Operating from a WeWork, 9fin might as well be a case study on how the hubris of tech founders pollutes the information economy. The company’s business model is built on the premise that journalists can force financiers to fork over NDA-protected and otherwise sensitive market intel via quid-pro-quo. If you have the misfortune of being hired as a “reporter,” know that this is really a sales job, and most of your workday will be consumed by cold contacting dozens of random people in corporate finance.
9fin’s upper managers, beholden to their venture capital overlords, are almost all men. The leadership style is punitive, and they're out of their depth as far as their “journalism” product is concerned. Some well-credentialed, talented journalists have landed at 9fin for one reason or another (shrinking industry, higher pay). While the bulk of 9fin’s reporters and editors are nice enough, they can also be shockingly ignorant and self-serious.
Leadership sees nothing wrong with giving out free subscriptions, which normally cost about $20,000 a year, to establish and retain sources, causing conflicts between sales and editorial. At the behest of upper management, every reporter at 9fin is made to use the Bloomberg terminals to copy names, emails, and personal information for cold contacting purposes. If reporters fail to produce enough intel, they’re ordered to go to the terminal at the public library and “get names." Additionally, reporters are given (optional) sales incentives. Some managers explicitly instructed me to mislead PR reps to trick them into confirming information.
No one seemed to care or understand that these practices are shameful and unacceptable in legitimate journalism. Most have never worked outside this dubious “financial intelligence” corner.
Depending on the team, you probably won’t write anything that requires a brain cell here. You will not be asked to pitch story ideas with intellectual substance, and the entire editorial process works backwards based on the “intel” that trickles in via frenzied cold contacting. What is valued amounts to poorly sourced deal leads and gossip for subscribers. A great deal of the “scoops” this place publishes are based only on word of mouth. “Yeah my source said that sounds right” counts as double sourcing here. For newsgathering, editors aimlessly throw company press releases and Bloomberg deal reports into a Slack channel with no context or direction. Upper management, despite never setting clear, organized editorial priorities, would become quietly enraged when a competitor broke deal news first.
Quality control was poor across teams. My editor, who I will refer to as “they,” routinely inserted grammatical and factual errors into mine and my teammates' copy, and then argued when I’d flag the mistakes. Did not understand subject-verb agreement and would throw anyone under the bus in cowardice to save their own skin. They refused to hold weekly individual check-ins or consistent team meetings. There were literally no reference materials or resources for new hires on my team. Nothing existed in writing. No style guide, no best practices, no team goals, no job descriptions, no organized process for pooling sources or information, no structure, no newsgathering, no pitching process. I was treated like a nuisance and an incompetent if I attempted to get them to do their job, and asking questions as a new hire would result in them condescending to me. One day I was doing fine, the next I was "not performing." They were smug as a default, barely literate as a rule, and a shining example of "failing up."
Management showed no understanding of meaningful, long-term source building. Their get-it-now approach to relationships completely undermined my ability to establish trust with industry players and create the sustainable “pipeline” they wanted. These people could not so much as explain what constituted a “story” or how they expected me to consistently produce three “scoops” a week by essentially spamming people in the market. I've never heard this lingo or seen these practices in the legitimate news and publishing world, and I could go the rest of my life without hearing the term "proprietary information." They have no idea what a scoop even is and they abuse the word to the point that it's totally meaningless.
PR reps know that 9fin and similar companies have an ulterior motive. As a result, if you get a rare opportunity to write what serious journalists would recognize as a newsworthy, narrative story, it will be incredibly difficult to get anyone to work with you or agree to an interview. By difficult, I mean weeks and weeks of sending out emails to over a dozen PR teams with no reply or getting yanked around only to be ghosted.
This place is an embarrassment, and the people there who aren't aware of that are as oblivious and tone deaf as they come. If you've spent any time at reputable publications, prepare to compromise your integrity and break every principle you've learned.
