Alexander Cockburn, Becky Grant, and CounterPunch Board President Joseph Paff.
You might not believe a 24-year-old could run CounterPunch’s business office, but Alexander Cockburn believed I could, and hired me close to three decades ago to be the Miss Moneypenny… the Janine Melnitz… the Pepper Potts of CounterPunch. Working for Alex was a joy but not without frustrations. I had to convince him of the importance of running a proper business: setting up proper bookkeeping, getting our non-profit documents in order, and building a proper way to manage subscriptions.
We debated the pros and cons of a card catalog vs. a database, argued about recording expenses, and lots of particulars, but soon the office was up and running in Petrolia in his garage-cum-CounterPunch headquarters, with the walls furnished with his library. He wasn’t exactly an organized fellow (he could scarcely keep his shirt buttoned correctly), but he knew exactly where he’d find any book he was referencing on those shelves. In tuna season, the CounterPunch phone was coated with fatty albacore residue. The floors were always littered with hay coated in horse manure he tracked in from his beloved Aggie’s stable. Two giant Balinese baskets took up considerable real estate in the office: one for garbage and one for documents to save for his records. They were identical, and the contents of both usually ended up in the same place: the local dump. I fished subscribers’ checks and important mail out of the depths on many occasions. Our original notification of 501(c)(3) status had a giant coffee ring decorating it.
When I arrived in the office in the morning, I was likely to find an empty wine bottle as an unlabeled jug of white gas, or perhaps compost tea for his roses. Does it age me if I say, “Those were the good old days?”… I hope so, because three decades is a long time, and the times, they have changed. The work has evolved steadily over the years, pushed ahead by technological changes: updated software, smaller computers, faster internet. On a few occasions, libel lawsuits drained our coffers. But changes come at lightning speed now: since our Spring Fund Drive earlier this year, the world of independent media has been turned upside down. We’re rolling with the punches. We’ve got our trusty tech at the front of the rollercoaster, arms up and ready for what’s thrown our way, while the rest of us hold tight to the oh-shit handles. We’re steeling ourselves for come-what-may.
Though CounterPunch was one of the earliest left-wing adopters of the World Wide Web format, we maintained the newsletter and magazine until recently. But now, like many news outlets, CounterPunch has moved to an online-only presence. We painfully held onto print until the numbers didn’t make sense anymore and we could not afford to print it any longer. Subscriptions dropped below a sustainable level, and, along with the remaining readers, we bid a sad farewell to real paper in our hands and the smell of fresh ink… goodbye InDesign… hello WordPress. I might miss the magazine production more than anyone on the team! It was a pleasure reading every article in search of typos, and I’ll always miss the creative work of magazine layout and making ads. But I put on blue blockers, along with the rest of the staff, and we forced ourselves to adapt.
Today, a few outlets still use print. I admire their tenacity. Others have websites, some have apps, or a combination of all of the above. But as of this writing, tragically, many readers get their news without visiting any of those directly.
Across the internet, a growing share of searches no longer lead to an actual website. AI tools fetch and summarize content directly, without a person ever clicking through to the source. Industry-wide, bots and automated traffic now outnumber real readers finding outlets through searches. That’s not a CounterPunch problem specifically. It’s happening across independent media and reader-supported journalism generally. And it means the simplest thing a reader can do to help CounterPunch, or any outlet you value, is to refuse to be a zero-click reader. Go to the website or visit on mobile, or read the newsletter that comes to your inbox.
Sadly, many outlets are built around an old system: get found through a web search, get clicks, sell ads against those clicks. That system no longer works, and many newsrooms are scrambling to figure out what replaces it. Fortunately, CounterPunch never depended on that model in the first place: we don’t rely on advertising — we rely on readers. Subscriptions and donations keep the website online. Whether or not we could have predicted that advertising would fail as a support system for media, we never wanted to sell off valuable real estate or farm our readers’ data to line our pockets. CounterPunch’s space is filled with stories posted every day by your favorite writers around the world.
If you are passionate about independent media, CounterPunch or otherwise, read their sites directly. If your browser is set up to use an AI search, you can opt out, or scroll past and click the links if you do a search. Whether it’s a recipe from a small blogger or the latest news, websites rely on your direct visits. When you want to know what CounterPunch has actually published, come to the site itself rather than asking a chatbot or an AI search tool to summarize it for you. If you haven’t already, you can sign up to receive the CounterPunch News Updates newsletter a few times a week so you can go to articles directly from the email. Many organizations offer this service. And this isn’t just about supporting independent media — it’s about accuracy. Reports are showing that AI tools including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity are not accurate, or even close to it. Significant errors, including misquotes, invented details, and straight-up nonsense, show up in 45% of answers.¹ Studies show that these errors, often called “hallucinations,” end up in search results 60% of the time. Musk’s Grok was wrong 94% of the time.²
These aren’t obscure tools: they are accessed by most everyone using the internet every time they open their browsers. It’s not improving, either: many newer AI models perform worse than earlier versions. So if you want to know what we actually said, there’s only one place to get it straight: at the source.
Which brings me to the point: I’m holding out our begging bowl to our readers. Less than 1% of the people who read CounterPunch donate. That number has to grow. Average donations could drop if that percentage increased by only 2 or 3 points. People are stretched thin, and we’re not asking anyone to give more than what makes sense for them. Give what you can afford. What we need most right now isn’t bigger checks — it’s more readers deciding this is worth keeping going. Please pitch in today!
Footnotes/data sources
1. Joint study by the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union, testing ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity on real news content — found significant errors (misquotes, invented details, wrong facts) in 45% of over 3,000 answers tested across 18 countries and 14 languages.
2. Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism study of AI search engines on 1,600 news citation queries — found incorrect answers more than 60% of the time overall, with Grok 3 wrong 94% of the time.
