[Ryan] Grim News

Grim said he’d leave The Intercept “in a box,” but he’s very much alive and launching a new outlet.

When I got back to writing earlier this year, I wasn’t expecting AIPAC to be a recurring theme. But then the right-wing group went and dropped over $4 million on a nearby congressional primary.

I was able to write about AIPAC with some fluency thanks in no small part to the reporting of Ryan Grim. Both at The Intercept — where Grim served as DC bureau chief from 2017 until this week — and in his 2023 book, The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution, Grim has been at the forefront of detailing how AIPAC’s longstanding bipartisan approach to influencing US politics has shifted over the past two election cycles, with the group now zeroing in on Democratic congressional primaries, and using millions of dollars from Republican donors to do it.

But going forward, you’ll no longer be able to read Grim at the Intercept, because he’s leaving — a move that took me by surprise, and him too. “I genuinely thought… I’d be leaving The Intercept in a box. The job was just too perfect,” Grim writes. “The why of why I’m leaving is a dramatic story probably much more interesting to me than anybody else, and there’ll be a time for telling that.”

Until that time, for weirdos (like me) interested in the internal machinations of the Intercept – a lefty outlet created a decade ago with the backing of billionaire eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar – the news site Semafor’s April story has us covered. It’s entitled “The Intercept is running out of cash,” and notes that Omidyar “decided in late 2022 to end his support for the organization,” setting off a chain of events that led to staff reductions, an internal revolt, and now Grim and others jumping ship.

Along with several colleagues, including Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill, Grim is leaving to create an organization in the same vein as the Intercept. “We’re getting the band back together,” Grim writes. Their new outlet, which launched Monday, is called Drop Site News.

“It would certainly be more personally lucrative for us to go off and write individual Substacks,” Grim writes, “but building a full-fledged news outlet is required if we want to punch above our weight.”

I admire the team approach, and look forward to seeing what trouble Drop Site stirs up in the years ahead.