Stories That Left Marks
Newton's landmark investigation at The Verge was not about a product launch or a funding round. It was about the people paid to watch the worst of the internet so the rest of us did not have to. His series on Facebook's content moderators - contractors enduring video after video of violence and abuse, developing PTSD, being paid close to minimum wage - ran in 2019 and 2020 and became a National Magazine Award finalist. Facebook eventually settled with 11,250 affected moderators for $52 million. That is not a data point in a year-end wrap-up. That is journalism that moved money.
Schiffer's breakthrough came earlier, in 2019, with a story about Away - the luggage company whose Slack channels, she reported, had become a kind of management horror show. The CEO resigned shortly after publication. She was a relatively new reporter, not yet 30, with a Stanford master's she had just finished. The company tried pushback. It did not land.
Together at Platformer, they became the go-to source during the chaos of Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition in late 2022. Schiffer had sources inside the company from her Verge days. Newton had the newsletter with 200,000+ readers who actually wanted the breakdown. Their dispatches from inside the wreckage - layoffs executed over Slack, engineers locked out mid-shift, the lights literally left on in empty offices - were the record of what happened.
Schiffer turned that coverage into a book. Extremely Hardcore landed in February 2024 with endorsements from Matt Levine ("the definitive book on perhaps the weirdest business story of our time"), Bethany McLean ("wonderfully gossipy and perfectly timed"), and a blurb from Nick Bilton that described Musk as having "strapped a rocket to a clown car and slammed it into a wall at 100,000 miles an hour." Musk himself, when contacted for comment, replied to interview requests with one emoji: crying with laughter. She put that in the book.
Newton, meanwhile, kept writing the newsletter and recording the podcast - Hard Fork with the New York Times's Kevin Roose, weekly, consistently one of the sharper tech audio products available. It made Time's 100 Best Podcasts. More importantly, it kept Newton's voice in the daily conversation about the industry he has spent two decades covering.