The Newsground turns to coffee to fund investigative journalism

It’s a beloved newspaper cliché: The reader sitting at the kitchen table sipping a hot cup of coffee while leisurely scanning the newspaper.

The news consumption experience, for most people, hasn’t looked like that for a long time. But a new publication wants to update the news-and-coffee experience for the modern era.

Enter: The Newsground, an investigative news outlet that is focused on accountability and corruption — and is funded via coffee subscriptions. The publication, which launched in March, is free to read. Readers can pay $5 a month for an ad-free news-only membership or $25 per shipment if they also want coffee.

Founder Scott Stedman drinks two cups of coffee a day and said he wanted to produce longform investigative journalism while also providing readers with a product they could hold in their hands.

“I hate paywalls and I wanted to come up with a creative way to marry the journalism from 30 years ago in the Sunday paper — the intentional, adversarial, investigative journalism that was pretty prominent back in the day — with the caffeine boost from coffee,” Stedman said.

Stedman reports and writes his stories himself, and works with a freelance editor and a video editor for multimedia pieces. The Newsground’s first story was about a Jeffrey Epstein associate who had previously worked for the Russian government. More recent stories include investigations into Trump Tower developers operating online gambling companies in the country of Georgia, a Russian model who recruited young women for Epstein, and the El Salvador government’s use of spyware.

The Newsground isn’t Stedman’s first independent outlet. In 2019, he founded Forensic News, a publication covering national security and espionage. He shuttered the publication in 2023 after settling a defamation lawsuit over a series of stories about a British-Israeli security consultant. (The lawsuit was brought in the U.K. even though Forensic News was based in the U.S., and a number of international organizations, including Reporters Without Borders and PEN International, criticized it as a SLAPP lawsuit intended to stifle critical coverage.)

For The Newsground, Stedman, who is based in Los Angeles, was inspired by the Midcoast Villager in Camden, Maine, whose business model includes a coffee shop called the Villager Café. He works with a Chicago roaster to supply the coffee beans. A 10-ounce bag of Newsground coffee costs $25 — $13 of which covers roasting and processing, with the remaining $12 funding the journalism. So far, The Newsground has four dozen paying coffee subscribers and has received $1,500 in one-time donations.

“I think showing the actual cost and being super-transparent about how much I’m making off each sale lessens the sticker shock a little bit,” Stedman said. “You’re supporting a good cause by buying this coffee and…funding reporting that punches really high.”

Stedman hopes to build on readers’ growing trust by hosting in-person events to serve the coffee, discuss his reporting, and show how the former supports the latter.

“In the digital media space, the community is everything,” Stedman said. “What I’m seeing so far in my initial hypothesis here was that coffee is a great conversation starter and it’s a great way for people to bond in increasingly disparate online worlds.”