GoKawiilis features writer with five years of experience covering the companies that shape technology and the people who use their tools.
Prediction market exchanges have created an environment where just about any piece of information is potentially monetizable: How well will BTS’s new song perform this week? How hot will Los Angeles get? Will Donald Trump be impeached? Users can wager on all of that and, on some platforms, more gruesome and violent outcomes in the real world.
The rapid rise and expansion of Polymarket and Kalshi have put newsrooms in a strange position. Prediction market evangelists often claim that their odds are more trustworthy and accurate than polls and traditional media — effectively positioning the industry as a replacement for news. At the same time, news organizations from Fox News to The Associated Press are cutting deals with prediction market exchanges, and Polymarket and Kalshi are attempting to align with independent journalists and Substackers through paid placement deals.
Because prediction markets allow users to monetize news, journalists are caught in the crosshairs: what they report (and the information that goes into reporting) suddenly has a dollar amount attached to it. It also means that the information they encounter on the job is potentially very valuable. Earlier this week ProPublica announced it was updating its code of ethics to explicitly mention restrictions on how staff use prediction markets. ProPublica’s code of ethics already has restrictions on how staff can invest in outside companies they cover. But the policy now states that “no employee should wager on the outcome of news events on the prediction markets — regardless of whether or not they are involved in coverage of said event.”
Diego Sorbara, assistant managing editor at ProPublica, said the outlet began discussing the issue after reports that some Polymarket users had made hundreds of thousands of dollars betting on military action in Iran. (Also a concern: the case of the Times of Israel reporter who was threatened by bettors who demanded he update his story to align with their wagers.)
“If you are covering, let’s say, a war in Iran, you also shouldn’t be taking monetary stakes in it so that you’re somehow enriching yourself off the news events,” Sorbara says. “Just as you wouldn’t buy stocks, I think we felt that this was almost a natural progression.” Sorbara says the policy applies not just to editorial staff like reporters and editors but to staff on the business side as well, given that everyone is privy to what stories are in the works.
ProPublica’s policy allows for some gambling: an office Oscars ballot, for example, or sports betting, where legal. Sorbara reasons that because the outlet doesn’t really cover sporting event outcomes, sports gambling didn’t pose much of a concern. The exception would be if a reporter was working on something like a story about the NFL or another sports league, at which point tighter restrictions might kick in. A reporter who worked on a 2021 story about NBA owners avoiding taxes, for example, would have been barred from betting on basketball games.
The bulk of trading volume on Kalshi is on sports, but prediction markets complicate what is a “news event” and what isn’t. I asked Sorbara whether a ProPublica employee would be allowed to wager on peripheral markets related to the Super Bowl — who will be in the crowd, or who will perform.
“‘Will someone perform at an event’ could be informed by thousands of different calculations. It could be [that] there’s an ideological issue: ‘I’m not going to perform at this event because this organization supports X,’ or ‘This league has taken Y positions in the past,’” Sorbara says. “All of a sudden that starts smelling like a news story to me. If someone [on staff] asked me, I would tell them to not [bet on] that.”
Do you have information about Polymarket or Kalshi? Using a non-work device, reach out to the reporter via email at [email protected], or on Signal at @miasato.11.
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