It seems like every week — sometimes multiple times a week — a journalist leaves their media outlet to start their own publication, usually on Substack. Terry Moran, Karen Attiah, Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen. The list goes on. Some, like Attiah, joined Substack after being fired from their outlets. Others, like Rubin, left legacy media, citing concerns about the priorities of corporate and billionaire-owned publications.
But a bigger question lingers beneath the headlines and high-profile exits: Is independent journalism on Substack actually a viable career for someone without a large following?
Can the early or mid-career reporter build a newsletter that attracts an audience and generates enough income to replace a newsroom salary?
The movement from newsroom to independent platforms isn’t new. There were the blogging days of the early aughts, followed by the launch of Medium in 2012, which felt like a promising outlet for creative writers and journalists alike. It’s an industry phenomenon that’s ebbed and flowed over the last decade.
What’s changed is how easy it is to do, the fact that journalists are looking at it as an alternative to working for a media company — and how many journalists are doing it at once. At a moment when attacks on the media are numerous and well-documented, and the ways to make a living outside a newsroom have expanded, the shift toward independent platforms appears to be accelerating.
“Twenty years ago, when I was a blogger for The Washington Post, if I wanted to leave, I didn’t really have that option,” said Liz Kelly Nelson, founder of Project C, an organization that provides training and resources to journalists who want to go independent. “I could have gotten an investor so that I could launch another media company or I could have launched a nonprofit, but I would not have been able to launch a Substack, right? Or a TikTok channel or a YouTube channel.”
The allure of going independent is growing. And it’s no wonder. For years, journalists have entered an industry where turbulence is the norm. The Washington Post laid off more than 300 of its staff this past February. In November, McClatchy cut its entire breaking news desk. Consolidations across broadcast news typically mean layoffs and fewer jobs for reporters. And then there are the persistent attacks on the press from the current administration.
For many journalists, the appeal is obvious. The path is less so.
What viability actually looks like
The latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the average journalist’s salary at a little over $60,000.
But replicating a salary isn’t enough when going independent.
“I think it’s worth underlining that it is very much a business,” said Marisa Kabas, founder of The Handbasket. She started the publication in 2023 while freelancing, using it to aggressively report on George Santos, often going deeper than local and national media.
“You have to learn a lot of things about running a business, which is not something I ever anticipated and not something I set out to do when I launched my Substack.”
Kabas now operates the publication as an S-corp, works with an accountant and manages quarterly taxes. Independent journalists must also account for costs once covered by employers — software and hardware, supplies, health and dental insurance, vacation time and retirement savings, subscriptions.
This is the mindset shift behind Project C’s eight-week “Going Solo” program. It’s about building business literacy: budgeting, setting revenue targets, building media kits, understanding taxes, structuring an LLC and developing sponsorship strategies.
Nelson tells participants that independent journalism is not a path to sudden wealth. It may be vocation-driven, but it is also operationally demanding. In other words, for independent journalism to be a viable replacement for a newsroom job, journalists have to think beyond salary and account for the full cost of running a business.
A look at the math
For many independent journalists, the first instinct is to focus on consumer revenue through subscriptions. But those fees come with tradeoffs.
Kabas began on Substack before moving to Beehiiv, another newsletter platform. She made the move for ethical reasons, but found a financial upside as well.
“Substack takes 10% of every paid subscription,” Kabas said. “Whereas on Beehiiv, you pay a monthly fee, like a hosting fee, and you get 100% of all of your subscriptions.”
She now pays about $275 per month for hosting — a tiered fee that increases as her following grows.
The Handbasket has roughly 31,000 total subscribers, including around 4,100 paid. Kabas recently gained 500 short-term subscribers through a bundle with two other journalists, which she’s hoping to convert to annual subscriptions.
The newsletter costs $8 per month or $80 annually, putting her gross income squarely in the low-to-mid $300,000s.
While Kabas’ newsletter is successful, many independent journalists struggle to make a living. A recent study of 43 creator journalists, conducted by Project C in collaboration with Video Consortium and Fordham University, found that most are not financially self-sustaining.
“Fifty-six percent of the creators we surveyed said they aren’t earning enough to support themselves,” Nelson wrote in an April newsletter for Project C. “Only 28% fully fund their livelihoods through their independent work.”
Forty percent said a job outside their independent work remains their most consistent source of income, and 52% are using personal savings as ongoing support — not as a bridge, but as a subsidy.
It’s worth noting that the study focused on creator journalists who primarily produce video. But a new study, published April 13 by the Center for News, Technology & Innovation in partnership with Project C, found similar results among a broader group of “independent information providers.”
More than half of the respondents identified as journalists and many said they turned to independent work after layoffs or broader industry instability.
That instability often followed them into the indie space. Only three respondents said they could fully fund their lifestyle, while “23 out of 43 said they canʼt fund their lifestyle at all.”
When asked about newsletters, Substack was one of the most commonly used platforms among respondents, second only to Beehiiv. Many cited Substack’s brand recognition and familiarity with the platform, but “several interviewees had moved away from it because they saw Substackʼs branding competing with their own or because Substack had begun reducing access to subscribers and control over user data.”
So is it possible to make a sustainable living on Substack? Kabas’ experience suggests it is, and Nelson points to other successes.
In an email, she cited creators like former CNN host Chris Cillizza, who has said he makes about $225,000 a year in reader revenue from his Substack.
She did note, however, that six-figure salaries are not the norm.
“For most journalists, they’re going to be looking at a more modest return, which is why at Project C we encourage every single journalist who moves into the creator ecosystem to have multiple sources of revenue, at least three.”
Still, newsletters can serve as a reliable foundation. Nelson described them as an “anchor of revenue and audience retention” for independent journalists and “especially for writers.”
“They are the source of direct reader revenue and that direct connection to their audience. They don’t have this connection on platforms like TikTok or YouTube, where the platform owns the first-party audience data, not the creator.”
The grind to success in the indie space
For journalists who aren’t famous or capitalizing on a viral moment, like Kabas did with George Santos coverage, the road to profitability is slower and less certain.
Isaac Saul’s foray into newsletter-driven, independent journalism was less ideological than existential. The founder of the politics newsletter Tangle decided to build something of his own after a series of final-round job rejections and the decline of the media company where he worked.
“I basically said, ‘I’m going to start my own thing.’”
In July 2019, he launched Tangle on Substack as a side project, hoping it might eventually replace his salary. He got up at 4:30 or 5 each morning to work on the newsletter, putting in hours before and after his full-time job.
“My writing was unedited, the reader question was from my mom, and about 13 people received it,” he wrote in a post. “The second newsletter went out to 16 people, and the third newsletter went out to 140.”
He sent the newsletter Monday through Thursday for free for the first eight months. When he launched a paid Friday newsletter, 15% of his subscribers converted.
Saul didn’t quit his full-time job until April 2021, when his newsletter reached about 22,000 subscribers and the bulk of his paid subscribers renewed annually.
But the newsletter isn’t his only product. “The Tangle Podcast” launched in 2020 and began releasing regular episodes in January 2021. A YouTube channel followed it in the spring of 2023.
Today, Tangle employs 12 full-time staffers and brings in roughly $4 million a year in subscription revenue, along with about a half million dollars in additional annual advertising revenue, Saul said. It is one of the clearer success stories in the independent space.
Saul credits the success of Tangle to its unique product. The newsletter presents left, right and center perspectives on issues, along with an editorialized summary — “our take” — designed to help readers make sense of competing arguments. The idea came out of his own frustrating experience trying to gather the political reporting and commentary he needed to form his own stance.
“I spent so much time — I wasted so much time — listening to The New York Times ‘(The) Daily,’ then reading their opinion page, then reading The Washington Post editorial board, then listening to a Ben Shapiro podcast, then going on YouTube, then listening to the ‘Pod (Save) America’ guys.”
He estimated it took about 10 hours per issue to compile all of the information to form a clear understanding.
“I really wanted to find a place where I could just get that all in one place and it didn’t exist.”
Still, Saul acknowledges that there are limitations to the independent model. It is not, he said, a replacement for traditional media. Tangle relies heavily on reporting produced by legacy outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The team synthesizes and analyzes coverage from these outlets.
“We couldn’t exist without those more traditional publications existing and most independent creators — I think they’re kidding themselves if they think they could.”
Kabas made a similar point. Independent journalism, she said, won’t replace institutional reporting. Much of her reporting today happens within the broader system, where institutional outlets often uncover initial developments and then independent journalists like her follow threads, contextualize and develop new angles.
She envisions a future where independent journalists, nonprofit outlets and worker-owned collectives “all work in concert in order to replace the old model of corporate-owned journalism.”
Skepticism persists
Not everyone believes patron-supported journalism can scale, or that it’s sustainable over the long-term. In a column for Talking Points Memo, publisher Josh Marshall noted the model hasn’t worked for him.
He argued that subscription-supported journalism cannot replace large, well-resourced newsrooms. It can’t fund foreign bureaus or investigative teams. It’s not the cure to journalism’s wide-ranging problems.
Independent journalism can’t solve the industry’s problems or fund the big-ticket desks and investigations, but as Saul and Kabas noted, it’s probably not supposed to, either. It is, rather, a piece of the ecosystem — one that might have seemed fringe, but is increasingly hard to ignore.
Beyond the subscription model
The subscription model itself isn’t new. Legacy media relied on it for decades. The internet killed it. And while many outlets are trying to bring it back, most consumers still don’t pay for news — and don’t think they should have to.
That’s why, Nelson said, financially viable independent journalism needs more than one revenue stream beyond subscriptions.
“The other one is advertising in the form of both programmatic and sponsorships,” Nelson said. “And then the third is philanthropic funding.”
Advertising is becoming more feasible as platforms integrate built-in sponsorship tools. Some independent journalists, including Saul, have secured deals aligned with their niches.
Philanthropy is also beginning to come into the picture, particularly for topic-focused reporting such as climate coverage. But early-stage funding remains limited, and more startup-style runway funding could significantly change the landscape for journalists attempting to go independent, she said.
So who is this for?
Independent journalism can be financially viable — for some. It tends to work when the product is distinct and the journalist is willing to think like a business owner.
But expectations matter. Replicating a newsroom salary isn’t enough, since going independent comes with added costs. And without an existing audience, success is rarely quick. Journalists who pursue this path need to plan for a longer runway.
In short, it’s not for everyone. Not for those simply looking to replicate their newsroom paycheck. Not for those unwilling to take on the demands of running a business.
It’s also not the solution to journalism’s ongoing crisis. But it is increasingly part of the ecosystem — alongside legacy institutions, nonprofits, collectives and solo operators working at different scales.
As Kabas put it, “If I’ve learned anything during my career in journalism is that you just have to be ready for change and embrace it instead of fighting it.”
Independent journalism will not fix the industry or replace institutional reporting. But it is here — and reshaping how some journalists define career viability in a profession that has rarely offered stability for long.
