From the Old Editor: "We Care If It's True. We Don't Care Why."

Today is a big day at Racket, a changing of the guard, with a reboot centered on investigative journalism.

First, to be clear: I’m neither leaving nor reducing my workload. If anything, subscribers will see more of my writing going forward. America This Week with the irreplaceable Walter Kirn is also staying, albeit on a different schedule. Another reason for change is to give me more time to work on long-form stories, the first of which drops this week. However, we’re also adding staff and new content, and the expanded operation needs to be run by someone younger, stronger, and less recently concussed than me.

Hiring Emily Kopp as Editor-in-Chief isn’t just about managerial energy. Probably best known for work into the origins of the Covid pandemic, when she mixed traditional source development with aggressive use of public records laws to draw out links between the virus and American gain-of-function research, Emily is full of what people in the business used to call “reporter DNA.” This personality type may be nice or a raving lunatic in private, but is focused on stories, unable to relax if details feel wrong, and likely to become difficult with anyone who gets in their way.

I started following Emily when I saw her byline at the U.S. Right to Know, a subject of this site’s “Meet the Censored” series years ago and a major factor in publicizing the existence of the aforementioned gain-of-function program. Her work at USRTK demonstrated tenacity and the ability to follow a complex, evolving story. Some of my older mentors pointed her out during this time. Since leaving USRTK to join the Daily Caller, she’s continued breaking stories but has also been at the center of controversies. Some of those involved close friends of mine, who’ll surely call in a rage this week, or maybe stop calling, who knows.

Those episodes, though, were the reason I started thinking in this direction. Emily isn’t a hot-taker and doesn’t seem motivated by getting her face on TV (an anti-Taylor Lorenz?). She just loves the job, and when she gets on a story she believes in, she’ll challenge anyone, even her own sources.

My weakness has always been that I don’t do that, at least not enough. The list of effective laid-back investigative reporters is comically short, like the famed Airplane! joke about great Jewish sports heroes. You