A US hedge fund has raised $100mn to make trades based on articles by its affiliated newsroom, launching a novel experiment in funding investigative reporting as the media industry suffers a fresh round of lay-offs.
The business is an effort to pair the sort of investigative journalism typically done by newsrooms with a long-short hedge fund. The fund, Hunterbrook Capital, places trades based on scoops uncovered by reporters at the newsroom, Hunterbrook Media, which is separated by a layer of compliance. Those scoops would only be based on publicly available information.
The companies, whose plans were first reported by the Financial Times last year, share a set of officers, including two co-founders — chief executive Nathaniel Horwitz and publisher Sam Koppelman — general counsel Fitzann Reid and head of operations Emily Pate.