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David & Goliath: New Independent Media V. Old Corporate Mainstream
Substack upstarts are fighting the corporate media machine — and winning.
It’s been a banner week for Substack and it’s only Monday.
Substack’s Matt Taibbi — nee, Rolling Stone; nee, Wall Street Journal — scored the Twitter Files; Bari Weiss — nee, New York Times — interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and, we later learned, was also sent the Twitter Files by Elon Musk).
While some mainstream media outlets are just getting around to reporting on stories that happened two years ago, a new generation of punk-rock reporters on Substack is breaking major stories, landing plum interviews, and generally outshining their major media network counterparts.
The success of Weiss and Taibbi over the past week — and indeed their growing success writing independently on the self-publishing site, Substack — is yet another clear sign of the public’s ever-waning trust in corporate media outlets.
But it isn’t entirely true that people no longer trust anyone in the media.
Increasingly, news consumers are turning to new and independent sources of news and information they can trust. They don’t even mind plenty of opinion — as long as it’s not so unbalanced as to be uncritically serving of any particular…