Bari Weiss | All-In Summit 2024

Weiss argued that subscription journalism replaced advertiser pressure with audience pressure, creating “audience capture” that can shape coverage without any conspiracy. She cited her wife’s reporting on uninsured minority businesses devastated in the Kenosha riots, which editors allegedly chose to hold until after the election.

Her strategy for changing legacy institutions has shifted from reforming them internally to building competitors that force them to respond. Weiss said her New York Times experience convinced her that donations, board seats and internal advocacy matter less than creating credible alternatives outside the institution.

Weiss sees independent media’s greatest danger as replacing establishment conformity with indiscriminate distrust. She described people who correctly challenged one institutional failure and then concluded that nearly everything mainstream institutions say must be false, producing a media environment where rigorous journalism and conspiracy claims sit side by side.

The Free Press is explicitly trying to combine old-media verification with the editorial freedom of independent media. Weiss said its work is rigorously fact-checked and publicly corrected when wrong, positioning the publication between legacy gatekeeping and what she called the independent-media “Wild West.”

The Free Press now rejects most submissions and commissions reporting around stories Weiss believes established outlets overlook. She cited sending reporter Leighton Woodhouse to interview roughly two dozen Minneapolis police officers and small-business owners about Tim Walz and the Third Precinct after his vice-presidential selection.

Weiss went from having never managed anyone or raised money to running a company with 50 full-time employees. She credited technology with making that path possible, saying that a journalist leaving a major newspaper 20 or 30 years earlier would have had far fewer realistic ways to build a competing institution.

She says the Free Press is deliberately sacrificing some short-term revenue to build an institution whose core asset is audience trust. The test, in her description, is whether it can publish work that angers or challenges subscribers rather than allowing subscriber preferences to dictate what gets published.