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Media|A Political Reporter Takes Her Scoops to YouTube
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/business/media/tara-palmeri-youtube-substack-puck.html
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After a few years of writing what she called a “niche newsletter for Washington insiders,” the political journalist Tara Palmeri decided she wanted to reach a wider audience. A much wider audience.
She’s taking her reporting to YouTube.
Ms. Palmeri said she is leaving the start-up Puck to strike out on her own, focusing much of her effort on the streaming giant. She joins a slew of other journalists who have left news organizations to build their own businesses around podcasts and newsletters.
But in politics, the most successful of these independent media stars have strong views and clear allegiances. Conservative hosts like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly remain atop the podcasting charts, and anti-Trump media collectives are rapidly growing; two of them, The Contrarian and MeidasTouch, each have more than half a million newsletter subscribers, many of them paid.
That is not Ms. Palmeri.
“I’m not on a crusade,” said Ms. Palmeri, 37, the type of political journalist who proudly abstains from voting in elections while she’s covering them in order to maintain objectivity with her audience. “I’m not sold on either party, and that’s why I don’t really have a lot of friends.”
In her new venture, Ms. Palmeri wants to speak to audiences from the underdeveloped territory of “the middle,” she said, without a political agenda. “There isn’t really anyone there yet, and I want to try.”
In focusing on YouTube, Ms. Palmeri is also taking a slightly a different tack from many of the journalists who have recently left media companies — whether voluntarily or through layoffs or firings — to release their own content, typically on Substack. (Though she will have a Substack newsletter, too.)
