ms. Angwin, the site’s editor in chief, and another of its founders, Jeff Larson, had established through their work at ProPublica, which they left last year. But on Monday evening, Ms. Angwin was fired from The Markup via email, just months before the site’s planned July start date. Ms. Angwin said in a letter to Craig Newmark, the Craigslist founder and the site’s biggest donor, that she was being pushed out by Sue Gardner, The Markup’s third co-founder who is also its executive director and the previous head of the Wikimedia Foundation. Ms. Gardner wanted to change the site’s mission to “one based on advocacy against the tech companies” instead of “producing meaningful data-centered journalism about the impact of technology on society,” Ms. Angwin wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times.

Source: New York Times April 23, 2019 14:22 UTC