For the last couple of years, the newsletter company Substack has dangled a tantalizing prospect in front of journalists: Quit your job, free yourself from management and shortsighted editors, and start a newsletter for which subscribers can pay you directly. If you’re about to be laid off anyway, what do you have to lose? For most writers, Substack merely provides a simple-to-use platform that lets them put out a newsletter and take in subscription payments (of which Substack takes 10 percent, in addition to credit card processing fees). In a select few cases, Substack has also provided promising writers with startup capital in the form of advances and stipends through its fellowship program. (Full disclosure: I use Substack for my own free newsletter.)
Writers of all dispositions and ideology have flocked to Substack, including some progressives who regularly put out important work and lead conversations in much the same way that independent blogs did a decade and a half ago. Though subscriber numbers are not public, it's clear from Substack's "top publications" list who the big players are. Here are nine of the most prominent left-leaning Substack newsletters:
Judd Legum’s Popular Information
In 2018, Legum left ThinkProgress—a website he had spent more than a decade building up—to launch Popular Information, which at the time made it Substack’s first political publication. (ThinkProgress was shuttered by its parent organization, the Center for American Progress, a year later.) It looked like a gamble, but it’s paid off—Legum is one of Substack’s most prominent newsletterers and has tens of thousands of subscribers paying either $6 a month or $50 a year. (You can get one post a week for free; a subscription gets you three additional posts.)
Part of Popular Information’s staying power is that it genuinely breaks news and puts pressure on powerful corporations. As ThinkProgress did, the newsletter covers Republican hypocrisy and malfeasance, but it has a particularly strong focus on Facebook, exposing the ways that big-name conservatives like Sarah Palin and Ben Shapiro have broken the social media site’s rules about trading money for links. It’s also reported that Facebook was apparently pressured into removing a fact-check of a viral article that contained misinformation about climate change. At this point, Popular Information’s competitors aren’t other newsletters so much as other small, progressive publications.
Emily Atkin’s HEATED
After Legum, Atkin is arguably the most famous progressive Substacker, and like Legum, she comes from a traditional journalism background. She left the New Republic in 2019, the Washington Post reported, after a controversy over a bizarre article about Pete Buttigieg nixed the magazine’s hopes of hosting a Democratic primary debate on climate change. Atkin told the Post that Substack gave her a $20,000 advance and she now has thousands of subscribers paying either $8 a month or $75 a year to get four posts a week. (You can get one post a week for free.)
Atkin makes enough now to have hired a research assistant, but writes the entire newsletter herself, mixing analysis of the news of the day with reporting and probing interviews with major figures, including Tom Steyer and Al Gore. In less than two years, HEATED has become a key part of the climate conversation—in July, Atkin hosted a debate of sorts between 18-year-old activist Jamie Margolin and famously moderate Republican John Kasich. The purpose was to find common ground, but the event went off the rails, and Atkin admitted as much in a follow-up post. That sort of bracing honesty has become a trademark of the wildly successful newsletter.
David Sirota’s The Daily Poster
The veteran progressive reporter David Sirota likely had his choice of gig after his stint as a campaign speechwriter for Bernie Sanders ended in 2020. That he launched a newsletter via Substack shows how popular the company has become among journalists. The Daily Poster—originally called Too Much Information—was polished from the start, with a three-person staff (that’s large by Substack standards) and a focus on reporting.
As the Biden era dawns, Sirota is in a familiar place, attacking Republicans but also moderate Democrats when they fall short of progressive expectations. In his election wrap-up post, Sirota criticized Biden for his "retrograde record" and doing "everything he possibly could to try to lose the general election"; in another article, he both sounded the alarm about a potential Trump "coup" and castigated Democrats for failing to respond with sufficient urgency. He's going to be a thorn in the side of Democrats for the next four years, and a representative voice of what the Bernie Sanders wing of the party thinks.
Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World
As the name suggests, Welcome to Hell World is not a “normal” progressive newsletter, and it’s almost not political. It’s about all the things that are wrong with America, how horrible it is to work a service industry job, and how the country is teetering on the edge of fascism—a combo of rage and despair that’s familiar to anyone who has seen how leftists talk online. Sometimes it’s just about Luke O’Neil’s taste in music and his day-to-day life. It’s more personal—and angrier, and less concerned with decorum—than mainstream journalism.
But that’s sort of the point of Substack. It’d be difficult for a lot of what O’Neil publishes to make it past gatekeeping editors at many publications (he often rambles and jumps from topic to topic in a single post), but he’s found an audience, earning $70,000 a year minus Substack fees as of 2019. He’s also turned his newsletter into a book of the same name, and earned widespread praise. As Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie has said, “This is what it looks like when a gifted writer finds his voice.”
Matt Stoller’s BIG
Many successful newsletters have a laser-tight focus on a particular subject, making it a terrific format for Matt Stoller, a former congressional staffer who has made denouncing monopolies his personal brand. He’s built a huge Twitter following through his critiques of tech companies in particular—and also through relentless denunciations of Democrats and progressives he feels are insufficiently attuned to his concerns.
Stoller is controversial, particularly on Twitter, but BIG has unquestionably found a big (pun intended) audience—it’s among the top free newsletters on Substack, and he covers topics few journalists touch. One sample headline: “Weird Monopolies and Roll-Ups: Horse Shows, School Spirit, Settlers of Catan, and Jigsaw Puzzles.”
Yascha Mounk's Persuasion, Andrew Sullivan's Weekly Dish, Reporting by Matt Taibbi, and Glenn Greenwald
These writers come from an array of backgrounds. Taibbi and Greenwald became prominent left-wing investigative journalists during the Obama years; Sullivan is a longtime self-described conservative columnist who travels in liberal circles; Mounk is a political scientist who has turned to mainstream journalism.
Sullivan and Greenwald publicly split from the outlets they wrote for (New York and The Intercept, respectively), in Greenwald's case, after a bitter spat over his refusal of revisions to a column. Mounk, on the other hand, founded his newsletter with a group of people who write for The Atlantic and still regularly contributes there.
But their newsletters share a sensibility, if not a style. All are clearly left-of-center, but take issue with what used to be called "political correctness" and is now called "cancel culture." In practice, this means they spend a good deal of time punching left, whether that's Taibbi decrying liberal censorship or Persuasion critiquing progressive electoral performance, or Greenwald sneering at "fantasies of a Trump-led fascist coup."
These figures are divisive among progressives, and it's obvious why left-leaning publications might not publish them for fear of alienating a portion of their readers and writers. But as the Substack numbers show—all have thousands of paid subscribers—there is an audience hungry for this type of journalism. And that's what Substack is, ultimately: a home for content that has an audience but can't get published elsewhere.
