rejoining the living and some thoughts on....free press and...that deal
never tweet. but posting?
I haven’t said much these last few months, that’s because I’ve felt way more introspective since leaving the L.A. Times at the start of 2024. I’ve been reflecting a lot on what it has meant to be in the media now, to have spent an entire career hearing about the importance of bravery and speaking truth to power, only to learn that this was more of a nice thing to say at journalism award ceremonies rather than values we were actually supposed to uphold. The genocide has laid bare so much of what is wrong in our industry, and this has led to a huge shift in my life, both professionally and personally.
Since I haven’t been in a newsroom for almost two years at this point, it has also changed my relationship to time and online conversation. While inside of an institution, all you can think about is budgets and long-term survival. Without living and dying by the news cycle anymore, I have had the space to see the shift in the media landscape today far more clearly.
I will have a lot more to say on this soon, but that desire to articulate and understand that shift has led to me working on building a new journalism project. I have also been working on a novel. So I have been, uncharacteristically, out of the loop. That warped sense of time and connection also comes from my decision to leave Instagram and Facebook. Unfortunately, I still have Twitter — because I cannot let go of the bird app, but it’s not as fun as it used to be so I stay off of it.
I am, however, trying to reconnect with what made me want to be online anyways, which was blogging, and feeling like I could speak in my own voice at a moment when it seemed like no one wanted to hear from someone like me.
So all of this to say: Although I am very much out of THE DISCOURSE™ I had some (brief) thoughts about the Free Press and Bari Weiss. There’s not much more I can say than what David Klion lays out here, in this fantastic analysis of both her and her outlet for the Guardian.
However — very anecdotally — there are two things that I feel are worth noting:
First off, since the founding of the Free Press in 2021, I haven’t ever seen anyone in the journalism world share any of their reporting or work begrudgingly. Over the years, I’ve always seen a “I know it’s [insert controversial outlet or writer] but this is well-done” about all of the provocateurs and ex-journalism superstars that have faded into the shadows. The work is viewed as a holy craft that, even in the wrong hands, can deliver excellent storytelling. That ‘view from nowhere’ that makes us believe that we can isolate the quality of the work from the person, the organization, and the resources that made it happen is what makes us seek out the opportunities to acknowledge the controversial instances of this.
I don’t think this is limited to journalism: In western, liberal democracies, the ability to find a salient point in even the most divisive and insidious work is supposedly a sign of being more evolved and intelligent. That desperate, unthinking grasp for the middle — to the detriment of truth and an accurate picture — is one of the qualities that has eroded public trust in some of the most venerated news organizations.
But…I will have more to say on that later. Anyways, back to the Free Press: Why hasn’t this particular news organization won a major journalism award? Is there any of its reporting that has had a tangible impact, in the way that we uphold in our field? It’s something I’ve thought about. I find it fascinating to see no evidence that, beyond creating a resonant lane in the cycle of takes (the ‘i’m progressive but even that is going too far for me’ crowd), it has published the kind of rigorous, impactful journalism that many other online media outlets had to push out to be recognized by their peers in the legacy space.
This brings me to my second point: During my time living in Los Angeles, a lot of the people I met in Hollywood loved The Free Press. I like to ask people about their media consumption (especially newsletters, partially because you can’t turn off my audience brain, but also because I like to learn about voices I haven’t heard of yet). Whenever I’ve interrogated this, it’s always been about what the Free Press represents and its perspective, rather than any particular article or type of content it conveys.
Here’s what I find interesting about that: First and foremost, as any dead-in-the-eyes audience person might tell you, there’s a limit to how much audience you can build based on a very specific event or context, even if it’s something that connects to a reader’s passion. We all saw a boom in subscribers and readers during the Trump presidency, the pandemic, or any other significant moment in time. If the play is “anti-woke” — without memorable content to underpin it, then it lives and dies by the life cycle of the “woke” that it was built to respond to, which has radically changed between 2021 and 2025.
If you’ve existed on the internet — especially within the context of a growing online media outlet — you know that the numbers fall, and audiences lose interest. You know that big numbers are fake and ephemeral — especially their money-earning power. To this day, nothing has captured that better than this particular South Park episode.
I read Ben Smith’s “Traffic” recently, and it really made me think about the rise and fall of the digital outlets that taught me everything I know about journalism (and the internet). I guess when I see new outlets emerge now I just see what happened in the past, which is that their survival is still a huge question mark, no matter what their ‘slant’ is. You are still trying to translate an online audience into real, sustainable numbers. That work becomes almost impossible, thanks to the problems that pre-date anti-woke: the platforms have so much power over not only your revenue, but your reach and visibility over the audiences you build on their sites. It’s hard to plan a future or even to accurately gauge success when so much of that is intertwined with these famously opaque platforms.
I also believe that audiences will eventually fatigue of ‘anti-woke’ in the same way that the ‘woke’ audiences they rage against have also grown tired of consuming too much rage bait.
All of this to say: CBS News is doing what a lot of legacy outlets have done over the years in their bid for survival, turning towards the “shiny” new thing in the hopes that it can save the whole industry, without understanding how time functions on the internet.
On top of that: I also wonder what audience they’re actually drawing in by bringing in the Free Press. After all, even though there isn’t publicly available data about their audience demographics, I imagine that the issues that animate their readership are not going to expand CBS News’ audience, especially since the median age of their audience is 59, according to a Pew study. As network television scrambles for longevity, I don’t really know how the Free Press is going to energize or renew its approach, apart from perhaps doubling down on engagement within their existing demographic. And even then, all of this still relies on an abundance of woke things to rail against, which leads to things…like this …..okay!
So yes, I think that this is sinister and devastating for the same reasons as everyone else. I am fully in despair about so many things about journalism, our industry, and the folks put in place as its vanguards and gatekeepers. When the strategy seems hasty and unclear, even to people who have been inside of media, it is hard to see these things as more than dumb stunts.