The reporting is moving. The credit isn't.

This spring, we spent time with two independent journalists breaking the kind of accountability stories that used to be the exclusive province of big newsrooms, and watched them fight on two fronts to keep their names attached to their own work. One front is legacy journalism, where outlets can treat solo reporters as sources rather than peers, scooping stories the creators originated. The other is an aggregation and AI-summary layer that strips reporter bylines in favor of whichever institutional brand republished the piece last. For journalists whose livelihoods run through a direct subscriber relationship, credit is how the next story gets paid for.

Right around rush hour on the afternoon of March 6, Marisa Kabas – who writes the indie newsletter The Handbasket – published a bombshell: never-before-seen body camera footage from the DOGE-led raid on the U.S. Institute of Peace the year before.

The story existed because she had spent a year in federal court to get it – filing a FOIA lawsuit in June 2025 with free legal support from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP).  Kabas and the RCFP fought through months of government delays and exemption claims, finally winning the battle before a D.C. Superior Court judge in February. 

The footage ran to nearly six hours. No other journalist had pursued it through litigation. 

Like many independent journalists building followings in the creator ecosystem, Kabas took her readers along on the journey to get the footage. She posted when she started pursuing the story. She updated when the FOIA request was made. And on Feb 18th, she triumphantly shared the news that she had won her lawsuit and the footage would be released within 14 days. 

“I will share clips and insights with you as soon as I can,” wrote Kabas at the end of that post.

Implied in that statement was the work now ahead of Kabas: hours spent poring over the footage, additional reporting and consultations with her partners at RCFP to ensure they were getting it right.

Kabas was not intending to publish on March 6th at 4:59 p.m., just ahead of NBC4 Washington’s evening news broadcast. The story of why she did is emblematic of the challenges independent journalists are facing when it comes to credit. 

On March 5, Marisa got an email from someone she didn’t know: Mark Segraves, a general assignment reporter with a local news broadcast station, NBC4 in Washington, DC. Segraves asked only for her phone number with no context for why. She sent it along, mildly curious.

The next day, Segraves called. He congratulated her on her work in winning the FOIA case, then revealed NBC4 had submitted its own FOIA request the week before and also had the footage and was planning to air the story, essentially breaking the news, that day on the channel’s 5 p.m. news broadcast. 

Kabas went into triage mode. She told Segraves about the months of work she’d put into the story, the long court battle – and asked Segraves for the professional courtesy to hold his story until Monday to give her time to finish hers and publish first. 

“Well, I'm not just a blogger,” Segraves said. “I can't just hold it. But I'll ask my editor.” 

The conversation turned contentious when she called Segraves out for knowing 24 hours earlier that they were planning to air the story on the 5th and not telling her (even though that would have given her at least those 24 hours to prep her story). Kabas said that Segraves made a point of saying he'd never heard of her before, which she found particularly galling given her very public reporting.

According to Kabas, Segraves soon called back to say they wouldn't hold the story, but offered to do a quick Zoom interview with her to to include in their package. She agreed, reluctantly, thinking she’d at least be on the record in this initial reporting, in some small way rather than erased entirely from a story she’d originated and fought almost a year to bring to light.

After that Zoom, Kabas had three hours to get her story out before the NBC4 evening broadcast. She did, publishing at 4:58 p.m.

At 5 p.m., NBC4 Washington aired a seven-minute package. The segment opened with the words "First on 4." Kabas was not mentioned for the first six minutes. When she appeared, they mispronounced her name. NBC4’s Instagram and TikTok cuts of the segment erased her entirely. When Kabas wrote to the station to point out all of this, the news director apologized only for the mispronunciation.

While a narrative has arisen about news influencers and creator model journalists taking reporting from established news organizations and getting more views and engagement, there is a long, uncertain history of how credit and attribution is handled in journalism.

Most of us have lived through the ways this dynamic played out during the Aggregation Era of the 2010s. But it has roots back to the earliest days of newspapering when even Ernest Hemingway had to fight for his byline.

That dynamic has not translated well to the indie journalism space where layers of editing and legal departments often don’t exist. Rather, journalists like Kabas are working on their own and vulnerable to being scooped – often by reporters and institutions that have less fluency with the creator space and poly-platform realities.

It’s left to the creator herself to make the calls, send the emails and demand credit if they want to chase a larger publication for attribution. Kabas is not the only reporter whose work illustrates this pattern. She's just had the most complete experience of it across 15+ months of independent reporting.

Monique O. Madan launched Two Can Be True on New Year's Eve 2025, nine months after being laid off from The Markup and CalMatters. She had spent 17 years in newsrooms: a decade at the Miami Herald, on the national team at USA Today, and in investigative roles at CalMatters and The Markup. Her Herald work freed a man from 11 years in ICE detention and solitary confinement.

She is not a newcomer to serious accountability journalism. She is, however, new to doing it without a salary, an expense account, a legal team, or an editor.

Eight weeks into her newsletter, a scoop landed. Guards at the remote Everglades immigration detention facility known as "Alligator Alcatraz" were circulating an unauthorized morale patch – a grim reaper with red eyes holding a hatchet, guard towers silhouetted behind him, the words "You Can't Hide."

A fired guard had handed the patch to an activist outside the facility. Madan tracked down a recently released detainee, asked him to describe the patch without being shown it, then confirmed it on FaceTime when his description matched exactly. Florida Highway Patrol, FDLE, and the Bexar County Sheriff's Office are now investigating. 

She reported this alone, on her living room floor, nine months postpartum. She tried to get a pre-publication legal review and was turned down by multiple organizations, who said they weren't set up to assist independent journalists.

"The reporting itself didn't change," she said. "The conditions did. Whether I was at USA Today or the Miami Herald or The Markup – records requests, pressure testing everything. Your instincts don't go away because you're independent. I found that to be really assuring. It was a beautiful moment for me."

"I did have less friction. But I also had less protection."

Madan’s experience with a mainstream local newsroom was different from Kabas’. 

The Miami Herald – her first employer, her alma mater and hometown paper – republished the investigation with full credit and a prominent link back to the original. She wrote a six-point essay explaining why the moment mattered. She knows what the norms should be, and she modeled them publicly because they aren't yet assumed.

The Herald did seemingly everything right to credit and attribute an independent reporter. And yet, still, in this evolving cross-platform world, there is more to the story…

Once the Herald republished Madan's investigation, aggregators, news sites, and AI-summarization tools picked it up, but attributed it to the Miami Herald. The Herald's clear notation that the story originated in Madan's newsletter did not survive the relay chain. By the time the story had moved three steps from its source, she had disappeared from it.

"I spent days reaching out to editors, generic websites, LinkedIn messages… saying I need a correction. I was screaming: ‘Link to my story. This is my reporting.’ And I got some pushback. A lot of people were like, ‘Well, we think we didn't make a mistake, but we're gonna help you out as a professional courtesy.’"

Some outlets updated their attributions, but many didn't change a thing.  And the AI summaries, once generated, were essentially locked.

“The institutional bias built into the aggregators stands in direct contrast to what so many people are choosing to trust – the human who actually did the work, has the knowledge and is introducing the public to the story,” said Joy Mayer, executive director of Trusting News, a non-profit that advises newsrooms and creators on best practices for trust and credibility. “It's easy and efficient to see everything in one place. But for an individual news consumer to believe something is responsible and accurate, being several steps removed from the original source isn't helpful.”

The aggregation failure is structural and largely automated, built into the architecture of how news travels online. No single bad actor. No correction mechanism. A system that seemingly defaults to the largest institutional brand name at each relay point.

The research supports this at scale. A 2025 Tow Center study at Columbia tested eight AI search engines and found they provided incorrect or inaccurate attribution answers in more than 60 percent of queries, with a specific documented tendency to cite syndicated rather than original versions of articles. When a Herald story is picked up by Yahoo News or MSN, the aggregated version is what AI tools reach for. 

As John Shehata of Newzdash told us: "At NewzDash, we track AI Overviews across millions of news queries, and we already see a major attribution problem, even for large news brands. If AI platforms are not consistently getting attribution right for major publishers, the problem is likely even more severe for independent journalists. And when attribution does appear, it usually goes to the publisher brand, not the reporter who actually did the work."

For a journalist at the Herald, this is no doubt irritating. There is work to be done between the executive offices and legal departments of these publishers and platforms. For a newsletter two months old, built on a reporter's name and a direct subscriber relationship, this is existential AND material. It's an economic and reputational threat.

"As journalists, we're taught it's not about credit," Madan said. "It's about the public good, the impact we're making. And I 100% believe that. But we also have to think about the realities of credit and what that leads to. I need to make a living somehow."

Back to the NBC4 reporter Mark Segraves’ comment to Kabas. "Not just a blogger" does double work: it's a status claim about himself, and it reveals the definitional map that is wildly out of date: a journalist defined as working with institutional backing plus beat assignment plus editorial chain.

What's absent from that map is that the source chose Kabas, not NBC4 or The Washington Post. The records were released because of her work. The legal risk and work was hers (and RCHP’s). The story would not exist without her. Yet the institution seemingly encountered her work as a resource to access, not a peer with prior claim. Kabas told us that Segraves made sure to tell her he'd never heard of her before. We can imply an assumption that recognition flows only from institutional affiliation – not from a year of federal litigation, not from the federal employees who trusted you with classified memos, not from a subscriber base that grew because you were right.

But the sourcing reality is expanding in the opposite direction from that credentialing assumption.

Sources are increasingly choosing independent journalists. Federal employees leaked to Kabas because they trusted her. Madan got the Alligator Alcatraz tip because a decade of immigration reporting relationships traveled with her out of the newsroom. The institutional frame values credentials; what actually produces the work is trust and sustained attention.

There are promising paths emerging. 

One clear example is when credit is designed into the process before a word is written. When Slate editor Patrick Reis approached Kabas in the summer of 2025, the resulting investigation into Jack Posobiec's voting records was announced as a joint production from the start: "combining Slate's decades of impactful journalism with The Handbasket's independent spirit." Both got attribution. Both got an audience. 

The credit-and-grow loop feels like the most immediate mechanism for the journalism industry to name and normalize. When independent journalists get proper attribution, audiences find them, subscribers follow, and that funds the next FOIA lawsuit, the next week of reporting on a living room floor with a nine-month-old, the next story that starts with a tip from a source who trusted one person in her apartment. 

Part of the fix isn't complicated. "Just heavily credit where you first saw the story," Kabas said. 

“I understand how the fast pace of daily news might leave precious little time for asking how information originally got uncovered and whether credit should be shared with an outside journalist,” said Trusting News’ Mayer. “But we simply must do better than doing a quick turn on something that's based on another journalist's labor. We simply must give respectful credit. Even better, we should be looking for ways to partner. In some sectors of the industry, collaboration has become a lot more common. That spirit needs to extend to independent journalists.”

Kabas described recently updating one of her own pieces to add a Times reporter's name after he jokingly pointed out she hadn't credited him. She did it immediately. "It's not that complicated," she said. The standard she's holding others to is the one she holds herself to.

But other solutions are less clear – specifically considerations like legal protection. 

In late April 2025, Adam Marshall from the Reporters Committee reached out to Kabas directly. He'd seen her name. He’d seen her reporting. He told her if she ever had anything, they were a resource. She mentioned the USIP footage, he took it to the RCFP team and they filed in June. A year later, she won.

"I could not have afforded lawyers for a year on my own,” she said. “There's no way."

So now, in some cases, the institutions built for journalism are reorienting toward the independent practitioner. But in others, the gap remains. Madan tried to get a pre-publication legal review and was turned down. Multiple organizations told her they weren't set up for independent journalists. And notably, no other organizations have reached out to Kabas since RCFP did.

As for the aggregator problem, that problem feels messier and primed to become more so. The Herald credited Madan by name, linked prominently, and seemingly did everything right with their alumna.

And yet the downstream ecosystem erased her anyway. The evolving system of aggregation, licensing and syndication has failed to identify and support the individual reporting.  

So what are reporters left to do, but keep reporting these scoops as we all work to position institutions to support that work. We know it starts by making it legible with case studies like this. We’re eager to continue the conversations with anyone who has ideas on how to support the humans doing this reporting.  

Note: We reached out to NBC4’s news director Anthony Mague and reporter Mark Segraves multiple times via email, phone and LinkedIn, giving them a week to respond. They did not.

Liz Kelly Nelson and Justin Bank co-reported this piece. Kelly Nelson is the founder of Project C. Bank is a principal at Better Media Studios and he blogs/substacks at BankonJustin. They are, with Ryan Kellett, co-founders of The Independent Journalism Atlas.