How is iBusiness Reporting funded? iBusiness Reporting is a division of the Fraud Discovery Institute, which generates much of its revenue by short selling the stock of companies that it thoroughly investigates and deems fraudulent and/or lacking a sustainable business model. Here's the Fraud Discovery Institute's full disclosure statement. Is this practice legal and ethical? Yes. iBusiness Reporting uses reliable public information, company documents, court documents, sworn testimony and/or government agency sources in every investigative story. Our goal is to get the truth, protect the public and expose fraud. Short selling stocks is risky and complicated, but the practice is legal for this very purpose. Insider trading is something very different, and very illegal. We do not engage in insider trading. If iBusiness Reporting receives insider information, we report it immediately to the investigated company’s chief financial officer. Is it ethical in the journalistic sense? Yes. We fully disclose what we are doing and allow readers to weigh our disclosures along with the facts we present. We are not influenced by advertising dollars; elected officials; or the political, religious or personal biases of our reporters. Our goal is singular: we seek the truth. To do that and to be able to feed our famiiies, we had to find a legal, ethical and moral business model that will not jeopardize that goal. News organizations are not as open about their biases. Let's look at a few examples of the competition: They routinely assign liberal reporters to cover Republican politicians or candidates, with no mention of how those journalists voted in past elections. (A few facts: as of Feb. 3, 2010, 14 journalists have been hired by the Obama Administration; and 89% of political reporters voted for Bill Clinton during his first run for president); place staunch environmentalists on the environmental beat; and have journalists write about abortion without revealing their personal stance on the issue. We disclose everything up front (and wish the mainstream media would, too). We believe objective journalism doesn’t exist, and the more information the reader has about the reporter and their motivations, the better. So we make the disclosures. The mainstream media generally does not and feigns neutrality. We believe the reader, if given the relevant information and all relevant primary supporting documents, is capable of making his/her own decision about the accuracy of the story. Don’t you have incentive to bash companies so that a) their stock will go down and b) you will profit? No. We only go after fraud that we can prove. If we engaged in a witch hunt, we would go out of business. We need our credibility to survive in the long term. If that’s lost, our business model fails. The market and the Internet are very good at sniffing out BS. We need to deliver facts (and back them up). Otherwise, we’re done. What are the safeguards in place to make sure you’re not just writing negative stories about a company whose stock you hope will go down? We have put our our own names, ethics and reputations on the line. It's that simple. Consider: In the end, iBusiness Reporting has much more at stake to get the story right than old media. We do not have the option of hiding a retraction in an unread print edition if we get the story wrong. Our business and our livelihoods depend on getting the facts right the first time. What are the advantages of the iBusiness Reporting business model? In an era when newspapers are dying and online journalism is struggling for credibility, iBusiness Reporting offers new hope for investigative journalism. Tens of thousands of journalists have been laid off in recent years, leaving a vacuum in risky indepth investigative journalism. iBusiness Reporting fills this unique gap with an innovative and profitable business model.
