Amphibian Media

Amphibian Media is a place where I’m trying to figure out what journalism can look like now.

That means the website is deliberately a little more open than a traditional publication. Some things here are finished stories. Some are interviews. Some are ideas we’re kicking around before we know whether there’s actually a story there. I want to show more of that process instead of pretending journalism only exists once somebody hits publish.

VIBES are the conversations happening around the reporting. I meet regularly with our interns and other collaborators to talk about what we’re noticing: stories in the air, strange little developments, documents we’ve found, companies we’re curious about and questions nobody has answered yet. Some of it turns into journalism. Most of it doesn’t, at least not right away. These are intentionally unfinished. Think of them as a window into the sludge and morass from which stories occasionally emerge.

CHATS are interviews with journalists, researchers, artists, public officials and anyone else who knows something we want to know more about. Sometimes they connect to something we’re reporting. Sometimes somebody is simply doing interesting work and we want to talk to them.

STORIES are the finished stuff: investigations, scoops, essays, podcasts, documentaries and books we’ve reported, produced, published or helped make. We also want other journalists to bring us ideas, so some of these stories will come from writers and reporters outside our immediate orbit.

Then there’s DEAD — Dead Reckoning. Every Friday, we publish a reader-supported newsletter about the businesses, technologies, institutions and people behind war, incarceration, policing and surveillance. We dig through public records, contracts, court documents, corporate filings and whatever else we can get our hands on, then try to explain who is making it happen, who is making money from it and who has to live with the consequences. A lot of the loose threads elsewhere on the site end up there as deeper reporting.

For the 2026–27 academic year, Dead Reckoning is being developed with support from the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, where Matt is a current fellow. The fellowship pairs experienced journalists with Marquette journalism students for nine-month, in-depth reporting projects focused on accountability and public-service journalism. For Dead Reckoning, that support gives us the time, student reporting power, and institutional backing to follow complicated stories much further than the daily news cycle usually allows.

Amphibian Media was founded by journalist and author Matt Stroud and works with journalists, producers, artists, researchers and other people who like making things and asking questions. If you have a story idea, want to work with us or think there’s somebody we should talk to, email Matt at matt@amphibian.media.