How Tim Miller and The Bulwark became 2024's unlikely YouTube stars | Semafor - 0 views
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The publication launched in 2018 out of the ashes of the Weekly Standard, founding editor Bill Kristol’s conservative magazine, which found itself in an ideological no man’s land as one of the few right-leaning publications that failed to bow to Donald Trump. Originally, founders Kristol, Longwell, and Charlie Sykes conceived it as a conservative news aggregator, a place to share the views of Republicans in media and politics who had been alienated by Trump’s rise.
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The outlet’s subsequent growth happened almost by accident. After two years of running a WordPress news and opinion blog, the founders stumbled onto the business of selling newsletter subscriptions on Substack. Fans of the site had been trying to send The Bulwark money, and Longwell wanted to streamline the process and provide those fans with some extra content as a thank-you.
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Four years on, The Bulwark is currently the fourth most popular news publication on Substack, behind Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, Heather Cox Richardson’s long running left-leaning history newsletter, and Nate Silver’s polling and media analysis project, the Silver Bulletin.
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