Listen To This Story

As this year comes to a close, I want you all to know how enormously grateful I am to you for continuing to support our work — especially during these times. It’s been a rough year across the board and that certainly includes journalism. 

The world is changing fast: politically, technologically, psychologically. Trust is eroding. Attention is fragmenting. And the news — once a shared civic reference point — no longer plays the role it once did in shaping how people understand reality.

Recently, Axios founder Jim VandeHei described what he calls a “post-news” world — one in which people no longer know what or whom to trust, where misinformation and disinformation spread faster than fact-based reporting, and where reality itself feels increasingly unstable. Artificial intelligence, he noted, will almost certainly make this worse in the near term. His diagnosis landed because it rang true. But it’s only half the story.

Axios, like many mainstream news organizations, was built to solve a specific problem: how to make essential information faster and clearer for busy readers. For Axios, the great innovation is compression — “smart brevity” in a noisy world. 

But speed and clarity alone don’t solve the deeper post-news crisis. When journalism becomes thinner, a lot gets lost: history, context, accountability, and sustained scrutiny of power. In a fragmented media environment, those aren’t luxuries — they’re the first things to disappear and the hardest to replace.

That is where WhoWhatWhy lives.

WhoWhatWhy was built for excavation, not compression. The problem isn’t just noise, but unexamined history, unchecked power, unanswered questions — and unasked questions. This places us outside the familiar media lanes. 

We are not mainstream media, constrained by scale and caution. We are also not pure advocacy journalism built around ideology and outrage. 

We challenge all sides — without creating false equivalency when one side cannot be defended. 

Mainstream media largely focus on the present tense: what’s changing now and how to react.

WhoWhatWhy focuses on the long arc: how we got here, what was buried along the way, and what patterns keep repeating.

Both approaches matter. But they reveal different dimensions of the same issue.

WhoWhatWhy provides what’s hardest to monetize, easiest to ignore, and most dangerous to lose: independent, deeply reported fact based journalism that holds power to account. 

In a post-news world, a clear-eyed understanding of how we arrived at this moment is essential. But what matters most is learning how to survive in this new information environment.

Thank you for sticking with us for the long haul.

Russ Baker
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
WhoWhatWhy