Editor’s note: This essay first appeared in the April 2024 issue of Capital Research magazine.
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The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity was launched in 2009. To date, it remains the most comprehensive effort to use the nonprofit sector to create and fund skeptical, limited government, state and local news coverage. Franklin’s initial mission statement pledged to “promote social welfare and civil betterment by undertaking programs that promote journalism and the education of the public about corruption, incompetence, fraud and taxpayer abuse by elected officials at all levels of government.”
A decade later, a 2019 Capital Research analysis of the news landscape written by Mike Watson examined the state of right-leaning and limited government journalism. He reached this dismal conclusion:
For the Right, the cause for concern is clear: A new press, more openly hostile than the “liberal media” of old and able to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars in resources annually is growing and beholden to the institutional left-wing infrastructure. There is little countering it.
The pessimism was warranted. As he wrote those words, the traditional media was still credulously regurgitating the Russiagate hoax and often behaving as thoughtless stenographers for friendly government sources.
Four years later, the resources deployed by the left-wing infrastructure are larger. And in the aftermath of COVID coverage, Twitter Files revelations, and other incidents of official misinformation, it’s clear regime media has become even less credible.
However, there is also less reason for pessimism. A stronger skeptical media landscape has emerged since 2019.
This isn’t to say that limited government or state-skeptical journalism has pulled even with government-friendly rivals, because it still isn’t a close call.
And today’s bright spots are ideologically nuanced. Some of the best work of exposing government malfeasance has come from left-leaning perspectives and even refugees from the corporate regime media. Many good journalists have shifted to new, independent platforms, where they cannot be cancelled by the powerful people and institutions they are challenging.
Rather than “limited government,” the better description of this new media movement as a whole is “power skeptical.”
The original work of the nonprofit once known as the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity ceased to exist sometime in 2017. In its tax filing for the year ending 2016, the Franklin Center reported a loss of $999,000. The next year, Franklin reported another loss of $291,061. The cumulative two-year shortfall of almost $1.3 million nearly equaled the Franklin Center’s total reported revenue for all of 2017.
Leadership affiliated with the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI), a nonprofit, limited government policy group, took control of the Franklin Center after the steep revenue declines and renamed it the Franklin News Foundation. The IPI team then launched a totally new media enterprise and funding model. The “new” Franklin has not retained any of the history, work product, leadership, staffing, or websites from the original.
In May 2019, the Franklin News Foundation launched the Center Square, a nonprofit news project that produces original content for a national news page and separate state-level pages. The staff page shows 30 employees, including 15 reporters, a dozen editors, a vice president, and a publisher, Chris Krug.
Krug explained its mission in a statement launching it. “Millions of Americans seek news from the vacated middle ground—from that center square—and simply want to understand what is happening in their state capitol, and how it affects their lives,” he wrote. “Our reporters are keenly interested in economics and finance, how tax dollars are generated and how they’re spent. We talk to our readers in terms that they understand rather than through the wonky, inside baseball that so often stands for statehouse reporting.”
Americans have generally not been willing to pay for what it costs to produce such things. For most of our history, advertising delivered with the news has subsidized print and broadcast news.
But the need to stay on the good side of the advertisers has always been a constraint on independence. Major advertisers can become a news story and not always in a good way. For printed news, it has been worse. The internet mostly displaced and destroyed print media’s classified and other advertisement-funded model.
Which leaves nonprofit journalism as a potential alternative. In practice, however, journalists want to be journalists, and that doesn’t necessarily make them good fundraisers. Good reporters are purpose-built to ask tough questions of big institutions, not ask them for money.
The Franklin News Foundation is an effort to transcend these challenges.
It is now the owner of two for-profit enterprises. The Illinois Radio Network provides sports and statehouse coverage for 84 affiliates in Illinois. The Franklin Media Group is a marketing firm that has provided services for corporate clients such as Bank of America, Ram Trucks, and the American Lung Association. According to the website, Franklin Media Group is also the “exclusive advertising agency for both Illinois Radio Network and The Center Square.”
Krug holds the senior leadership position at the Franklin News Foundation, Center Square and Franklin Media Group.
Like the Franklin Center before it and many other nonprofits, the Franklin News Foundation also solicits charitable donations from private individuals and donor foundations. Since 2018 Franklin News has received cumulative donations totaling six figures or more from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Allegheny Foundation, the Thomas W Smith Foundation, the Considine Family Foundation, and the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation. Each has historically donated to limited government causes.
But unlike the Franklin Center, the Franklin News Foundation is also funded by the for-profit businesses it controls. The theory is that this separates what people are willing to pay for the news (not enough) from the revenue the non-news subsidiary can amass from paying customers in the marketplace. The more profits produced by the Franklin Media Group, the stronger and more independent the Center Square can grow.
It is not uncommon for nonprofits to operate profit-generating enterprises to supplement charitable donations. Examples include everything from the snack shop at a small religious shrine to the spirit shop at a major state university.
In theory, the Franklin News Foundation could acquire or create other profitable enterprises to support its mission and generate even more financial and editorial independence.
This diversity and theoretical enhancement of funding is an exciting model that could put strong news content on a sound and fully independent financial footing. Those wishing to promote the work of the Center Square already have multiple options for supporting it: as donors receiving a tax deduction, or as customers of tax-paying firms.
…big money—while still important—is less useful than it used to be. During the last couple of years, skepticism, good ideas, quality content, and mere individuals are more powerful than ever before.
How is the Center Square doing?
As full disclosure, I was once an employee of a state-based think tank and in that position involved with the work of the Franklin Center in its early years (long before the Center Square). For this report, I asked for candid observations from a handful of people I know who were involved in, or otherwise familiar with, the prior history of the Franklin Center. As per my agreement with these sources, observations not strictly my own are repeated anonymously.
My sources were divided on what they think of the Center Square so far. Most were cautiously optimistic; one was vaguely critical.
The bottom line is that whatever its successes or failures to date, five years is not enough time for a single news operation to become excellent at reporting on every state government in the country. Literally no effort at that mission has ever done it well before. State-capital news coverage, to the extent ever done well, was done by newspapers based in those states, not a national effort.
The Franklin Center’s troubles demonstrated the magnitude of the Franklin News Foundation’s challenge.
Success in this mission is difficult to measure.
In his 2016 book, which was excerpted at the lefty news site Salon.com, left-wing author Jeff Nesbit included a chapter on the Franklin Center. Although hostile to its mission, Nesbit portrayed the Franklin Center as an operation that “works quickly and efficiently” and had “become the norm for the way in which news is conveyed in American democracy.”
“The Franklin Center grew from nothing in 2007–08 to the largest network of local political reporting in the country almost overnight,” wrote Nesbit. Further on in the chapter he reported that “nonprofit media organizations” were “amazed at the rapid growth of the Franklin Center because it has been extraordinarily successful at a time when local investigative journalism efforts—even those supported by philanthropy—have struggled to take hold.”
On one level, this observation demonstrates the potential for meeting the unmet appetite for news that breaks from the conventional, left-leaning regime media pack. Just this early, modest effort by the Franklin Center raised an alarm on the left.
But even so, as people were reading Nesbit’s words, the Franklin Center was financially unraveling. Lamenting then-recent cutbacks to conventional corporate media in state capitals, Nesbit wrote, “Yet, the Franklin Center flourishes. Why? Because it has deep financial pockets and no worries about its funding.”
“In many of the state capitals across the United States, especially in the less populated red states, the Franklin Center news sites are a significant source of local and statewide political news,” he claimed.
Those that I spoke with agreed the collective work of all the reporters throughout the life of the Franklin Center was uneven. All agreed some of the journalists were very good, but that not enough of them hit that standard.
Most of those I spoke with still believe in the potential for a state-level nonprofit news model and expressed hope that the Franklin Center might have worked out its growing pains with a “longer runway” of funding.
A lot more money than the Franklin Center or the Franklin News Foundation leadership could dream of having is now being spent, but on the side of decidedly left-leaning nonprofits with missions to provide state-level media content. As of 2021 there were at least 15 of them: First Look Media, Mountain State Spotlight Inc, Deep South Today, States Newsroom, Charlottesville Tomorrow, City Bureau, the GroundTruth Project, Outlier Media, Chalkbeat, Independent Media Institute, Online News Association, Scalawag, Institute for Nonprofit News, American Journalism Project, and the Center for Public Integrity.
Collectively, these 15 spent $96.6 million in 2021 alone.
For the seven years through 2016, the Franklin Center spent a cumulative total of less than $54 million—an average of $7.7 million annually. Total 2021 spending by the Franklin News Foundation was less than $3.5 million.
Contrast this with States Newsroom, which raised more than $21.6 million in revenue for 2021 alone and reported sitting on net assets of more than $13.6 million. First Look Media has spent more than $28 million all by itself in each of the three years from 2019 through 2021, for a cumulative total of more than $85.7 million.
For-profit media relies on advertisers. Nonprofit media and research think tanks require donors. Both traditional models are concentrated sources of funding that are vulnerable targets for cancel campaigns. They are like large aircraft carriers without a supporting fleet to defend them. Substack is immune to all of that.
Although a minority of the whole group, many former Franklin Center staffers and affiliated reporters have gone on to do good work at other nonprofits and in the news media. Some have even wandered into the regime media. Kathryn Watson, who currently covers the White House and the Trump presidential campaign for CBS News, worked for the Franklin Center’s Watchdog project for more than three years through June 2015.
On her LinkedIn page Watson boasts that she generated 95 percent of the story ideas that she wrote for Watchdog. (She is no relation to the Mike Watson noted earlier).
Her boast is revealing. One source I spoke with lamented that not enough of the Franklin Center reporters demonstrated that entrepreneurial spirit, even though most were pulled from a conventional local news background. Several sources said that what the Franklin Center really needed was a large stable of assignment editors to research and generate story ideas.
Even at the highest levels, the corporate regime media we see today appears to get an alarming amount of content by just repeating little more than what government sources have told them. Recent coverage of COVID origins, the Hunter Biden laptop, and Russiagate are just three of too many notorious examples.
The regime media has “assignment editors,” but they sit behind desks in places such as congressional offices and federal bureaucracies.
So, conventional media refugees might not always be the best source for talent. Nonprofits trying to build government-skeptical news divisions might be better off finding and transforming strong writers and researchers from other disciplines.
The Franklin Center spent considerable resources trying to address these issues and coach-up its journalists. Tax filings from 2011 through 2014 show a cumulative total of more $3 million spent on travel expenses. In some large measure this spending was for training conferences that were often quite good, at least for those who heeded the lessons.
One of the better trainers, fondly remembered by myself and two others I spoke with, was the late Trent Seibert. He was an old school investigator who worked for both mainstream newspapers and limited government nonprofits. One of Trent’s famous scoops showed that Al Gore was living in a home that gobbled up 10 times the electricity of the average American residence.
Consistent with that finding, Trent would say at his seminars that “most scandals don’t involve lawbreaking—but what is perfectly legal and unethical!” In lively performances, Trent explained how to generate ideas, research, and report them.
I wasn’t even aware of Kathryn Watson before researching this report. The friend who mentioned her to me did so within the context of listing several other Franklin Center alumni now making important contributions elsewhere.
This source also observed that the Franklin Center as a talent pipeline may be its real unintended yet enduring legacy. Like venture capitalists, Franklin Center donors ended up betting on a lot of prospects. And though most didn’t pan out, the ones who did have become strong and important contributors to the liberty movement because of the opportunity.
That’s not a trivial outcome. Whatever successes or failures are in store for the Center Square, it too is likely to accomplish at least that much for its donors.
There are also programs designed to create and reward journalists who report on government with a skeptic’s eye. Notable alumni of the internship program run by the Young America’s Foundation National Journalism Center include investigative reporter Peter Schweizer (author of Clinton Cash), Fox News Channel late night host and comedian Greg Gutfeld, Washington Post columnist Marc Theissen (a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush), and Capital Research Center president Scott Walter.
Recently, YAF’s National Journalism Center has teamed up with the Daofeng and Angela Foundation to create the Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. An August 2023 announcement explained the prize would be awarded for “journalism that holds power to account” and “courageous journalists” who have often “been either attacked or ignored by their peers.”
The winner of the annual Dao Prize receives $100,000, and $10,000 prizes are given to each of two honorable mention candidates.
The winners who split the $100,000 inaugural Dao Prize in November 2023 were Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, for their work on the Twitter Files. The two $10,000 prizes were awarded jointly to three investigative journalists from the Washington Free Beacon: Andrew Kerr, Joseph Simonson, and Aaron Sibarium.
All these individuals and the news outlets they work for (or have created, as is the case for the first three) are important players in the new landscape of “power skeptical” journalism.
Another superpower is the aforementioned potential for individual content creators to become profitable with only modest audiences, a power amplified by Substack’s financial incentive to help its partners. This market opportunity may pave the way for civil society donors to become highly effective venture capitalists.
Ostensibly a for-profit company, the Washington Post may now be American history’s most expensive example of another media business model: the money-losing for-profit kept afloat by one or more generous benefactors. In 2013, climate alarmist billionaire Jeff Bezos bought the newspaper for $250 million ($329.3 million in 2023 dollars), and in July 2023, the New York Times reported the WaPo was going to lose a whopping (WaPo-ing?) $100 million for that year alone.
The American auto industry and U.S. taxpayers have a similar arrangement, though the relationship has been far more expensive and less voluntary.
The “Democracy Dies in Darkness” paper cut 40 jobs in 2022 and reportedly planned to reduce by another 240 staffers during 2023. Also like the auto industry, in December 2023 the WaPo unions reacted to all this by . . . walking off the job.
Although still small in size compared to regime newspapers such as the Washington Post, there are some very good, government-skeptical, for-profit news enterprises that may or may not be literally profitable.
According to its “About Us” page, the Washington Free Beacon “is a privately owned, for-profit online newspaper.” Whether or not he is the legal owner, many accounts in other media, have reported the Free Beacon is “largely funded” by billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer.
The Free Beacon masthead reads: “Covering the enemies of freedom the way the mainstream media won’t.” The news outlet lives up to its goal, as the Dao Prizes demonstrate. The reporters won the two awards for investigative features covering gender transitioning of teenagers, school closure policies during the pandemic, and the massive Arabella Advisors left-wing donor empire.
Similarly, there is the Washington Examiner, reportedly owned by right-center billionaire Philip Anschutz. The Examiner pledges to provide “in-depth news coverage, diligent investigative reporting and thoughtful commentary” that will “make sure you’re always in the know about Washington’s latest exploits.”
Like the Free Beacon, the Examiner is home to investigative journalists who go where the regime media fears to tread. A good example is investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky, whose February 2023 multipart series on tech platform censorship revealed the U.S. State Department was funding the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). The GDI, a British group, was being used to blacklist and divert online advertising revenue away from right-of-center news and opinion websites. Top targets of the censorship assault included the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, and even the Washington Examiner.
…the New York Post’s attitude resembles a fun college dorm room [. . .] A 2021 report on the resignation of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo following sexual harassment allegations was titled “At the End of his Grope.”
The New York Post is owned by News Corp, a publicly traded firm controlled by the family of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch. News Corp also owns a huge stable of print media properties, including the Wall Street Journal, and is separate from the Murdoch-controlled Fox Corporation (which owns Fox and Fox News Channel).
Despite its legal parentage, the New York Post’s attitude resembles a fun college dorm room more than a stodgy corporate board room. The front-page headlines are reliably irreverent: A 2021 report on the resignation of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo following sexual harassment allegations was titled “At the End of his Grope.”
Snark aside, the New York Post is a right-center news property known for serious investigations. Though no fault of their own, the most notorious recent example was their October 2020 exclusive regarding the controversial contents on the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s laptop, followed by the shameful effort to suppress it by the major regime media and social media platforms right before the 2020 presidential election.
Whether or not the New York Post as a specific division of News Corp has been profitable, News Corp as a whole has been reliably profitable over its history.
One source I spoke with suggested that the New York Post model might work for wealthy individuals or groups of them with limited government sensibilities who wish to change the choice of news stories in other big and mid-sized cities.
Key to this idea is that many local newspapers could be more profitable if their standards are maintained, but the choice of stories is different. The success of the Fox News Channel demonstrates there is a big appetite for news the regime media conspicuously ignores.
One component of the New York Post’s success is a brand that has been around for two centuries. Founding father Alexander Hamilton founded the newspaper in 1801. Its success as a right-center news product today isn’t because it has altered how it has reported news stories, but rather because of the news it chooses to cover. As its regime media competitors shamefully demonstrated, their bias was to suppress the Hunter Biden story, rather than expose it, even though it was true and solid news.
Noting that the financial woes at the Washington Post are not unique, my friend suggested that lots of established newspaper brands in countless big and mid-sized cities are likely in similar shape. Those brands are also often owned by large media conglomerates that might be willing to part with them for mere tens of millions of dollars. That’s a bargain compared to the quarter-billion dollars that Bezos paid for the WaPo, and within reach of some of the largest right-leaning and libertarian foundations.
Rather than create a new brand and customer base, he argued, why not buy one that already exists? So long as the quality of the reporting remained constant, or improved, he persuasively argued, the readers wouldn’t care who owned it.
Finally, another entirely unique model is that of Real Clear Media Group, the holding company for RealClearPolitics (RCP) and its affiliated verticals such as RealClearPolicy, RealClearInvestigations, and RealClearMarkets. RCP has existed and apparently thrived online since the late 1990s. As an aggregator of political polling, the “RCP Poll Average” has arguably become the media industry standard and likely a major driver of traffic to all of RCP’s pages.
No matter where they’re from, journalists with news to break or opinion to share will get far more eyeballs on the work if it gets picked up by one of RCP’s platforms. RealClear is a scrupulously bias-free aggregator and amplifier of virtually any online source that provides interesting news, research, or analysis. It is commonplace to find, for example, a left-wing analysis of the value of the union movement stacked conspicuously next to a right-leaning argument for the virtues of right-to-work laws.
In addition to aggregating the work of others, RealClearInvestigations funds and promotes original investigative journalism, often on topics the regime media ignores. They have a RealClear Media Fund to support this work.
Revolution Rather Than Replication
When trying to fix a problem, it is human nature to try to improve upon what had worked before, rather than smash the old ways entirely and begin from scratch. That’s because the incremental approach usually succeeds. All the media ideas profiled to this point have in common a plan to use well-established models to take over the public trust that has been vacated by the regime media.
Consider instead the NBA three-point line. First approved for the 1979 season, it gave a 50 percent scoring advantage for shots from 24 feet and beyond. Despite this, it wasn’t until 2010 that the new ownership of the Golden State Warriors decided to build the first team specifically designed to exploit three pointers.
The Warriors hadn’t won an NBA championship since 1975. But beginning in 2015 the three-point bombing machine won four of the next eight titles and changed the game forever. The executives who pulled off this revolution weren’t basketball experts, but instead venture capitalists. Their day job was exploiting market inefficiencies, and they found a big one.
Real innovators don’t follow the old rules. Those hoping to recreate well-organized media enterprises with a stable of talented and trusted journalists could be falling into the trap of being replicators when the situation requires revolutionaries.
In addition to winning the aforementioned Dao Prize for their joint investigation into federal government suppression of online speech, journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger share two other important similarities. First, all are refugees from either left-leaning big regime media enterprises or (in the case of Shellenberger) the left-wing climate alarmism movement. Second, all of them have successfully moved their individual journalism to the Substack media platform.
Created in 2017, Substack is a combination of social media, multi-media, podcasting and blogging for content creators. (Although not addressed in this analysis of print media, podcasters—most prominently Joe Rogan—have launched their own independent media revolution that is crowding out the space of regime media broadcasters such as CNN, MSNBC and even mighty Fox News.)
Substack contributors keep roughly 80 percent of subscription fees collected and they can produce content on any subject they wish. It takes just a tiny paying audience to become a professional writer, novelist, journalist, or podcaster. A mere 2,000 subscribers paying just $50 per year means Substack sends $80,000 to the content creator.
A former political and economic reporter at Rolling Stone, Taibbi ran afoul of the left-wing world because he began writing some of the earliest and best debunking of the Russiagate hoax. This occurred despite Taibbi’s being a man of the left. A lot of his good work from this era was used in Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch profile of the hoax.
Resigning from Rolling Stone, Taibbi moved to Substack, where—according to Substack figures—his Racket News now has more than 398,000 subscribers and “tens of thousands” paying his $50 annual subscription.
If all are paying the full price—Substack does sometimes offer discounts—then a mere 10,000 paying customers would equal $400,000 annually back to Taibbi. Whatever the amount, he hasn’t been pocketing all the money. Instead, as he grew the Racket News audience, he reinvested the money into hiring additional journalists of lesser reputation to help him.
Michael Shellenberger’s Public also features additional journalists covering government censorship, climate alarmism, energy policy, the decline of urban areas due to bad policies, UFOs, and more.
Bari Weiss, a refugee from the woke wars at the New York Times editorial page, started the Free Press, another multi-contributor Substack that seems to have no limit to the range of topics it covers.
In just a few short years these three have leveraged their personal reputations into individual media empires. And they sometimes pool their resources and collaborate, as they did on the Twitter Files reporting that won them the Dao Prize.
Their financial success might also pave new paths for aspiring young journalists to incubate reputations and then build their own independent corners of the media.
Right-leaning examples of writers with reputations making bank on Substack include former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (tens of thousands of paid subscribers), Christopher Rufo (thousands of subscribers), and Libs of TikTok (a conservative account, despite the name, that has thousands of paid subscribers). For donors and investors hoping to incubate government-skeptical alternatives to regime media, Substack may offer more “bang for the buck” than all other rivals.
In November 2023, The Atlantic ran an opinion feature titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem: The newsletter platform’s lax content moderation creates an opening for white nationalists eager to get their message out.”
The allegation was a total lie, but the predictable regime media campaign demanding speech suppression ensued. Substack reviewed the alleged “opening for white nationalists” and reported that the would-be censors had identified just 29 total paid subscribers scattered across only six of the platform’s content creating accounts. That’s not enough Nazis to fill out a high school football roster.
Answering these dishonest critics, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote that “we don’t like Nazis either” and then eloquently made clear that better ideas are the solution to bad ideas, and that Substack wouldn’t be demonetizing or censoring anyone practicing legally protected speech.
For-profit media relies on advertisers. Nonprofit media and research think tanks require donors. Both traditional models are concentrated sources of funding that are vulnerable targets for cancel campaigns. They are like large aircraft carriers without a supporting fleet to defend them.
Substack is immune to all of that. Its financial support comes from content creators and their subscribers. This makes the content providers both customers and business partners. Substack cannot succeed unless it guarantees that it will protect them and help them prosper. In today’s hostile woke environment, this unique relationship—unprecedented in the history of major media, think tanks, and research nonprofits—is akin to having a superpower.
Another superpower is the aforementioned potential for individual content creators to become profitable with only modest audiences, a power amplified by Substack’s financial incentive to help its partners. This market opportunity may pave the way for civil society donors to become highly effective venture capitalists. Large donors could fund multiple Substack start-ups at a time, with no commitments beyond a few years, and with tiny sums of money compared to conventional nonprofit funding. Smaller donors could adopt just one Substack prospect, or pool resources on one project.
The trivial entry barrier in each example means a far smaller price is paid for failure compared to conventional funding models. Journalists that become self-sustaining, single proprietor enterprises from this assistance would each have the theoretical potential to follow the Matt Taibbi model and become their own small media empires.
The donors who launched them could continue to help them grow or move on to other start-ups. The forms this support might take are as limitless as the law and imagination allow. The simplest way to implement such ideas may be to copy the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship program, colloquially known as the MacArthur Genius Awards. Every year this scion of Big Left philanthropy awards a couple of dozen $800,000 grants to individuals with no strings attached save for payment in equal quarterly installments over five years. Recipients are people who have supposedly demonstrated “exceptional creativity.” New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones won a MacArthur grant in 2017 and by 2020 she was the creative force behind her newspaper’s historically inept but socially prominent 1619 Project, smearing America’s founding.
An $800,000 grant across five years would create a very generous runway of time and money for a free society “genius” to build a self-sustaining media and research platform on Substack.
Other options for donors to feed the Substack potential are as numerous as imagination and the law allows. Substack readers subscribe using email accounts. The content creators own the lists. Most everyone with a reasonable professional background has a large email contact list, if not also a decent social media presence. All these are excellent starting places to begin promoting the brand and adding paying subscribers, beginning with the use of traditional advertising on those platforms (e.g., Twitter/X and Facebook ads).
Other lists of likely subscribers can be purchased from right-leaning magazines, think tanks, political candidates, and so forth. Donors hoping to fuel a Substack startup could purchase both lists and annual gift subscriptions for prospects on the lists. The trial subscriptions could both fund the content creator and give the trial subscribers an opportunity to renew when the gift period ended.
A new list of prospects could be obtained and used the following year. This could be continued until the subscriber base is big enough for the content creator to thrive on his or her own, or the enterprise could be shut down if deemed unsuccessful. Because Substack profits from this arrangement, its incentive is also to help the individual audiences grow.
Direct snail-mail lists could also be used. Donors could send hard copies of sample content to physical addresses, and then offer a prepaid trial subscription for those who return a valid email address. Because this option requires an affirmative effort to buy into the content, those doing so would be even more likely to renew.
A generous donor to a free-market nonprofit think tank could buy trial subscriptions for the other donors to the think tank. Much like hosting a special event, the advantage for the think tank would be the brownie points of providing something interesting to their donors.
Nonprofit research think tanks would be one of the likeliest sources for journalists and content creators who could be launched into these independent, profitable Substack careers. Many free society nonprofits have talented researchers and strong writers whose policy and reporting interests veer outside of the remit of their employer. Liberated from the narrow focus of their employer think tank or nonprofit’s mission, and its ancillary needs (meetings, management, etc.), some current employees could become far more effective and prolific as more nimble, single-person research think tanks.
Arrangements could even be made with current employers to ease such people from their think tank roles into the Substack entrepreneurial space. Donors hoping to launch careers of younger journalists could bias funding toward those who fit that description. Right-center journalism training nonprofits could be enlisted to find and train talent.
A donor who funded 10 such projects that became successful would be creating 10 self-funding research and news media Substacks. And then the donor could go looking to build 10 more.
Is this preferable to creating and funding just one, successful 10-person nonprofit think tank, that is still reliant on annual donations forever into the future?
An important criticism of this model is that not every strong writer, researcher, videographer, or podcaster in the free-market think tank and media space would thrive on their own. This is true. For many, the security and structure of a large, well-capitalized institution will trump the inherent risk of entrepreneurial adventure. That’s not a judge of anyone’s talent, just a fact regarding the diversity of temperament and risk tolerance in all of us.
The big think tanks on the center-right will have an important place for a long time to come and will need the support of their donors to fill it. But ours is inherently a free enterprise movement. That is our superpower. We have it in abundance compared to the collectivist Left and the regime media. Many in our world could change the world if charged up with such an opportunity.
The history of the mainstream media has suggested that big institutions with big budgets are the only way to fight. This has put skeptics of government power, in particular those with a right-leaning or libertarian perspective, at a disadvantage. Even the nonprofit institutional media landscape has been and is easily dominated by massive and explicitly left-wing foundations with “buying power” that is three times or more that of their ideological rivals. They have natural and huge financial and philosophical advantages.
Like the Soviet Red Army, they cannot help but think bigly, bureaucratically, and collectively. But while quantity has a quality of its own, it also has a vulnerability. The Substack option may provide a natural advantage to free society donors who are philosophically inclined to think individually and entrepreneurially at the most basic, smallest level.
It could be the force multiplier that builds winning ideas before it needs to fund the managers and bureaucrats required by bigger institutions. Better yet: When a small Substack bet pays off big, that probably means it is profitable on its own and may never again need to submit grant requests to make payroll, let alone hire another vice president.
This doesn’t mean foundations and other donors should abandon large right-leaning and government-skeptical journalism ventures or research think tanks. Some of those traditional enterprises work quite well. We would (and will) argue that the Capital Research Center, its magazine, and our InfluenceWatch website are strong examples. (Additionally, our mission, different from yet complimentary with all of those discussed, is to provide research content to be used by news outlets, not to rival those outlets and the audiences they must collect to survive).
The conventional regime media and their allies on the left may still dominate the creation of news content and the dollars available for same. However, in sharp contrast to our earlier, pessimistic looks into the news media landscape, big money—while still important—is less useful than it used to be. During the last couple of years, skepticism, good ideas, quality content, and mere individuals are more powerful than ever before.
Clear and growing opportunities now exist for almost anyone who wants to meaningfully fund or create media projects that cast a wary eye on government power and influence.
