Is the Contrarian the future of online opinion writing?

Popular Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin announced that she’s leaving the Post and joining a number of other writers to start a subscription-based Substack channel called The Contrarian: Not Owned By Anybody. To me, this looks like the start of a rush towards the exits for popular newspaper writers and what will be an increasingly popular monetization model.

Why Rubin said she left — and who’s joining her

Rubin is a witty and incisive writer. At one time her column in the Post was called the “Right Turn,” but she had no interest in following the Republican Party in the direction of Trumpism and is probably now more accurately characterized as an independent. In any case, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post is no longer a comfortable fit for her. Here’s some of what she wrote in her first post on The Contrarian:

Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy—Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.

I therefore have resigned from The Post, effective today. In doing so, I join a throng of veteran journalists so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign.

The decay and compromised principles of corporate and billionaire-owned media underscore the urgent need for alternatives. Americans are eager for innovative and independent journalism that offers lively, unflinching coverage free from cant, conflicts of interest and moral equivocation.

Former ambassador and Brookings Fellow Norm Eisen is her cofounder. Writers at the Contrarian will include Joyce Vance, Andy Borowitz, Laurence Tribe, Katie Phang, George Conway, Olivia Julianna, Harry Litman, and Asha Rangappa. You may not know all of those names, but you’ve probably encountered some of them. They share expertise, wit, and an independent and rebellious outlook.

The founding post for the Contrarian is worth a look: while its contributors are diverse, all of them are unwilling to just hand over the keys of the Republic to the incoming president.

Democracy faces an unprecedented threat from an authoritarian movement built on lies and contempt for the rule of law. The first and most critical defense of democracy—a robust, independent free press—has been missing in action. Corporate and billionaire media owners have shied away from confrontation, engaged in false equivalence, and sought to curry favor with Donald Trump. It is hardly surprising that readers and viewers are fleeing from these outlets. Americans need an alternative.

The Contrarian is that alternative: unflinching, unapologetic, and unwavering in its commitment to truth-telling. The Contrarian contributors may not agree on all issues (and, in fact, enjoy lively debate), but we share an unequivocal determination to defend our fundamental freedoms and the values essential to a pluralistic democracy.

Expect more journalists and columnists to leave their outlets

This looks like the start of a trend to me. Newspapers including the Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe are now in the hands of billionaire owners. The New York Times has taken a distinctive turn towards normalizing presidential behavior that in the past would have been considered bizarre, as is continually documented by media gadfly Jeff Jarvis. As they always have, writers who stay at such outlets have limits on what they can write, but the positions of the guardrails have shifted. Now that it’s possible to monetize one’s audience in various ways, it’s no surprise that popular columnists are exiting and taking their audiences with them.

Substack makes it particularly easy to monetize one’s audience, assuming you can build one. The Contrarian’s model is a fascinating example. You can get access to everything for $7 per month or $70 per year. There’s also a free option featuring a daily morning and evening newsletter and access to some exclusives, but I’m sure that’s designed to wear you down and lure you into the subscription option.

I signed up immediately, because it’s a lot cheaper than a newspaper subscription and I enjoy writers like Rubin, Andy Borowitz, George Conway, and Laurence Tribe. Plus, hey, I’m sort of a fan of democracy.

(If you’re interested in a free month’s trial subscription, email me at josh at bernoff dot com. I got five free invites along with my initial subscription.)

The model in which individual influencers monetize through Substack is commonplace by now, with examples like statistical pundit Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin and liberal commentator Robert Reich. Others like historian Heather Cox Richardson have expanded their audiences with free Substacks. But the Contrarian fascinates me because it’s not just built on one person’s ambition. It’s an alternate form of opinion journalism, monetized instantly from day one without advertising. I’m intrigued to see if other writers band together to create similar outlets.

In today’s argument-saturated social-media-driven online news culture, opinion pieces drive much of the traffic, helping support the news at newspapers and other journalistic sites. If more opinion writers start deserting sites to start their own collectives, it will further hollow out the news business, which is already on financially shaky ground. It’s ironic that these trends of writers moving to where they can write without restrictions about democracy may dent the business of the news organizations whose functioning is essential to democracy.

People create content. And they have needs. So this is inevitable.

The path by which writers join news organizations as journalists, develop skills, become sophisticated, jump to bigger outlets, and become columnists is well trodden. In the past, such writers achieved personal success by holding up their organizations for more money (as tech columnist Walt Mossberg did at the Wall Street Journal), by developing careers as authors and speakers (as New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson did), and by starting their own ventures (as Gladwell did for audibooks, Mossberg did for tech coverage and events, and Silver did for data journalism).

The difference is that now Substack makes it far easier for writers to team up and launch, basically, their own journalistic site.

The Contrarian is never going to be as big as the Washington Post. But it’s instantly a player, and it’s going to make a lot of money for its writers without many content restrictions. That’s an attractive model that will attract a lot more writers in the near future.