Bari Weiss

when I left the New York Times, the free press was barryweiss.substack.com, and it began as a reactionary product, honestly. Like, now it's transformed itself. But it began as me being so pissed that they were ignoring and lying about so much.

And what we're desperately trying to do at the free press is to be the bridge. And what I mean by that is to marry the standards that you would once expect from a place like the Washington Post or the New York Times. In other words, everything is rigorously fact checked. When we get something wrong, we publicly correct it. Like all of those old rules, but marrying them to the sort of political freedom of the new world.

I think I began at The New York Times as a reformer, believing that I could make a difference. And God bless the people who are still trying to do that. I think there's a role for both. I think what has made me more of a radical, not politically, but just in terms of my posture, has been that I've become someone who believes that the way to change those institutions is not to give money to those places or join the board of them or delude yourself with the idea that you can transform them from wi

The thing that began at the margins and at the fringe has moved into the center of American institutional life. And that is the story of the transformation of The New York Times.

the very places that used to be feeders to the New York Times were no longer feeding in your sort of standard center left liberal Democrat. They were feeding in a kind of person who believed in something like revolution and believed that their job was to foment that inside the New York Times.

if you look at the kinds of people that work at the New York Times, they went to the same 10 boarding schools or fancy schools and the same 10 colleges, and they marinated in the same set of ideas, and they want their kids to go to the same schools in Brooklyn Heights or the Upper West Side. And that creates this very particular group thinking phenomenon.

something like 95 to 98 percent of readers at the New York Times, and I'm choosing that only because it's the experience I know most intimately, regard themselves as liberals or progressives.

Once the business model shifted, you no longer were as concerned about, although you still are to some extent, about enraging, you know, Procter & Gamble. You're worried about enraging the reader, right? This is the phenomenon that so many people have talked about, which is audience capture