Occasionally, we can be petty for petty sake. But also we can be petty and make an important point about the difficulties facing running a startup news organization in an era of online engagement farms. Let’s start with the former and then move to the latter.
Taking Names.
Last week, we stumbled upon a May 2025 filing in the Western District of Texas which outlined a case of a man who is accused of using Roblox to plot an ISIS-inspired attack against a Christian music concert.
With 11,000 subscribers, no outside funding, no paid ads, no special SEO magic – we are used to people taking our reporting, repacking it and reaching a larger audience with proper attribution. Hell, we have an entire page on our site dedicated to highlighting that. Having been a terrorism scholar for the last two decades and a reporter for half that time, we knew it was an interesting case so we partnered with our friends at 404 Media to report it out. We assumed that other news organizations would also take notice of our reporting, cite it, and write their own copy. That’s how journalism is supposed to work.
But we don’t think we fully appreciated how much the Internet ecosystem and parts of the established news organizations are parasites to original reporting.
An instagram account with millions of followers got more than 30,000 likes by posting a summary of the case with no link to ours or 404 Media’s reporting. Another instagram account racked up nearly 8,000 likes rewriting 404 Media’s story with no credit.
A X user got five millions views by posting a 13 word tweet about the arrest with no reporting credit. But just to put a bow on it, they linked to the court record from our piece, complete with a URL that included our site-specific tracking tag from the Court Watch/404 Media story.
Another X account with more than 600,000 followers also tweeted the gist of our story out without credit. We like to think we shamed a gamer site so bad that they quietly (old version) added a hat tip (new version) but not before they racked up 225,000 views on X. Not to be outdone by X content engagement farms, large Facebook accounts also got into the game.
Lest we think this is just the Internet being the Internet, established news organizations like CBS, ABC, and NBC, also conveniently forgot to mention that we broke the story. These things matter, not only because smaller news sites began noting “according to a report by CBS…” In a normal course of covering the courts, one could argue that other reporters also came across the charging documents on their own. That argument loses weight quickly when you note that the filing was untouched, more than six weeks old, and their reporting came hours after ours.
Now that we’ve gotten through the petty, let’s talk about why it’s important.
The Slight Matters.
Our site lives by subscribers and will die without growth. As of writing, the story last week got 11,091 views which pales in comparison to the engagement received by others which took our reporting without credit.
There are also expenses associated with our reporting.
We ran the math. It cost us $53.10 in PACER fees to find that story. We started by running searches in 94 federal districts for everyone charged with “interstate threats.” The U.S. Courts require you pay a fee for each of those searches, even before you review any docket. Then they charge you to download all the charging documents. In the era of very angry (usually) men, a review of all the cases involving threats can rack up quickly.
We then spent time reaching out to the defendant’s lawyer, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and Roblox to ask for comments. You know, typical reporter stuff. Our reporting fellow Peter Beck – who we pay a far too small of stipend to because of our current burn rate – spent his Thursday evening writing up our story.
As we’re written before, our news startup is barely hanging on. Through a new influx of paid subscribers, we went from losing money for the last three years to finally breaking even in recent months. But that breaking even only works because we take no salary. That’s not a sustainable news model. It’s currently paid subscriber money in, paid subscriber money out to pay for PACER fees, freelancer costs, and other reporting expenses.
Despite being an approved Google News publisher, cold emailing the head of Google News, asking anyone who has a cousin’s brother’s friend at Alphabet, our site is not being picked up by Google News. If you search for the story on their platform, the links will bring you to the news sites that rewrote our copy and neglected attribution. They get the clicks. We get to carry that annoyance.
We do original, fact-based, non-partisan journalism at a time when those three things do not translate to eyeballs. What does bring views is lazy and parasitic quick takes that leech off the time and expenses of real reporting.
This is all to say, not getting recognition of our reporting may come off petty. But that recognition sure is important for the survival of Court Watch.
If you’ve gotten this far into this piece, we trust that you’re as petty as we are. We’d sincerely appreciate it if you'd channel that pettiness into a paid subscription so the next time you see a viral news tweet, you will know you supported the news site that gave them their free content.