Stratechery, Platformer and 404 Media, AI journalism done seriously

Today we get into where you read technology done seriously, and I'll warn you up front that the list I'm bringing is in English, it charges, and it's worth every cent. The thesis is harsh: the public conversation about AI in Spanish runs six to twelve weeks behind the place where the analysis is actually produced. Why insist that the Spanish-speaking reader pay for subscriptions to foreign outlets? Because there's no honest way to follow the sector on Spanish general-interest press alone, and I say so after trying for years. My opinion is biased, because I pay for several of these subscriptions. Form your own: try one free for a month and compare it with your usual supplement.

I've had five active subscriptions for five years. Some I've tried and dropped. Others I keep. I'm going to run through the ones I consider essential, the ones I consider useful with caveats, and the ones worth knowing even if you don't pay. The criterion is one: what does this outlet give you that ten general-interest pieces put together don't?

Stratechery, the weekly theoretical frame

Ben Thompson started Stratechery in April 2013, in his kitchen in Taiwan, while working for a company that paid him badly to do strategy. It was the moment when the word blog still meant something. Twelve years later, Stratechery is probably the most read strategic analysis in the global technology sector — board members, investment researchers and regulators read it; Thompson himself has been regularly invited to speak before European and American competition bodies.

What sets Stratechery apart isn't the scoop. Thompson rarely has sources who pass on leaks. What he has is an analytical frame — Aggregation Theory, first laid out in a series of columns starting in July 2015 — that lets you read the sector's moves as instances of a broader theory. The theory explains why some companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon) capture value by aggregating demand without owning the supply, and why that produces stable oligopolistic dynamics. When Thompson applies that frame to OpenAI or to Anthropic, the relationships of dependence on Microsoft and Amazon stop being news and become structure.

The newsletter publishes one long free piece on Mondays — available at stratechery.com — and three weekly pieces for subscribers on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. The subscription runs around 12 dollars a month or 120 a year. For anyone reading technology in Spanish who has no time for more, my operational recommendation is to read the free Monday piece and skip the rest: that one weekly piece already gives you context you won't find in any Spanish outlet.

Platformer, platform journalism

Casey Newton founded Platformer in September 2020 when he left The Verge. The bet was risky at the time: leaving an established newsroom to set up an independent newsletter on Substack. Five years later, Platformer is a reference for anyone wanting to understand how the big digital platforms work from the inside.

What Newton does well is source journalism. He has a consolidated network of employees — current and former — at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and Twitter/X who leak him information when something shifts. When OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman in November 2023 and reinstated him five days later, the Platformer pieces built on those leaks were the most informed circulating in those days. When Google fired Timnit Gebru in December 2020, Newton covered the case with a level of detail no Spanish outlet matched.

Platformer's subscription runs around 10 dollars a month. The Tuesday piece is free; the rest of the week sits behind the wall. Newton moved the newsletter from Substack to his own infrastructure after the 2024 controversies with the platform over extremism, and the change cost him subscribers but gained him ethical coherence.

404 Media, field reporting

404 Media is the youngest and, for many tasks, the most necessary. It was founded in August 2023 by four journalists — Jason Koebler, Sam Cole, Joseph Cox and Emanuel Maiberg — from Vice Motherboard, after the closure of Vice left them out in the cold. They opted for a journalism cooperative where the four are owners and editors. The bet is the opposite of the author-newsletter: here there's investigative reporting, not analysis or opinion.

What 404 Media has done since 2023 is notable. They investigated the ecosystem of non-consensual pornographic deepfakes — including coverage of the Taylor Swift case in January 2024. They published pieces on the mass scraping of public databases for training. They documented the network of invisible annotation farms in Kenya, the Philippines and Venezuela that prop up the big labs' RLHF. They investigated AI-generated content infiltrating platforms like Pinterest and LinkedIn. They covered, with field-level detail, the problem of automated calls with cloned voices during the 2024 US elections.

404 Media's model is hybrid. They have a portion of free content and another for subscribers, around 10 dollars a month. The coverage critical of the sector — especially when it discomforts the big platforms — is what best justifies the payment. For anyone wanting the ProPublica of the tech sector, this is the address.

MIT Technology Review, the classic that still holds

MIT Technology Review has been published since 1899 and from the mid-2010s reoriented its editorial line towards AI and biotech as its main axes. The magazine belongs to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, in practice, works as a bridge between serious science communication and the sector's academic debate.

What MIT Technology Review does best is the medium format. Pieces of 2,500 to 6,000 words where a journalist with technical knowledge explores a topic over weeks. When you want to understand what happened around Yann LeCun and the resignation of several members of Meta's ethics committee in 2022, or exactly what the OpenAI Safety Team's role was in the months before Altman's firing, MIT Tech Review has the piece with historical context. It doesn't have the scoop. It has the report that comes out three weeks later.

The subscription runs around 100 dollars a year in its digital version, with some articles freely accessible. For someone who reads technology in depth once a week, it's probably the most cost-effective option.

The Information, expensive industrial scoops

Jessica Lessin founded The Information in 2013 on the bet of charging a lot — around 400 dollars a year — in exchange for tech-sector scoops no other outlet has. Twelve years later, it remains the reference for investors, venture capital, sector executives and regulators who need to know what's cooking before it's public.

The Information is source journalism at industrial scale. It has a network of leakers at every relevant lab, every hyperscaler, every top-tier venture fund. When OpenAI closes a round, when Anthropic signs with Amazon, when Apple decides what to do with Apple Intelligence, the first versions of the story tend to come out here.

It has its B-side. The Information is industry, not criticism of the sector. Its business model depends on its subscribers — many of whom are the protagonists — continuing to leak to it. That produces informed coverage but not especially hard on the interviewees. Useful as a source, not as a moral compass. For anyone needing operational intelligence on the sector, there's no substitute. For anyone wanting a critical perspective, you need to cross-check it with 404 Media or Platformer.

What the five have in common

There's a pattern worth naming. The five outlets are independent, charge by subscription, don't depend on sector advertising and have small teams. Stratechery is practically one person. Platformer is three. 404 Media is four. MIT Tech Review has a larger team but university funding that separates it from the advertising market. The Information is bigger but fiercely independent of sector advertising.

That structure isn't accidental. The quality of the coverage is inversely correlated with the section's advertising dependence. The less an outlet depends on Microsoft's or Amazon's advertising, the freer it is to criticise Microsoft or Amazon when the story calls for it. The five outlets mentioned sit at the low-dependence extreme, and it shows.

This raises an operational question for the Spanish reader. If good coverage of the sector costs money and is in English, what does the Spanish-speaking reader do with a limited budget and/or limited English? The honest answer has three parts, and here it comes.

The operational strategy for the Spanish-speaking reader

The first part of the answer is pragmatic. Subscribing to a single good outlet costs less than two coffees a month. The "it's expensive" argument is real for someone earning little, but it isn't for someone who reads technology regularly and has a middle income. A subscription to Stratechery for 120 dollars a year or to MIT Technology Review for 100 dollars a year more than replaces, in informational quality, the time the reader spends consuming free mediocre coverage.

The second part is linguistic. For anyone not comfortable in English, today there's the technical possibility of reading these newsletters with the help of automatic translators — ChatGPT, Claude, DeepL — that produce readable Spanish. The loss of nuance exists, but the difference between reading Stratechery with a translator and reading a Spanish technology supplement is on the order of five to one in operational information per unit of time. It sounds exaggerated and it isn't.

The third part is selection. You don't need to read all five. A reader who subscribes only to Stratechery and reads its free Monday column is already in an informational position far above the reader who consumes ten weekly pieces of Spanish general-interest press. If they can also pay the subscription and read the other three weekly pieces, the leap is bigger. If they add Platformer or 404 Media, they reach a level of coverage no Spanish outlet offers. You don't need more.

And it's worth complementing this with two habits. Read at least one Spanish-language newsletter that keeps its judgement — Error 500 by Antonio Ortiz, Café Ambrosía by Lluís Esteban, the occasional analyses of Manuel G. Pascual at El País, Maldita Tecnología. And read the original papers or their technical summaries when something really matters: Vaswani et al.'s 2017 paper on transformers, Bender et al.'s 2021 paper on Stochastic Parrots, Bommasani et al.'s 2021 paper on foundation models. It costs an afternoon and saves months of mediated coverage.

The political question

This is personal opinion, but I hold it with figures. The asymmetry between coverage in English and coverage in Spanish isn't a cultural problem but an economic one. The key difference is documented by the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2025: the share of the population willing to pay regularly for online news is 13% in Spain, around 24% in the United States, and over 26% in the Nordic countries. That difference translates, almost linearly, into the amount of independent journalism each market can sustain.

What this produces is an informational inequality that accumulates. The Spanish reader who consumes only free content gets information mediated by advertising or by quick translations, without the nuance of the original. The reader who pays, in Spanish or English, accesses the analysis. The difference between the two readers shows up two or three years later in the quality of their decisions — professional, electoral, vital. It's no exaggeration.

What I'd ask, with no realistic hope, is that the Spanish companies that depend on understanding the tech sector — banks, telecoms, energy, health, public administration — pay their teams' subscriptions to Stratechery or The Information as part of the training package, the same way they pay for coffee or the gym. It costs less than an hour of outside consultancy and is worth more. The difference between a board that has read Thompson on Mondays for a year and one that has only read headlines is quantifiable in decisions avoided.

The concrete figure that closes it: in September 2024, Casey Newton published in Platformer — available at platformer.news/p/the-platforms-are-quietly-changing-how-they-fight-misinformation — a piece on changes to the moderation policies of Meta, X and YouTube regarding electoral disinformation. The piece came out on a Tuesday. The translations in the Spanish press appeared between six and eleven days later, trimmed, without the anonymous sources Newton himself cited, and with a headline that minimised the change. That window — six to eleven days — is the operational difference between the two ecosystems, and it shows in every story, not in some.

Definitions

Newsletter: a periodic publication, generally digital, distributed by email or web to subscribers. Stratechery and Platformer are newsletters in the strict sense; The Information works more like a digital newspaper.

Subscription: a business model in which the reader pays the outlet directly, without sector advertising as an intermediary. It's the model that best protects editorial independence.

Aggregation Theory: a theoretical frame proposed by Ben Thompson to explain why digital platforms that aggregate demand capture value without needing to own the supply. It lets you read the monopolisation dynamics of the contemporary tech sector.

Investigative reporting: journalism that starts from unresolved hypotheses and spends weeks or months verifying them with multiple sources. It's the most expensive genre and, for that very reason, the scarcest in markets with low willingness to pay.

References

Ben Thompson, Stratechery (stratechery.com, since April 2013). Weekly strategic analysis newsletter, paid subscription.

Casey Newton, Platformer (platformer.news, since September 2020). Digital-platform journalism newsletter, mixed free and paid.

Jason Koebler, Sam Cole, Joseph Cox, Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media (404media.co, since August 2023). Independent journalism cooperative, mixed free and paid.

MIT Technology Review (technologyreview.com, MIT, since 1899). The sector's dean magazine, mixed free and paid.

Jessica Lessin et al., The Information (theinformation.com, since 2013). A specialist digital newspaper of the tech sector, high paid subscription.

Ben Thompson, Aggregation Theory (Stratechery, columns from July 2015). The founding text of Thompson's analytical frame.

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2025 (Oxford University, June 2025). Figures on news subscription by country.

Going deeper

Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso, 2023). A frame for understanding why independent coverage of the sector needs economic structures different from those of general-interest journalism.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (Viking, 1985). A classic precedent on how the medium conditions the content.

Nicholas Lemann, Transaction Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). A historical analysis of the transformation of the press and the new models of sector coverage.

Antonio Ortiz, Error 500 (error500.net). A Spanish-language newsletter on technology with independent analytical judgement.

You might also like

• Why Spanish journalism about AI is very bad
• OpenAI's press release is not journalism
• Three months without reading headlines to understand AI
• Where AI is really thought through, and it isn't on LinkedIn

Elsewhere

• Nieman Journalism Lab (Harvard)
• Maldita Tecnología