Lessons From a Heated Media Rivalry

Fansplaining’s editors receive an email every time we get a new subscriber, as well as when someone buys one-off access to a story via a tool called Acta, which we use to charge $1 per piece. None of us makes a habit of scrutinizing every subscriber email that comes into our inboxes—for a publication as small as ours, even a dollar is a great help, and I tend to take a moment of gratitude before quickly archiving—but this one stood out for obvious reasons. 

On July 20th, someone at the New York Times used their work email when they purchased access to our July 8th feature, “Heated Rivalry is at the Center of Fanfic’s AI Reckoning” by Kayti Burt. One of Fansplaining’s editors, Aja Romano, noticed the Times email address, too, and posted about it in Slack. “Keep an eye out for a story on this broader issue with unattributed reporting,” I joked in reply. Aja reacted to my comment with the melting emoji.

I was only sort of joking. I’ve worked in the media industry for two decades now, at institutions large and small. I’m fully aware of which publications tend to take without asking, and what it feels like when it happens. Sometimes the beats are the same, or the sources are adjacent: parallel articles that feel like sisters. Typically, this borrowing is subtle; you’ll have no hard proof. That was partly why a Times reporter using a work address to buy our piece struck me as odd. I sincerely wondered if we’d be getting an email in the coming days asking for an interview. I’d have happily spoken to the Times on a fanfiction-related topic—as I’ve done in the past—or directed them to Kayti, who’d done all the hard work on this particular story.

No email came, but a week and a half later, I got my answer: on July 30th, the Times published  a story titled “When A.I. Invaded ‘Heated Rivalry’ Fan Fiction, the Meltdown Was Epic.” The author was tech reporter Emmy Martin, a name I was familiar with—she had, after all, used her work email to buy access to our piece. 

We obviously didn’t have ownership over this topic: the release of an anonymous document revealing that dozens of Heated Rivalry fics had remnants of Claude outputs in their source code. It was a huge incident which rocked not only that fandom, but the fanfiction world more broadly. We were, however, the only journalistic outlet I’m aware of to have covered it in so much depth. Just shy of 5,000 words, Kayti’s piece dug into the context around both Heated Rivalry fanfiction and AI attitudes among fic writers more broadly, as well as the massive fandom fallout. (Jess Weatherbed at The Verge also published a brief piece on the Claude-detection method shortly after the anonymous document was released.) Like most of our new articles, Kayti’s was initially paywalled, though we’ve unlocked it in conjunction with the publication of this story. As of today, it’s the second-most-read piece we’ve published since our April launch, and our most-read paywalled piece.

Via the Acta transaction, we had hard evidence that our reporting was at least a part of the Times’ research process. The core structure of the two stories was similar, and Martin used the same examples, figures, and framing as Kayti. The interviews were different, of course; in one bizarre detail, there was mention that the Times had reached out to the showrunner and stars of Heated Rivalry as well as series author Rachel Reid for comment (about…AI in fanfiction??).

We drafted an email to Martin asking for clarification in light of her purchase of our article—and for a citation to our coverage. But a little research revealed something that reframed the issue for us: she was actually a fellow, part of an early career program where reporters are mentored by experienced writers and editors. We knew it was entirely possible that a younger journalist wouldn’t know what an ethical violation it was to use another reporter’s work as a source without the basic courtesy of a citation. The call for accountability shifted to her far more senior editors, to whom we directed our email instead. Assuming they were unaware of what had happened, we hoped that they would acknowledge the mistake and agree to cite our reporting directly.

Times deputy editor Pui-Wing Tam replied swiftly and firmly, denying that any of their reporting was based on ours—and never acknowledging that we had literal receipts. The Times would not be citing us, Tam said, but would be willing to link to our publication to reflect “the general ferment” around the topic. Why, we wondered, would the New York Times offer to link to a random, relatively tiny publication if their story had nothing to do with ours?

We declined the offer of a link. Over the next few days, I watched as people shared the Times piece at a far greater scale than our own; reading a Reddit thread on it, I was frustrated to see comments about a lack of depth or analysis—things they’d readily find in Kayti’s much lengthier piece, which was written by a longtime fandom reporter and member of the Heated Rivalry fic community who’d been working on a story about clashes in commenting cultures and AI accusations there since May. (When the document dropped in late June, Kayti worked quickly to re-report and overhaul the story so we could get our coverage out as soon as possible.) 

In the intervening weeks, I’ve had many conversations about whether we should share these details publicly: with Aja and Fansplaining’s other editor, Lin Codega, with Kayti, with friends in the media industry, with editors at other indie publications, and with the National Writers Union. This incident isn’t a one-off—it’s part of a longstanding pattern of legacy publications with massive financial resources and reach taking what they can from smaller, often niche outlets and independent reporters, knowing the latter will be left with little recourse to push back. It’s a dynamic that’s deeply familiar to anyone who works in the industry, yet it’s almost entirely invisible to the general public. 

But it’s also about our specific beat: fandom. When Fansplaining transitioned from longtime fan culture podcast to larger independent publication this spring, the bad mainstream coverage of fandom was core to our pitch to potential readers. We come from mainstream publications ourselves; we’ve spent years fighting to get stories about fandom taken seriously, and fans depicted fairly and accurately. Sometimes I felt like I was shielding fans from the most exploitative angles, approaches, and framings my colleagues in the media were attempting to take. As we drafted Fansplaining’s launch message, I suggested a sort of cheeky tagline of, “Pay us to report on fan culture so you don’t have to complain about a bad fandom article in the Times every three months.” We wound up deleting it, but looking back now, the irony is stark. 

The indie media boom of recent years has been partly about wresting power back from corporate forces that have gutted our industry, and partly about talented writers and editors reshaping the way many subjects are covered. If mainstream outlets are going to bungle your beat, why not go and do it for yourself? But what happens when you’re doing it for yourself, and the mainstream media just comes in and helps itself anyway?

Our stance on this situation would have been the same regardless of the piece at the center of it, but the fact that the author was Kayti Burt, one of the most experienced fandom reporters we work with, was notable. Kayti is also a working-class journalist who’s far more attuned to the labor realities of the industry than many folks I know in media; she’s an organizer with the Freelance Solidarity Project, a campaign within the National Writers Union that works to help freelancers, who historically have had little to no labor rights, get the fair wages and treatment they deserve. Her first piece for Fansplaining was a meta one—“The Fan-Journalist Tightrope.” The dek (subtitle) says it all: “Low pay, minimal worker protections, and pushback from both publicists and fellow fans. Is covering the thing you love even worth it?”

When I asked Kayti to share her thoughts about this situation, she started by zeroing in on the mismatch between her fandom journalism experience and the compensation for that expertise. “As a fan, I have been reading fanfiction for decades,” she writes. “As an entertainment reporter and culture journalist, I have been studying fandom more intentionally for more than a decade by attending fan studies conventions, reading seminal books in the field, and interviewing hundreds of fans for specific stories over the years. I say all of this because when fan-journalists write an article like this one, we are often drawing on years of our own lived and professional experiences to shape the story. To treat the subject with the respect and complexity it deserves.”

Fansplaining, she kindly notes, “pays more than most culture-specific websites, including richer, corporate-backed websites”—but that rate is still $300. In the spirit of transparency, it’s currently all we can afford: despite our launch being met with a great deal of enthusiasm and commentary about how necessary the project was, our paying subscribers number in the low hundreds, and we bring in just over $2,000 per month. “When freelance fan-journalists like myself write well-researched articles like this one, we are often doing it for very little per-hour compensation,” Kayti underscores. “Our labor is ‘subsidized’ by a belief that this work is important.” 

A few weeks after the Times piece came out, Kayti and I talked with David Hill, a freelance writer who works as a volunteer grievance officer for the National Writers Union. Our situation wasn’t a grievance, which often involves something like a breach of contract (a serious example might be this recent case the NWU won against The Intercept). “I've seen publications take advantage of freelancers in every way you could imagine,” Hill told me in a later email. “Freelancers have long had to put up with these sorts of situations because in order to make a living we often have to piece together dozens of small checks from dozens of publications.”

Fansplaining’s situation, Hill explained to Kayti and me, was indicative of a new dynamic cropping up as more journalists go independent—sometimes in small teams like ours, sometimes as solo reporters publishing via newsletter platforms. Indie outlets have given freelancers more opportunities, especially in niche areas like fan culture; but, Hill writes, “publishing a story with a smaller, independent publication—or even publishing it yourself on your own platform—means that larger publications can piggyback off your reporting and writing, take advantage of the work you put in, and have a larger audience read it as if it was original work. The dynamic isn’t as simple as freelancer vs. publication anymore. Today it feels like the freelancer is also caught up in a battle between independent and legacy media.”

If the Times story had simply been about the same subject as ours, it would have been annoying, and I likely would have taken to Bluesky or Tumblr to complain about the way mainstream outlets continue to approach fandom (though I have to admit, with so many bad articles since Heated Rivalry aired late last year, I am increasingly too tired to bother). But the smoking-gun element here was notable—our story had a real connection to theirs. 

“To some, this might not seem like a big deal,” Kayti Burt writes. “This is an article about Heated Rivalry fanfiction, not Watergate. But as journalism struggles to figure out how to survive in a shifting internet landscape and in a hostile political environment, I believe it is more important than ever for those of us left hanging on to maintain fair and ethical practices.”

The imbalance between big and little guys has only grown in recent years. While many indie journalists don’t want to go public for fear of cutting off future hiring prospects, some have been vocal about the way legacy outlets, to use Hill’s term, “piggyback” off smaller orgs. After giants like the Times, the Washington Post, and CBS News referenced her reporting on Rwandan refugees without naming or linking to her, The Handbasket’s Marisa Kabas wrote, “Hi, it’s me. I’m the independent journalist. And a multi-billion dollar news corporation couldn’t be bothered to write my damn name.” In a Splinter article about the incident as part of a broader pattern, Jacob Weindling wrote, “It’s very difficult to see how CBS and the New York Times’ ‘reports’ are anything other than a conscious decision to erase the original report because it comes from a source they clearly don’t respect and/or see as a threat.”

When I asked a group of indie outlet editors about being ripped off by the big guys, many chimed in to say they had been, citing the Times in particular. Our own editor, Lin, who co-founded the TTRPG-focused publication Rascal, has multiple anecdotes of this nature, including, notably, when they confronted a more medium-sized publication that had used their reporting without attribution. That editor quickly rectified the situation and cited Rascal. 

“The National Writers Union has a long history of helping writers get paid what they are owed and what they deserve,” Hill told me. “But sometimes writers deserve more than just pay, they deserve credit—especially from a publication that didn’t pay them a dime for their work but used it anyway. Attribution costs the New York Times nothing, but it means a lot to writers and independent outlets trying to build an audience. The New York Times should give writers credit for their reporting not because it’s charitable to do so, but because those writers deserve it.” 

The Times sees it differently. “As an editor from The Times made clear to Fansplaining in an email, our article is an original piece of reporting based on independent research, interviews and citations of public social media posts,” Times communication staffer Charlie Stadtlander told us in an email when we reached out to them for comment on this piece. “Our reporter and her editor produced this work independently and we are confident both in what it brings to light and its presentation of original facts to readers.”

The Times’ rejection of the framing that they are a large outlet drawing influence from a smaller one, especially given a paper trail pointing in that direction, highlights some of the larger tensions in a troubled industry. “To some, this might not seem like a big deal,” Kayti writes. “This is an article about Heated Rivalry fanfiction, not Watergate. But as journalism struggles to figure out how to survive in a shifting internet landscape and in a hostile political environment, I believe it is more important than ever for those of us left hanging on to maintain fair and ethical practices.”

Amid comments about the substance of the Times piece and the Heated Rivalry-AI fanfiction situation, I repeatedly saw the same question: Why are journalists covering this at all? 

Some of these comments, to be clear, were directly aimed at the Times, not the media as a whole: their fandom coverage often feels like a tourist dipping into a subculture without fully understanding it. I have zero knowledge of how many people involved in this particular story are in fandom; they might be deep in the Heated Rivalry fic mines right now. But usually, when staffers are assigned a niche-topic story at a large publication, they’re not experts. This approach has made the decimation of freelance budgets in recent years even more concerning, since freelancers with actual subject-matter expertise are finding it harder than ever to place stories, even as larger publications skim off the top of their knowledge.

But as media attention ravaged through fandom in the first half of 2026, starting with endless “why slash” articles around Heated Rivalry and followed by endless “fandom is toxic” articles around The Pitt, there’s been a loud drumbeat from fans about whether journalists should be looking at fandom at all. I literally became a fandom journalist under these circumstances: 15 years ago, terrible articles about fanfiction after the success of Fifty Shades of Grey spurred me to make use of the decade and a half I’d spent up till then reading and writing fic, pivoting from book coverage to writing about fandom. Outlets wanted stories on fanfiction, and I was going to help make sure that at least a few of those stories actually came from a fic person.

The mainstream media is not going to stop publishing articles about fandom. They live for clicks—even your hate-clicks. These pieces generate vast amounts of publicity in the pushback. But were I to approach this state of affairs holistically, I’d bring up one of the fundamental positions of Fansplaining’s launch: “To understand the world, you have to understand fandom.” Fan culture threads itself through today’s mass culture; “fandom,” even at its narrowest definition, is exponentially larger than when I first got online in the ’90s and learned that other people also wrote fanfiction. 

So if the media is going to cover fandom, who actually gets to cover it? We’re in a moment of crisis for culture writing. With most books sections already gone, pubs are slashing film and television criticism, too. For culture reporters—who often have the contextual knowledge to understand the world in which fans are operating—there are vanishingly few jobs left. Vox, where our editor Aja was part of the culture team until last year, finally killed off the section last week. This bleak landscape makes it all the more galling that the few big outlets left with the resources to cover culture—including fan culture—are instead using those resources to exploit smaller publications and individual writers.  

During my conversations about going public with this story, I was asked what exactly we hoped to get out of doing so. To me, whether or not the Times cites us is a bit moot; I’ve given my expertise to large outlets many times over the years as an interviewee, and rarely did I feel that doing so led many people to my work. A citation doesn’t solve the problem of folks outside of fandom trying to write about these issues with little knowledge of or care for the nuances of fan culture.

But I did hope that more people who care about those nuances would learn about Fansplaining. Since our launch, we’ve published some extraordinary pieces on fan culture and culture more broadly, including Gavia Baker-Whitelaw on The Vampire Lestat, Maria Temming on conlangs, Morgan Leigh Davies on Philip Pullman, Tabby Kibugi on African K-pop fans, Joshua Rivera on Spider-Man, Earl Hopkins on Drake’s fandom, Michelle Jaworski on covering Game of Thrones, Anne Jamison on the Good Omens finale, Ilana Masad on The Bachelor, Soila Kenya on decolonizing fanfiction—and, just a few weeks after her piece on AI in Heated Rivalry fanfiction, Kayti Burt on Boy Throb. Our editors have written some fantastic pieces as well, like Aja on global creative censorship, or Lin on Pitt fanfic. (I was pretty proud of my essay on big tech narratives on TV, too.) And we have so much more in the pipeline over the coming months that we can’t wait to share with the world. 

We work to be a reputable journalistic voice that’s by and for fans, and we think that still matters even in an industry that’s trying to optimize all the joy and purpose out of journalism. If you’d like to help us in that mission, we hope you’ll join us by becoming a subscriber or making a one-off donation. 

These stories deserve to be handled with care—and we can’t do that without your help.

This article has been modified to add a response from a Times spokesperson to our request for comment.