Today, David Ellison’s Paramount announced that it will acquire The Free Press—founded by Bari Weiss, Suzy Weiss, and Nellie Bowles, and powered by Substack—for a reported price of $150 million. While much of the commentary about the deal has focused on the characters involved, we believe the most remarkable feature of this story is that a media startup went from zero to a nine-figure outcome in the space of three years, at a time when many have been led to believe that news is a dying business.
As much as this deal feels like a seismic event in the media business, it won’t be the last of its kind. The media is going through a volatile transition as the industry adjusts to the ongoing ramifications of the internet and the start of the AI age, but the public’s appetite for trustworthy storytelling is greater than ever. While some of the giants of yesterday are struggling to survive this transition, there is an immense opportunity for ambitious new media founders to build a new generation of institutions.
The Free Press is one such institution, and it is one among many on Substack, collectively accounting for millions of paid subscribers. Among this new class are Sarah Longwell’s politics collective The Bulwark, Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim’s Drop Site, Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen’s The Contrarian, Richard Rushfield and Janice Min’s The Ankler, Mike Solana’s Pirate Wires, Jerusalem Demsas’s The Argument, and JD Flynn and Ed Condon’s Catholic news outlet The Pillar, to name a few.
We’re also seeing the emergence of new models that take advantage of Substack’s network-centric design and flexible features, including Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist, which recently sprouted local variants in California and New York, and spinoff publications created and funded by individual writers who have found success on the platform, such as Judd Legum (Popular Information and Oligarch Watch) and Matt Yglesias, who started the Slow Boring newsletter as well as Politix, a podcast co-hosted with Brian Beutler (Yglesias is also a contributor to The Argument). Emily Sundberg has used her newsletter, Feed Me, as a base for expansion into audio and events, and Lenny Rachitsky has turned his tech expertise into a rampantly successful media business that encompasses text, audio, video, a community, and a premium bundle of AI tools made available to subscribers.
These founders are building here because they can enjoy the distribution benefits of the Substack network—which drives more than 30% of all paid subscriptions across the platform—without compromising their vision. That network growth and discovery via the app means a media business can now scale faster, and more cost efficiently, than ever before.
What once took months to research, compose, and activate is now available out of the box. The founders of The Free Press and Zeteo didn’t need to hire developers, wrestle with a dated content management system, or stress about subscriber profile management. They can instead dedicate almost all of their focus to the work that matters most: their journalism.
In today’s media environment, independent voices who have a direct relationship with their audiences are beacons for a better system. As more of these publishers succeed on Substack, we provide them with infrastructure that flexes to meet their growing ambitions. This new generation of entrepreneurs are producing media companies that bear the same commitment to quality that was once the sole dominion of legacy media, while equipping themselves to thrive in a world of decentralized authority and diminished trust in public institutions—including the media itself.
Substack was first a place for creators to start a publication and community. Now it’s also a place for entrepreneurs to launch entire networks. These founders are the future, showing the way forward to a media ecosystem that can be richer, deeper, more open, and more valuable than what has come before.
If you are energized by the idea of building the next generation of the media, then please let us assure you: there has never been a better time to start.
Let’s build the future of media together.