If they are publishing a story about company A, what’s the ethics on buying in company B, where the latter is a competitor or supplier who will be affected by the story? There’s a murky line here that they haven’t necessarily crossed, but I imagine somebody has or will.

As long as the information is publicly available, it makes no difference.

Once upon a time, if you shorted publicly traded Corp Z, and then wrote an article negative about Corp Z encouraging others to do so as well, most people were fine with that as long as two things:

1) what you wrote was factual or was an analysis of public acquired information.

2) you declared your financial position on the stock as well.

Post crypto people have done neither.

But if say this new journalistic venture gets the data from public sources, and their honest about it and the hedge fund's position, it's probably fine?

The interesting problem is that reporters will get material non public information and then make it public. But now the hedge fund gets first crack at the information before it's published to the world.

That normally would be insider trading but hiring journalists somehow makes it legal? I'm not sure.