What is The Free Press?
Can Substack build Media Empires while keeping its most viral writers?
Hey Everyone,
Today we are going to talk about Bari Weiss. Substack has in some ways helped to build an alternative-media industrial complex. The Twitter Files catapulted Bari Weiss into the spotlight in December, 2022 and she launched The Free Press.
Substack has molded itself as the best place for political analysts and writers to turn the solo-entrepreneurs life to riches and with the Dispatch leaving, The Free Press is the heir apparent.
The Free Press is a new media company founded by Bari Weiss and built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.
The Substack Pivot
A once 35-year-old star opinion writer for The New York Times back in 2019, has now just four years later, at 39, built her own Media Empire custom designed on her new Substack.
In about a week, The Free Press has accrued more than 120,000 followers on Twitter and its flagship newsletter has added more than an additional 25,000 free and paid subscribers.
Since Elon Musk’s Twitter Files launched, Weiss' Twitter following itself has exploded in that time, growing from more than 500,000 followers to more than 900,000 in less than a week. It’s today 937,000 and counting.
She remains one of the pivot Substack journalists given the inside scoop on the Twitter Files. So much so that you might suppose Twitter was an investor in Substack or about to acquire it.
Whatever the case may be, political content is by far Substack’s star category and it’s all thanks to Twitter’s entertaining political banter. Bari Weiss has turned her Newsletter ambitions into a full-fledged empire ready to take on 2023 and this elections’ cycle.
I don’t pretend to understand of the intricacies of content like The Dispatch or The Free Press, or the economics of why one stayed and the other went independent. But you have to admire that Alternative Media Empires can truly flourish on Substack and be built at an accelerated timeline.
With Twitter’s synergy with Substack and Substack’s own efforts to creating a discovery-recommendations flow, it’s now faster to use Substack as a springboard to create a Media empire. TikTok and YouTube Creators should really be made more aware of this!
Where did the Media Go Wrong?
Elon Musk is the latest patron for an alternative-media ecosystem and the Twitter Files features not one, but at least three Substack journalists. Since Twitter’s Revue acquisition is folding, Substack is now one of the only Newsletter platforms left standing and it has proof of empire-building now in 2023. That’s not something beehiive or ghost can say.
Substack is a bit of a specialist at developing political Media empires. The Fress Press has a great design and a unique vibe that even features a poster Ads campaign.
The visuals are stunning and this is how it looks today:
The Dispatch was such a commercial success for Substack, it’s great to see that they were able to retain Bari Weiss and her team, at least for now. While journalists and writers thrive on Substack, retaining them is harder than it looks, when you are taking 10%+ of their revenue. Still the top influencers on Substack that have remained faithful to the platform, have usually been rewarded in terms of success and higher salaries. When your boss are all those micro boss readers, good things can happen!
What is the Big Picture of Building Media Empire on Substack?
Feeding on resentment against mainstream media, new media players have established a power base via Substack newsletters, podcasts and other independent channels. For American audiences, political writers consistently outperform all other writers combined in terms of revenue by many degrees on Substack. This shows you how starving for good content Americans are while trying to support Democracy in turbulent times.
For whatever reason Substack did not for example decide to focus on education in technology or other very lucrative niches and categories. Substack as a free speech platform chose to focus instead of talented political writers who wanted to make it on their own, and many of them have done so with fabulous ROI over the years and especially in 2022 when Substack figured out a flow to grow its own network discovery that leads to significant boosts to Email lists and audiences over time.
The value proposition for building a micro media empire in Politics on Substack, has probably never been better heading into 2023.
Building on Controversy and Mistrust
The Free Press, formerly Common Sense, is now a beast of Twitter.
The Free Press bills itself as a new media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of American journalism.
As the gap between what we’re allowed to say in public and how we talk in private grows, so does our distrust—in power, in the press, and in one another.
Journalists who saw curiosity was becoming a liability—not a necessity - left the traditional Newsrooms and seemed destined for greatness with synergy in Substack’s melting pot and commercial springboard.
Substack’s Anti-Establishment Calling
That you could scale a media solo-entrepreneurship into a million dollar business was once unthinkable, now no more. That you could go from one to say, ten employees, it’s doable. Not all of us will be Alternative media heroes, but it’s interesting to see some are able to do it, leveraging Twitter and Substack and rallying the cries of the masses.
In our current media climate, where facts are subordinated to various master narratives, and everything is viewed through an ideological lens, there are also new kinds of profiteers and voices that are elevated in the political spectrum of the binary times in which we live, censorship vs. free speech.
Substack thus is the perfect platform for so-called Renegade journalists and those who are able to create clicks out of controversy. It’s almost a new brand of journalism of its own making. I myself do not know what to call it. But it appears to cater to the entertainment side of politics - the emotional sense of the not so uncertain injustice of the times in which we live.
The Dispatch was the second most popular Substack newsletter in the politics category, at the time of its leaving. The Free Press is already essentially #4. If you are in the top 50 of Substack’s Politics leaderboards, you are already likely a big deal. We are talking hundreds of thousands of revenue a month in subscriptions.
Substack desperately needs to be able to retain its top voices in Politics, because this is really the main driver of their growth. Everything else from finance, to technology to business, is a bonus for them.
Brave New Worlds
The Fress Press publishes investigative stories and provocative commentary about the world as it actually is—with the quality once expected from the legacy press, but the fearlessness of the new. Visit www.thefp.com to learn more.
That the Twitter Files coincided with the new layout and design and launch of The Fress Press is the kind of genius that makes Bari Weiss potentially a special voice and creator among the masses. Bari Weiss, the New York Times columnist turned independent newsletter writer, has hired ten full-time employees and over a dozen contractors to help build her new media company, The Free Press. She has built a team, it’s an media empire in kindergarten clothes and Substack is showing it’s a decent school of journalism to scale a media business.
Bari Weiss has gone from one to 10 with the Free Press.
Subsack has provided an ideal platform in which The Dispatch and The Fress Press, among others have truly blossomed to find a paying audience.
Brian might call of all these “culture war agitators” like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, Bari belongs in a new archetype of independent journalism. It’s the template that works the best on Substack thus far and that impacts male and female readers the most as a whole!
The Fashions and Patterns of the New Media
Sara Fischer is not wrong, this is a new packaging for journalism. Feeding on resentment against mainstream media, the public readers it seems like the change. We now nearing 2023, have no problems paying for the New York Times, the Guardian the WSJ and a bunch of our favorite Substack writers. We collect voices that affirm and challenge our thinking. We find voices that entertain and educate us and refine our viewpoints and strengthen our own beliefs and ideological preferences.
We all fundamentally want to be free and see the world with fresh eyes! “The Fress Press” is certainly an upgrade for Bari and her team.
But how different are these solo-entrepreneurs really from us? The mainstream media calls Weiss and Taibbi “controversial figures” who struck out alone after working for major media outlets. But how many of us may have wanted to do the same but were simply too cowardly to do so? How many young people today wish they were their own boss? The world is changing and Substack does provide a new way of doing things, our own way.
“On The Mad Coattails of Twitter”
Twitter was simply the shortcut Substack took to get there, just as any of these few dozen to few hundreds truly successful Substack writers. Hundreds among millions, let’s not forget! I never imagined Substack would replace The Dispatch so easily, but when one of your kids leaves, another grows up perhaps faster than you believed possible! I’m still keeping tabs on Every, another surprising kid of Substack.
If I had entered the field of journalism earlier in life, I’m sure I’d be a half decent media historian. This marks the point where Substack graduates from being a Newsletter platform into an Empire building stack, in 2023. And for new media, it could be important. What once felt like a risk to build a Substack in 2020, in 2023 won’t feel like such a daunting challenge. Substack’s product innovation and feature timeline has been noticeably above average.
It’s had enough notable wins in 2022 to build on its momentum. The Fress Press, Lenny, Gergely, many others I don’t often talk about. Substack’s racy political writers can build controversy, so long as it helps the rest of us eat, I’m totally fine with that. On some level now, the more Substack itself grows, the more minor and unnoticed Substack writers like you and I, can perhaps dream bigger.
We are entering the dawn of the age of the solo-entrepreneur. Software, generative AI and shifts in consumption are changing how we can reach an audience. While the Substack provokers also have their own “narrative”, by pretending that they are less scripted compared to mainstream media - it creates space. The “narratives”— to use the fashionable term for what was formerly called “the party line”—often feel manipulative, intended to advance agendas. The truth is, we all have our agendas, bias and so does Substack as a business.
Whatever “the party line” of new media founders on Substack, that we can explore our own voice (whatever it may be) is still important. That we can make a living while doing it, is key. As the subscription economy gets more crowded in 2023, I hope that we can realize a more diversified business model that sows the seeds to greater trust and safety that our future empires are indeed sustainable.
Whatever our relationship to the legacy Ads, algo and mainstream media scripts, we must continue to grow - or else we fail in our attempts. Not all of us have the luck and fortune to take the shortcuts that Substack and Twitter provides us, some of us must truly be pioneers in our own less popular categories and self-defined niches. Not all of us have the luxury of stirring a mob to further unrest.
As much as I might praise the founding pillars - Taibbi, Weiss, Greenwald, Yglesias, Goldberg (The Dispatch), Berenson - it’s not so clear if those not famous from New York have a shot. It seems previous fame and Twitter followers matter a lot in this game of new media. Our very trajectory and speed to sustainability depends on it.
While Subtack now boasts statistics around its discovery flow, 40% of unpaid readers, 13% of paid, one has to wonder at the meritocracy of such a system. If you weren’t a popular journalist without a significant Twitter following, what is you realistic chance of “building a media empire” on Substack? Now as a minor blogger, that’s a figure I’d like to know.
Let’s think of the average Twitter following of some of Substack’s Pillars, i.e. high earners:
Taibbi - 1.5 million
Weiss - 973,300
Greenwald - 1.9 million
Yglesias - 532,300.
Goldberg (The Dispatch) - 356,000
Berenson - 429,900.
So to be among the Founding Six, you’d have had to have a stellar career and a network effect on Twitter, let’s see the average, 948,583 followers. For Taibbi and Weiss this is also being in the good graces of Elon Musk, who has a follow himself of 121.3 million on the network he now owns.
Of course Subsack’s voices are greater than the sum of its parts. And this is just one simplification of an example of building media empires.
So someone like Seth Abramson, ranked a tier lower than the founding six, noticing the network effect of his peers, must realize that getting a massive following first on Post News, might become important. And so the merry-go around of influence, network effect, and attention seeking in the hopes of building media empires continues.
The founding six I imagine all rationalize that they are doing important journalism. And I personally have no ideal really if this is true. So long as their is an audience who loves it, knowing what’s real or not is not a strong point of the alternative media empires it would seem. Some of us minor writers and analysts might argue that point, but perhaps it’s really insignificant. When the biggest YouTuber is called “Mr Beast”, you sort of have to wonder what exactly we are creating.
The thing about political content on Substack is that it’s conducive to comments and thus community because things like politics and op-eds on America really seem to matter to people living there. It’s not just a niche that you are talking about, it’s part of their identity.
Just as the American healthcare system seems to profit from its sick, its entertainment industry seems to profit from its mental health unease that often can cascade into ideological patterns and/or political motivations. At that point, are you informing or entertaining the masses, I am not quite sure.
Whatever is the case, I have no doubts The Fress Press can scale and grow faster on Substack than say The Dispatch can grow on its own. Such is the irony of platform economics. The 10% + 3% (from Stripe) that Substack takes is still worth it even for a 10 person media startup like Bari and her wife have created.
Bari Weiss didn’t even start her Substack journey that long ago, so it’s incredible what she has built. I understand that Substack is what it is due to Politics and Twitter, I may not have to like it.
Axios explained it thus:
Taibbi is a veteran writer who started out on the left, capturing national attention during the financial crisis of 2008 for describing Goldman Sachs as a "vampire squid." His work has more recently taken aim at media pieties, and alleged censorship by government and tech companies.
Weiss is a former New York Times op-ed columnist who left that newsroom amid controversy — and now focuses on voices and positions that, she argues, mainstream media outlets are suppressing.
Greenwald is a veteran blogger who came to fame as a key figure in the massive 2013 leaks of U.S. government documents by Edward Snowden. Greenwald took his combative writing to his own email newsletter after departing the Intercept, which he co-founded.
Greenwald and Taibbi, like many of their readers, broke with their former fans on the left in the Trump era. They saw less danger in Trump's actions than in efforts by some in the U.S. intelligence community to stymie him.
According to Fischer, Musk’s Twitter takeover has helped these Substack entrepreneurs cement their alliance with Silicon Valley investors who share their hostility to mainstream media — including several members of Musk's inner circle, like investor David Sacks.
The Political category remains the most acclaimed for Substack’s actual audience while in many other categories it remains somewhat nascent. That our founding media empires are thus mostly from the Political domain of journalism is not surprising.
As for David Sacks his very Twitter banner seems to support The Free Speech movement:
The Free Press along with other Subtack empire builders might have backers, allegiances, investors and contributors that we from the outside don’t even fully understand or could appreciate. They might also have insiders within Substack that favor them somehow, or just by the shear revenue they bring in might get a lot of bells and whistles and special attention.
Marc Andreessen, one of tech's most prominent investors, has poured billions of dollars into Substack, Clubhouse, and other platforms that democratize media creation. Now we have to include Post News that’s more for mainstream journalists, not necessarily (exactly) the crowd Substack caters to. a16z recent shut down their Future media venture, in a surprising move.
So there you have it, those are my opinions on the state of journalism and empire-building as it relates to Substack and some of its personalities. Congrats to The Free Press for an excellent launch, even though I don’t find The Twitter Files helpful or political writing that useful, it is the best catch for Substack’s growth and for that at least, I am grateful.
I’d bow to Elon Musk, but I’m slightly afraid that would bring too many enemies into my inner camp. Just kidding.
A slew of politicians are cutting out the media middleman entirely by launching their own Substacks and “building in public” in new ways, a few media empires will result.
Weiss said her subscriber number has more than doubled since the beginning of the year, to 283,000, so far in 2022. Weiss' newsletter, which used to cost $5 monthly now costs $8 monthly under The Free Press umbrella. Last year, Marketwatch reported that Weiss made over $800,000 from her newsletter alone, which at the time had 14,000 paid subscribers. The newsletter has more than double that number of paid subscribers today.
If we 30,000 x $8, that’s around $240,000 revenue a month in paid subscriptions. Not just a buzzy lil startup any longer.