🟪 End of an era

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Removing a story, once published, is about as serious a decision one can make in a newsroom.

It’s an act that says "we screwed up" in its most extreme form, constituting an acknowledgment that the story in question cannot be sufficiently corrected to spare it this fate. Typically, such removals are accompanied by an explanation, a mea culpa, a where-it-went-wrong. As you might understand, it’s a last-resort decision, when all other options have been exhausted, when the mistake is too fundamental to fix.

And yet CoinDesk’s removal of a story by journalist Callan Quinn doesn’t appear to have followed the formula. The story — a somewhat snarky take on Justin Sun’s consumption of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian after the Tron founder bought it at auction for $6.2 million — was yanked without explanation, though it still exists in a republished version on Yahoo.

Fortune’s Leo Schwartz reports that the article was removed after Sun’s team complained to the leadership of Bullish, the crypto exchange firm that owns CoinDesk. Bullish then reportedly pressured CoinDesk’s editorial leadership to take the story down. This move, according to Schwartz’s report, set off a firestorm in the newsroom.

Then, Friday morning, Bullish reportedly fired three of CoinDesk’s top leaders: editor-in-chief Kevin Reynolds and deputy editors-in-chief Marc Hochsten and Nick Baker. According to Fortune, Bullish characterized the firings as a long-planned move to reduce costs and raise productivity. They also claimed no further layoffs were to take place.

This sequence of events is nothing short of disastrous.

I don’t know what Bullish thought would happen here. If the intention was to irreparably damage the newsroom that won CoinDesk a Polk Award, Bullish has succeeded. If the intention is to assure major event sponsors that they will be spared of anything approaching criticism, Bullish has succeeded.

As I’ve written previously, I spent more than five years working in CoinDesk’s newsroom, and many fine, decent and intelligent people have crossed its doors — both in the newsroom and on the business side. Yanking a rather inoffensive piece of event journalism at the apparent behest of a major crypto business interest is an affront to all the hard work done over CoinDesk’s 10-year existence.

I’ve criticized some of CoinDesk’s decisions since my exit, but when the acquisition deal was announced last year, I genuinely hoped that Bullish would be the owner the world’s biggest crypto news platform needs: one respectful of its editorial independence and focused on the task of building, at long last, a sustainable business model through which its news, events, and other products could thrive.

Crypto media needs more strong, analytical voices who help people understand what’s happening in the industry today, not less.

Now I’m left wondering if this is the end of CoinDesk as we know it. And crypto, ever in need of critical minds and independent voices, would be poorer for it.

And now, on to the roundup.

— Michael McSweeney

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