2025 → 2026
A letter from our Publisher.
We had a big year. Now we want to scale our impact. So we need your help in two categories:
Reporters: The newsroom is hiring — especially for journalists in energy, healthcare, and technology, as well as social media savants. Send anyone exceptional our way. Contact: talent@hntrbrk.com
Stories: Hunterbrook exposes wrongdoing, features overlooked companies, and breaks news that impacts entire sectors (see this week’s viral investigation and podcast with Mark Cuban that hit the PBM businesses of UnitedHealth, CVS, and Cigna). Who should be investigated? Featured? What stories are missed with newsrooms shuttering across the country? Contact: ideas@hntrbrk.com
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In 2025, Hunterbrook Media published dozens of investigations, driving impact across healthcare, housing, and the environment. (See below!)
No ads or clickbait. No exclusive paywalls. No donors or high-dollar events.
I am excited to report: Our radical new approach to funding journalism — which I wrote about for the Nieman Journalism Lab — proved profitable within 18 months of launch.
We did this with two businesses: a fund, Hunterbrook Capital, which can invest based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting; and a litigation firm, Hunterbrook Law, which can use our reporting as the basis of lawsuits against bad actors.
But really, our business model is simpler than that.
We get paid to be right, to be rigorous. Because if the reporting is wrong, the investment or the lawsuit fails. And the reverse is also true. Markets and courts, while severely flawed, are still fairly good at getting to the truth — eventually.
And equally important, because our model doesn’t depend on how many eyeballs we reach, we can tell overlooked stories that matter to specific communities, geographies, or sectors — never resorting to clickbait for ad dollars.
To those who have supported us with stories, talent, or even just the time you’ve spent engaging, thank you again for your early conviction in a new way to drive accountability and awareness. You were right.
We had a hypothesis we could do this. You helped us prove it. Now: growth.
So please do send us your best story ideas and reporters — and help us build a platform proving that, even today, the truth still has value.
Here are some highlights from the newsroom:
We uncovered, in collaboration with Pablo Torre, that a Harvard-linked startup working with elite athletes just so happened to be secretly funded by the Chinese Communist Party...
... and that a medtech giant was selling inaccurate blood sugar monitors to people with diabetes, despite warnings from the FDA —
— and we published both those stories in the same week.
The former triggered a Congressional probe. The latter catalyzed multiple lawsuits and a major decline in share price, forcing the company to take action.
We also educated Santa Barbara County on the stakes of potentially transferring a pipeline responsible for a major oil spill from Exxon to a sketchy spinoff named Sable Offshore. The deciding vote on the municipal board that ultimately refused to permit the pipeline transfer, often an ally of the fossil fuel industry, switched sides here: “The final straw for me was a Hunterbrook article, which was as disturbing as anything I’ve read.”
We worked with human rights groups on an investigation revealing that over 200 Western companies have enabled precision strikes on Ukrainian hospitals, schools, and shopping centers. An airborne division of the Ukrainian army sent us this signed flag:
We then published an investigation identifying kidnapped Ukrainian kids on Russian adoption sites. The evidence disappeared from the web — but only after we’d already sent it to prosecutors.
And we plan to have our biggest story about the Russian invasion of Ukraine running later this month.
We relentlessly reported on the fallout of the Vistra fire in Moss Landing — a scandal the NYT and Bloomberg published investigations into weeks after Hunterbrook first scrutinized the incident. Our work was so dogged that the company pressured the county to block Hunterbrook from asking any more questions (but reversed that decision amid backlash).
We’re especially proud of the range of our reporting — which spanned from a literal “How The Sausage is Made” deep-dive about a toxic factory in rural Illinois and a leukemia cluster in the Nebraska birthplace of Kool Aid to a bustling Jumia warehouse in Nigeria and a Restoration Hardware outpost near London with more deer than people.
We also published an investigation into how eggs became so ridiculously expensive. The same week we released our story, the DOJ opened a probe. Egg prices have since plummeted and Hunterbrook’s reporting has been cited in multiple antitrust lawsuits.
We don’t believe our reporting was causal, but it was well-timed!
In recent months, we ramped up our reporting on another national story: companies using AI hype to fool investors, from abandoned oil wells to radiology (in an investigation led by Bethany McLean).
We also built on last year’s work — and went deep into the housing sector, revealing how thousands of ordinary Americans get pressured into buying homes they can’t afford or that suffer much worse quality than advertised.
And in collaboration with ProPublica, we showed how certain Americans — three cabinet secretaries — hypocritically game the system on their mortgages.
But the newsroom didn’t just expose wrongdoing this year. Our reporters also found hidden, exciting, positive stories.
See: That time one of our reporters rented a hotel room with a view of a tarmac to discover a secret hydrogen aircraft.
Or that time we (with Citrini Research) broke the news of a transformative robotics deal, the same day Goldman Sachs initiated a “Sell” rating on the company. In December, after the stock more than doubled, GS switched its rating to “Buy.”
Or when the FDA finally approved a new life-saving medication after years of monopolization, a story Hunterbrook first broke in 2024.
These are just a few examples of the newsroom’s scoops.
We scooped the news that a Chinese drone giant stopped blocking flights over airports and military bases; the company is now banned from the U.S.
We found a Department of Energy website that accidentally revealed which companies would — and wouldn’t — receive loans in the final days of the Biden Admin.
We reported on a tragic death at a Pennsylvania steelmaker, after an investigation into its practices last year, forcing its new parent company to pledge to improve conditions (we’ll be watching).
And we quickly debunked an insane fake news story planted by a Dubai-based market manipulation operation claiming that a pizza chain would be acquired.
Notably, we also broke the news of the massive American military deployment to the Middle East. Weeks later, we reported one of the biggest stories of the year: that B-2 stealth bombers had taken off from Missouri en route to Iran. We published that news before the jets had even left the state, hours before any major media outlet. The next day, the jets bombed Iran’s nuclear sites.
Months later, back in August, we first posted about a similar military build up — this time, within striking distance of Venezuela.
Throughout 2025, the newsroom’s reporting reached boardrooms, investment committees, and government agency offices. We gave our reporting teeth. We forced executives, board directors, shareholders, and regulators to act.
We’ve also learned change doesn’t happen all at once.
It took a year after our initial UWM investigation for the Ohio Attorney General to charge the mortgage giant for alleged deceptive practices. Just as long for the U.N. to demand answers on a toxic copper smelter in Namibia. Weeks before Permian Resources even acknowledged a gas leak Hunterbrook exposed — eventually admitting the incident had happened to regulators.
That’s why, in 2026, we need your help identifying more stories and talent.
Because we’re building an enduring institution — the kind that can create sustainable, scalable change, at a time of perceived impunity.
Who should we connect with? Who can join this expedition?
Telling truth. Making money. Creating change.
We’re doing it every day. And only just beginning.
Thank you,
Sam Koppelman
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
©2026 Hunterbrook Media LLC. All rights reserved.
All information presented are our opinions based on our analysis and are subject to change. Except where otherwise indicated, the information provided herein is based on matters as they exist as of the date of preparation and not as of any future date and will not be updated or otherwise revised to reflect information that subsequently becomes available, or circumstances existing or changes occurring after the date hereof. Hunterbrook assumes no duty to update this copy of the letter to reflect information that subsequently becomes available, or circumstances or changes after the date hereof.