In the early ’90s, shortly before he helped think up Snopes, the first (and favorite) website for fact-checks, and way before he was banished from the very thing he’d helped build, David Mikkelson was quite a character on message boards. He wasn’t looking for love necessarily, but it found him nonetheless.
Mikkelson, a divorced computer programmer in California, met Barbara Hamel, a divorced bookkeeper in Canada, on Usenet, a precursor of sorts to Reddit, where the two lorded over a prolific channel called alt.folklore.urban. AFU acted like the site’s fact-checker for far-flung urban legends. If, for example, a rumor was circulating around the internet (and watercoolers and lunchrooms) about a cactus that disgorged scorpions, AFU’s job was to investigate.
AFU is ultimately a footnote in the story of Snopes—the now well-regarded fact-checking site for sorting out myths, rumors, and misinformation on the internet, which averaged around 6.4 million page views per month in 2022, according to analytics company Comscore. But it’s an important one: AFU is where some of Snopes’ civic-minded DNA was spun, and arguably where Mikkelson’s blend of aptitude and arrogance was first put on display in a saga that would, in the end, remind the world that sometimes the people who police our messy digital lives are themselves in need of, at a minimum, some adult supervision.
“Snopes.com did not spring fully formed from the cloven skull of Zeus, all right?” says Harry Teasley, one of AFU’s other prominent members. “It came from a place, and that place is AFU.”
AFU’s members had dreaded September because that was when college started up and students would find themselves, for the first time, with access to a computer. Too many of those arrivistes misbehaved, and though the group had no moderator, members worked unusually hard to enforce its standards and reinforce cohesion. They accomplished that through netiquette and in-jokes. But the witty know-it-alls also used a new electronic blood sport—born to AFU—called trolling.
Trolling was named after the fishing practice in which anglers bait hooks and pull them on lines through the water. Online, the bait was a bit of bad info, and a “‘good’ troll,” according to AFU, was “obviously facetious/sarcastic to anyone who has a sense of humor and some intelligence.” But because of pomposity or because people were gullible or stupid, they’d leap to correct a poster who’d spoken in jest. So they were reeled in and informed that they’d “lost.” They’d been trolled. They weren’t worthy company.
In 1993, AOL began providing Usenet access to its subscribers, and tens of thousands of newbies were dumped onto the electronic bulletin board in what became known as “Eternal September.” Trolling became meaner. It became even more of an “insider’s game,” says the user experience designer Michele Tepper, an AFU alumna and author of the first academic paper on trolling. (It would mutate later, of course, into something else—something dark—and the whole web would become its playing field.) But newcomers to AFU were offered “survival guides” and warned against arguing with Mikkelson, a legend, in particular.
“Never, ever bother correcting him,” groupies posted of Mikkelson online. “He *knows* he’s wrong, he just wants you to admit it. Just follow his trail of devastation. . . . It can be quite fun to watch.”
“David liked [newcomers] with ketchup,” Tepper told me, which, in non-AFU-speak, means he regarded them as easy prey, like snacks. Mikkelson seemed to think of himself as an iconoclast who merited respect, and who harbored resentment toward others whom he found undeserving of their status—a feeling that The New Yorker’s then-new editor-in-chief Tina Brown also seemed to inspire.
In 1993, Mikkelson trolled Brown by snail mail: “I was wondering if you could be prevailed upon to change the name of your magazine. I keep confusing it with a very fine publication of identical title that mysteriously disappeared from newsstands several months ago.” In this case, he signed his own name, not his AFU username: “snopes.”
Mikkelson had adopted a surname of William Faulkner’s creation, a family “of pure sons of bitches,” who appear in a number of Faulkner’s works. Mikkelson was very familiar with their saga: Flem Snopes, the central character, possessed a talent for verisimilitude, which helped him climb from outcast sharecropper to bank president and church deacon.
Mikkelson would go on to say that he had chosen snopes “simply because it was short and distinctive,” and he’d only shrug noncommittally when asked if he was a fan of Faulkner’s. But people have often pondered the connection to an alias along the lines of snipe, snicker, sneak, or snake. “We all felt that it was deeply, deeply appropriate,” says Teasley.
Mikkelson was one of their “best trolls” and a “great researcher,” another core AFUer tells me over Twitter DM. “But he was never a good guy, just high status, given what we valued back then (exclusivity, sarcasm, laying traps for people to walk into).”
In 1994, Mikkelson and Barbara launched Snopes.com; two years later, they married. Was the website his idea or hers, I had asked him when we first spoke, years ago—and when did Snopes begin? “When did the Beatles begin?” he answered. “The day Paul first played with them? The day Ringo joined? How do you pick a point on a continuum?” That feels so true. Information gets awfully mutable when it’s fitted to a story. Wasn’t that the revelatory nature of their whole operation? (I reached out to Mikkelson recently, but he didn’t respond to my request for further comment.)
Barbara recalled the early days: “Instead of being cast in stone, our articles evolved as older legends reappeared with new twists to them, which was very exciting,” she said. “Without realizing we’d be doing so, we found ourselves recording what America was feeling, in that the urban legends in current circulation present a fairly accurate reflection of what the country is, at that moment, worrying about.”
Ex-Snopes chief operating officer Vinny Green (who would himself figure heavily in the site’s downward trajectory) says the Mikkelsons were ahead of their time, with “the best idea for 2016 in 1996.” Its scope, though, did not creep out until later, after the attacks of September 11 in 2001, at which point the myth-busting mom-and-pop concern geared into a more political address, debunking false claims like the narrative that CNN had faked footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Whatever their visitors thought Snopes’ remit should be, they were looking to it for “something else.”
The Mikkelsons were not trained fact-checkers. They did not think what they were doing was journalism, but they tried to behave like journalists and often discussed journalistic standards in suburban L.A., where they worked at opposite ends of a home shared with cats and pet rats.
She ran the brand. He ran the backend. They had beats—she liked to cover business, crime, glurge, sports, and soft drink trivia; he preferred Disney, music, movies, radio, and TV—and they more or less split the research and writing. Mikkelson joined Barbara full time in 2002 (after he was laid off from his programming job). Nothing posted before it was reviewed by the other.
In March 2002, Snopes published an article purporting to quash a claim made by Michael Moore that members of bin Laden’s family had flown during the U.S.’s travel ban in the days after 9/11. “This just goes to show what a little bit of fact flipped onto its side and then spewed by a public figure can do,” Barbara wrote on Snopes at the time.
Come September 2003, Moore seemed not to have been so off the mark after all, and Snopes overhauled its article but failed to mention the significant corrections—an oversight for which it was roundly criticized. Though Barbara apologized, some complained that Snopes had swept sensitive errors under the rug before, and watchdogs pointed out that the site had, apparently that same week, coded in a noindex meta tag—which meant Google crawlers could not cache Snopes’ pages. Barbara says she was not consulted and was not aware of that decision, which might have had an innocent explanation. It smelled, however, like a way to preempt getting confronted with revisionism, right when the digital presentation of edits was a hot topic.
(In fact, since November 2002, Mikkelson had also excluded Snopes from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a project by the digital library to snapshot the World Wide Web for future reference. Mark Graham noticed the exclusion when he started as the library’s director in 2015. “I was like, What the fuck,” Graham says.)
Snopes predated FactCheck.org, created by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2003, and PolitiFact.com, created in 2007 by the Tampa Bay Times—now run by the Poynter Institute. But unlike those outlets, Snopes’ identity was never quite clear. Was it a fact-checking newsroom or a place for irony-laced commentary? Or something in between? And wasn’t Snopes entitled to growing pains?
It might feel unfair to expect a pillbox to keep up with the papers of record, but less so as it left the realm of hobby to be a media business in earnest. “I wouldn’t give them a Get Out of Jail Free card just because they started on a listserv somewhere,” says Mathew Ingram, a digital media reporter at Columbia Journalism Review.
By 2010, the Mikkelsons were spending much of their bandwidth on political claims—even if politics, they told the New York Times, was the last thing they wished to be writing about.
Barbara had never heard the backstory behind a password the Mikkelsons used for various Snopes accounts: “henry8wives.” In 2010, in Las Vegas, Mikkelson met a professional escort named Elyssa Young. According to Young (who’d eventually join Snopes as an administrative assistant), Mikkelson said the password had once come assigned to a piece of hardware, and he joked that the reference to the English king’s serial marriages augured his own future.
In 2014, Barbara discovered Mikkelson’s affair with Young and left him. By that point, poor health had obliged her to write far less: She authored 132 articles from 2011-2014, of a total—by her count—of 1,905. Three months later, Mikkelson brought Kim LaCapria on as the site’s first outside writer. LaCapria knew the internet’s dark caves and had even met her husband, in the 2000s, on the message board that Snopes once hosted. “I felt like I was channeling Barbara’s voice,” she said.
In November 2015, Brooke Binkowski, a high-octane border and post-conflict reporter, came on as the site’s first managing editor to help take Snopes from folksy to pro in time for the presidential election. More writers followed. And Mikkelson and Young stayed together, eventually moving to Tacoma, Washington, where they married, and where, in Mikkelson’s home office, an old clothbound set of Faulkner’s Snopes novels served as a laptop stand.
The term “fake news” was being popularized just as Snopes was professionalizing its shop. But Mikkelson appears to have been struggling to keep up the good fight. The site had grown ramshackle, with especially poor load times on articles. More importantly, it seems Mikkelson still didn’t get that if you’re fact-checking, you’re doing journalism—so you have to play by all the rules. It would later come out that Mikkelson had a plagiarism habit; the earliest example of that in a Snopes article—“Are McDonald’s Minions Toys Swearing?”—dates to July 2015, which was also the year of the Mikkelsons’ bitter divorce, halving the ownership of Snopes between them.
It was around this time that two twentysomething entrepreneurs—tech wiz Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup, an intellectual property attorney—grew interested in acquiring Snopes. Mikkelson later told me that selling his half of Snopes to them was “never on the table,” but in an email to Schoentrup, in June, he’d listed it as one of the possibilities to which he was “open.” He went on: “Honestly, I’m not a 20-something looking to become the next Mark Zuckerberg and make a gazillion dollars with an online empire. If I can just recoup what I’ve lost to Barbara, then I’d be happy and have no concerns about who owns or manages things.”
What ended up happening, Richmond and Schoentrup started an ad tech firm, Proper Media, to handle Snopes’ advertising and infrastructure, including an overdue move to the WordPress CMS. (Snopes is mostly funded through its digital ad sales.)
But soon, Mikkelson encouraged Richmond and Schoentrup to buy Barbara out. “Keep in mind that although she may sound rational, Barbara has a personality disorder and a sometimes tenuous grasp of reality,” he cautioned Schoentrup in a Slack message sent in January 2016. Barbara, who denies any such disorder, agreed to sell.
In December 2015, Binkowski messaged her boss that she was editing the site’s About Page. Mikkelson promptly instructed her, “Don’t mention Barbara . . .” Eventually, the page, which had previously stated that the site was “founded by Barbara and David Mikkelson,” a “team,” would state simply that it was “founded by David Mikkelson.”
Articles written pre-WordPress had no byline, but Barbara had always signed her work in the footer, using wry internyms (“Barbara ‘the power behind the throne’ Mikkelson”) in the mode of their AFU days. Six weeks before she sold her half of the company to Richmond and Schoentrup, Mikkelson told Binkowski that his ex’s signatures could be deleted; and that summer, on the day the $3.6 million sale was inked, Binkowski Slacked Mikkelson to say she was removing Barbara’s name from everything she found. “Is that all right?” Binkowski asked again, according to captures reviewed by Fast Company. “Yes, please,” he replied.
When Snopes migrated to WordPress, articles were assigned by default to “Snopes.” But that byline was changed to give Barbara’s articles to Mikkelson specifically. “David’s byline wasn’t added to those pages until way later,” said LaCapria, who helped Binkowski to scrub Barbara’s name. (They secretively kept her name buried in the HTML, invisible to the casual reader, but still there and part of the site’s records). The reattribution came up in a Slack exchange with the one-time COO Green in December 2016: “It’s not a big deal,” Mikkelson said. “I should take credit for everything she wrote just to spite her.”
“That should have been a red flag,” says CJR’s Ingram, referring to Barbara’s removal. “It seemed so petty.”
Donald Trump had just been elected the month prior. For the first time, “journalists had to start reacting to lies rather than just seeking truths in the Trump era,” says Emily Dreyfuss, senior managing editor of the Technology and Social Change team at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy. (In 2017, The Washington Post, for example, created a “Fact Checker’s database” to track President Trumps’ false or misleading claims; it had logged 30,573 such claims by the end of his term.) Yet, here was Snopes, a site that tasked itself with helping people to verify reality, spinning its own history, courtesy of Mikkelson.
When asked by at least three journalists why posts authored by Mikkelson’s ex-wife now carried his byline, Mikkelson explained that it had been auto-populated during the migration. “That’s so typically David,” LaCapria says with a laugh. “There’s this grain of truth, and this whole fluffy lie wrapped around it.”
Snopes had staffed up and was doing well, though. It was even regarded as a sleeper media story. “For at least a year, everything was humming along,” Binkowski says. “We were all getting raises. Traffic was great. It was a unicorn place.”
There were death threats à gogo. Some people were unshakeable in their conviction that Snopes was an agent of the far left. Bankrolled by George Soros, in the tank for Obummer and hiLIARy. But the real threat that emerged, according to Mikkelson and Green, was its partial owners, Richmond and Schoentrup.
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, that’s them,” Mikkelson told me when we spoke all those years back.
Proper Media had an oceanview office in San Diego, which local Snopes employees were allowed free use of. That changed at the beginning of 2017, when Richmond and Schoentrup were in Puerto Rico, where they said they were relocating for the tax break, and Mikkelson canceled Proper Media’s vendor contract. (He said they weren’t doing their job.) As owners of a chunk of Snopes, Richmond and Schoentrup did not believe he had the right, and, effectively, withheld the site’s ad revenue, according to Mikkelson and Green, taking its backend “hostage.”
In turn, they launched a GoFundMe campaign titled “Save Our Snopes” (#fightforfacts), the goal mark of which would grow to $2 million. The money was for legal fees, operating expenses, and “the continuation of our overall mission to fight misinformation.”
Richmond and Schoentrup sued in May 2017 over subterfuge and mismanagement, and a protracted legal battle ensued, but neither the court of public opinion nor the press seemed to seriously entertain the possibility that these guys were in the right and the heads of a fact-checking house might not be the good guys after all. “They’re winning the narrative,” said Schoentrup. “It’s Snopes. Snopes can tell no lie.” (Snopes gave up its foothold in the San Diego office around the time the suit was filed and became a remote company.)
Another major moment came months later in 2017, when Mikkelson and Green fired Binkowski, the site’s managing editor. The discord traces back, at least partly, to a splashy agreement Snopes had made with Facebook one year prior, to help quash misinformation on the social media platform. Binkowski had sensed that the tech giant was pushing false stories and using Snopes’ brand for crisis PR. She fought the partnership: “We cannot be their bitch. We cannot accurately report on people we’re taking money from,” she told me she’d argued. Mikkelson and Green disagreed, at least at first. Snopes eventually did end the agreement but not until 2019, by which time Binkowski was long gone. “[Binkowski] worked seven days a week, from like 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.,” editing up to 15 stories a day, LaCapria recalled with disgust. “She was underpaid and overworked, and ruthlessly discarded.”
Mikkelson and Green were bullying LaCapria too, according to both LaCapria and a recent staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity. In December 2017, LaCapria’s husband passed away in his sleep while abroad. “David was initially very nice about it, and he arranged for me to get a standby ticket to go to England,” for the funeral, she said. But Mikkelson then pressured her to “come back to work sooner—which I did on January 22, 2018.”
Her relationship with Mikkelson worsened: “I think he was uncomfortable with my initially hysterical shock and that’s when he started being acrimonious,” LaCapria says. Around June 2018, Mikkelson became “livid for no clear reason,” she says, relegating her to “secretarial duties.” LaCapria soon resigned and, together with Arturo Garcia—another former Snopes reporter, who has a pending wrongful termination suit against Snopes—joined Binkowski to work at the rival site TruthOrFiction.org.
In addition to legal woes and attribution issues, another, more troublesome albatross was hiding in plain sight at Snopes: Mikkelson couldn’t seem to bring himself to renounce his AFU-like games of cleverer-than-thou.
This impulse to outwit and rile up folks felt weirdly at odds with the good faith and empathy you’d expect from someone in his business. In 2016, for example, Mikkelson kidded with Green on Slack that a man named Jeff Zarronandia was his best hire. “Model employee,” Green replied, according to screenshots. Mikkelson had made up Zarronandia a year before to troll the conservatives who insisted that Snopes was biased toward liberals. But as Snopes sought to level up, Green, then the director of business development, told Mikkelson that he thought they needed to “clean up our loose ends.” That didn’t happen, and Zarronandia was outed as an alt in a BuzzFeed exposé by the reporter Dean Sterling Jones.
Mikkelson didn’t exactly offer a mea culpa: “I mean, certainly, anyone who’s paying attention knows there’s no such thing as a Pulitzer Prize in numismatics,” he told Jones, referencing the made-up staffer’s made-up bio.
Trump advisor Roger Stone, who had referenced some of Zarronandia’s articles in his books, was livid when he found out. But he loved that Snopes had been discredited, and so did Fox News and Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room. Mikkelson had failed to see that the right wing would weaponize his behavior against not just Snopes, but all fact-checking orgs.
Another example involves a claim that humans swallow eight spiders per year in their sleep. Mikkelson had debunked it in a 2001 Snopes post, tracing it to a column in PC Professional by Lisa Birgit Holst.
But in time, people realized neither the magazine nor the columnist ever existed; and in 2015, a Reddit user figured out that the author’s name was anagrammatic. (“This is a big troll.”) Mikkelson initially copped to nothing, but has since described the fictitious source as a “wink.” His explanation to alarmed staffers? He wanted to see if anyone was checking primary sources. “We’ve seen many instances where people [in a position like Mikkelson’s] say they’re ‘just checking to see if you’re paying attention,’” says the Shorenstein Center’s Dreyfuss. “It’s an old troll. And it’s completely unethical.”
I’ve heard from AFUers, Snopes fact-checkers, and other journalists that Mikkelson had to be the smartest guy in the room—that he came off as the guy who was way too interested in proving someone wrong. Staffers have colored him as a mudslinger and a gaslighter. They have said he was a black box who became a roi absent. Once an employee complained to their superior that talking to Mikkelson was “like going to see the wizard of Oz.” And a reputable business reporter, after spending an afternoon with Mikkelson, was struck, they told me, by how little Snopes’ head seemed like management material.
It’s a curious disconnect, given Mikkelson’s devotion to board games. In a rare Zoom meeting with a couple staffers in the summer of 2021, for example, he perked up excitedly when the conversation strayed to the subject of turning Snopes into a deduction board game à la Secret Hitler. “I have definite ideas about what I’d like a Snopes game to be and not be,” he said in the recording, obtained by Fast Company. He’d been playing Battlestar Galactica, based on the TV series, for seven years, multiple times a week. “It’s another hidden traitor mechanic,” he explained, beaming. “I kind of like that mechanic, again where there’s two teams, and you don’t know who’s on which team . . . ”
Mikkelson could often be found at board game conventions, in which he sometimes placed first or second, though Young had encouraged her husband to work instead on his leadership skills. “I even suggested puppy training and karate,” she says. (They divorced in 2022.)
In the end, Mikkelson was only half the equation: the other half, Vinny Green, was an extension of Mikkelson’s poor leadership, who came to hold day-to-day sway over Snopes’ operations.
Green had enlisted in the Marines at 17—an experience that he’s said exposed him to “a lot of leadership styles, good and bad.” He was finishing his associate degree in sociology at MiraCosta College when he turned up as a chatty friend-of-a-friend at the condo that Richmond and Schoentrup were renting in San Diego’s Ocean Beach neighborhood. “He seemed ambitious, which was cool,” said Schoentrup.
In less than three years, Green shot from an internship with another of their companies, TV Tropes, to become Snopes’ VP of operations. “I was 100% integral in getting Snopes as a client,” Green told me when we spoke in 2019. “David delegates all of operations to me.” (Though we spoke on the record all those years ago, Green declined a more recent request for an interview.) Mikkelson had agreed, too: “He was the guy coming up with all the ideas. He was the guy who was the most enthusiastic.”
“Most of what he did was tasks that weren’t specialized,” says Richmond in a less generous assessment. Richmond had never known anyone to form alliances as Green did. Like in one of Mikkelson’s board games, he and Schoentrup claim not to have realized the extent of the double-dealing until it was too late. They, and others, say that Green was in Mikkelson’s ear and blew up his relationship with Richmond and Schoentrup. Green told me they did that all by themselves.
Green seems to have cared a lot about rank. He pushed to be nominated for (and made) the Forbes 30 Under 30 List in 2017. “He thought he was just naturally good at this, that he picked up everything like a child genius,” LaCapria says.
I’d first spoken to him in 2019, after Richmond and Schoentrup purchased Salon, and the prospect of VCs like them in journalism concerned the then-COO. “For the first time, they’ve got a newsroom under their purview,” Green said at the time.
Snopes was on a “death march . . . we’ve got a boot on our throat,” Green would go on, referring to the financial drain of the lawsuit with Proper Media. But big things like a membership account were coming down the pike: “We took Patreon and shoved it inside Snopes, took a subscription model and shoved it in, added a scrollable newsfeed and got to [Snopes’] own platform.”
Green has been described by colleagues as a temperamental mansplainer, “poser coder,” and “snake oil salesman” who talked a good game and had a desk stacked with books on leadership (including Radical Candor and Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose). Ex-colleagues say he intercepted Binkowski’s invites to conferences and went in her stead. They also say he had “ideas for days” but was unable to follow through or evaluate what was working and what wasn’t.
Snopes teased the membership account in April 2019, for example. But it didn’t ship until November 2020—much too late—and was, according to Snopes’ lead developer Chad Ort, both uninspired and over budget (he estimates they burned through $500,000 with outside developers). “I’ve heard him use the phrase ‘my gut’ so many times and that just stops all conversations,” Ort complained to HR in one of a number of reports filed about Green, later obtained by Fast Company. “I keep asking for business requirements, and I never get them.”
Employees say Green would lose his cool and bark orders, and would accuse staffers of subterfuge. “You need to stand down,” he once told a staffer that had been at Snopes since its dawn.
In April 2020, Carly Gillis started as director of operations and communications. She’d been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, loved Snopes as a kid, and had worked in media for a decade. Given millennial nostalgia, she was surprised that Snopes had not pivoted into something bigger. Why, she wondered, weren’t they doing media literacy outreach? Why weren’t they on TikTok? “When I started to see the cracks was pretty quick,” she said. “David never initiated any business plans. It left Vinny scrambling.”
“What is so broken about this thing?” Lisa Wang, hired not long after Gillis as an operations manager, says she asked herself. She and Gillis saw that the problem was not the newsroom, which was doing solid work despite everything.
One Friday, in April 2021, following a conversation that Wang and Ort had with Mikkelson by Zoom about Green, the company’s part-time HR consultant told Wang that an outside evaluator would be coming next week to audit Green’s performance, and that she’d be able to speak with them. That never happened. Instead, the following Thursday the entire operations team—Wang, Gillis, and their junior female colleague—were laid off. Financial strain was cited. (Finances were failing, but the decision also smacked of misogyny, which Wang and other women staffers say they experienced from both Mikkelson and Green.)
In August 2021, Buzzfeed contributor Dean Sterling Jones broke the story of Mikkelson having fabricated Zarronandia and using plagiarized material in at least 54 stories between 2015 and 2019. Mikkelson, who said he was trying to get copy out fast and “scoop up traffic,” was suspended from editorial, and an internal review counted a total of 194 articles that were plagiarized or poorly attributed.
Soon after Mikkelson’s black eye, Snopes’ VP of advertising left for Fox News. And instead of reporting to Green, Ort began reporting to Doreen Marchionni, Snopes’ managing editor since 2018. Marchionni was, according to everyone I spoke with, universally adored by the newsroom, but editorial could not check management.
Snopes’ lead assignment editor left for CBS in May 2022; and by mid-June, a staff reporter emailed an ex-colleague to say that things at Snopes were “phenomenally bad.” Adding, “You were right about everything.”
Senior employees were all working on reduced salaries. Reporters had been told that the company would go bust in a month. Reasons for that included OnTheIssues.org, a janky website that tracks the stances of politicians, which Snopes had acquired at Green’s suggestion back in 2019 and packaged as a bimonthly newsletter. “Where’s the business case? How will it make money?” Wang said she’d asked Green. “He came up with a lot of wild ideas that, in my opinion, were not grounded in reality.”
Over the course of weeks and months, the reporters had helped Green work up various proposed fundraising solutions—a podcast, a logical fallacy flash-card game—only to have those projects shelved or binned without explanation. Their general manager’s latest strategy was a collectible coin drive. “Act now,” Green tweeted, “to get a . . . coin with a lifetime membership. We’re only making 7.5K. It’s like an NFT but real & you get ad-free browsing.” He’d told the newsroom that Snopes was going to make $750,000 from this, but the coins weren’t moving. One reporter vented in an email: “I can’t believe that we’re here and Vinny’s only idea is to sell collectible coins as though we’re daytime television advertising in the 1980s!!”
The newsroom turned on Green in their last staff meetings, in which Mikkelson is said to have lurked in the background while his lieutenant took the heat. July neared: A different reporter composed a letter complaining about Green on behalf of the writers, and emailed it to Mikkelson with their blessings and the endorsement of editorial. It was a vote of no confidence. Finally, Green was fired, but by that point, three of the seven staff reporters had already jumped ship.
Then the pandemic hit. The reporters knew that every point of misinformation loomed like—or really was—a matter of life or death in that landscape. The tiny newsroom’s task was more Sisyphean and high stakes than ever, and traffic to the site regularly skyrocketed by well over 100%. Green had praised the staff for working “their asses off.” But meanwhile, thanks in part to his poor and unilateralist decisions, Snopes was on the ropes, even if the company’s mismanagement had been more easily obscured by the nature of an all-remote outfit and a managing editor in Marchionni who had done her best to shelter her team from tensions with the C-suite.
But reporters were now seeing Snopes’ situation as Wang had. “It’s being held hostage by these two men,” she’d said, “who are wildly incompetent at—wildly inappropriate for—their jobs.”
Since 2017, the site’s part-owners and several of its past staffers have claimed that Mikkelson and Green were bad actors, hiding under the halo of fact-checking. Those sources were widely brushed aside as ax-grinders, squeaky wheels, competitors, and hysterical women—but they were right. That this did not come out sooner is an “indictment” of the media industry, Binkowski has said over and over.
Traffic to the site has continued to drop. To be fair, websites across the board have seen readership declines post-election and post-COVID, but even with that caveat, the numbers are jarring: Per Comscore, Snopes’ traffic has declined from a monthly average of 32 million page views per month in 2020 to 9.6 million in 2021, and then 6.4 million last year.
In early 2022, Richmond and Schoentrup almost worked it out with Mikkelson. Reportedly, the snag was Green, who wished to find funding to buy and run Snopes himself. (Instead, he wound up founding a digital platform agency, called Web Multipliers.) Finally, in September 2022, Mikkelson sold his stake to Richmond and Schoentrup (who themselves had offloaded Proper Media in 2021), cutting all ties to Snopes. Three days later, Mikkelson married for a fourth time. Barbara settled Mikkelson’s related lawsuit against her as well, thus ending a hundred months of litigation between mom and pop.
Schoentrup told me that he and Richmond will “keep injecting money” into Snopes “until we save it.” So far, they have moved the site to a custom (read quick) CMS, with a redesign to follow. Snopes has also migrated off of unnecessary third-party tech vendors, which were costing it about $50k a month. (Salon, which has more traffic and employees, spends around $13k, Richmond said.) This January, Richmond coded a script that looked for Barbara’s internym in a 2015 backup and compared older articles to their versions on-site; if more than 50% of the text was the same, Barbara’s byline was restored—amounting to 1,427 articles. As Snopes CEO and president, the two are taking the same hands-off posture toward editorial that they have at Salon, which was profitable in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
As the 2024 election nears, and the U.S. finds itself gripped by an unremitting informational crisis, the question is whether Snopes can still be the internet’s ombudsman. “I think, incredibly, [that this election] will be worse than the previous two for misinformation/disinformation,” says Marchionni, who has stayed on as managing and executive editor. But she believes that Snopes is ready: “We’re part of an NSF grant that is developing a tool to help newsrooms spot misinformation and stomp it out. And that’s been invigorating and fun. I think financially and morale-wise, we’re in the best shape we’ve been in in years, thank god. The newsroom earned it.”
Schoentrup is the worrywart of the new leadership. As mediation dragged with Mikkelson and Green and the involvement of eight legal firms, he’d brooded over the damage done to America’s original fact-checking site. Then, one night, he rented Vengeance, the recent black comedy by B.J. Novak. Midway into the movie, he says he heard Novak’s character, a New Yorker journalist, flatly disagree with a cartel member, saying, “Go on Snopes. It’s not a real thing.”
Dean Sterling Jones contributed reporting to this story.
Correction: Due to an editing error David and Barbara Mikkelson’s wedding date was originally listed as 1994, not 1996. The article also originally reported that Snopes had debunked false claims about Palestinians dancing in the streets after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In fact, Snopes debunked false claims about CNN faking footage of that event.
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