After a few years of writing what she called a “niche newsletter for Washington insiders,” political journalist Tara Palmeri decided she wanted to reach a wider audience. A much wider audience.
She’s taking her reporting to YouTube.
Palmeri said she is leaving the startup 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 such as 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 500,000 newsletter subscribers, many of them paid.
That is not Palmeri.
“I’m not on a crusade,” said 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, 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, 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. (Although she will have a Substack newsletter, too.)
YouTube says its viewers want more long-form news analysis, especially via podcasts. It recently announced having more than 1 billion monthly podcast listeners, outpacing any other media platform. (Watching and listening to podcasts is an increasingly fuzzy distinction.) Palmeri is part of a program meant to support “next generation” independent journalists on the platform with training and funding.
But whether “news influencers” like Palmeri can succeed at the same scale of popular partisan commentators is still untested. Many people say they want more unbiased news. Do they really?
Adam Faze, an emerging-media guru known for producing TikTok shows who is informally advising Palmeri, said he wasn’t aware of other political journalists approaching YouTube quite like her.
“Not with her access,” he said. Piers Morgan has been successful, Faze pointed out, but his YouTube channel is largely reminiscent of his cable news days, with cacophonous cross-talking panels and a green-screen cityscape backdrop.
“I don’t want you to go to this YouTube page and think, ‘I could have watched that on a cable channel,’” Palmeri said. She aspires to “speak like a normal person,” rather than a news anchor, and also “be more gritty.”
Palmeri takes pride in her grit. She often describes herself as “feared and fearless” — a daughter of New Jersey whose parents did not go to universities. Her zeal for scoops has made her variously unpopular among both Democrats and Republicans and occasionally other journalists.
Before Puck, while working for Politico, Palmeri reported on an investigation into a gun owned by Hunter Biden, a story that she said had “ostracized” her from her newsroom. In 2021, a deputy White House press secretary resigned after telling Palmeri that he would “destroy” her for reporting on his relationship with an Axios journalist who had covered the president.
An old-school tabloid sensibility drives Palmeri, who in her 20s door-knocked a couple of White House gate-crashers for The Washington Examiner and chased a “cop-killer” in Cuba for The New York Post. On her new Substack, The Red Letter, she plans to include blind gossip items, Palmeri said.
“She has a cadence that makes you feel like you’re just talking to a girlfriend” rather than a journalist, said Holly Harris, a veteran Republican strategist who encouraged Palmeri to go independent. This disposition can prove “a little dangerous,” Harris added: “All of a sudden you realize you’ve given up the state secrets.” In November, at a cocktail party in Washington, a former congressional staff member approached this reporter with the warning not to trust Palmeri, who was also at the party. (“I love that,” Palmeri later said.)
Palmeri has at times struggled to fit in while working at more traditional newsrooms, such as ABC News, where she spent about two years as a White House correspondent — the first of which she appeared infrequently on the air.
“I’ve always felt like there’s never really been a place that I’ve been at home,” she said.
After ABC, she hosted investigative podcasts for Sony about disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and the wealthy family of his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. She intends to continue making podcasts; her current show, “Somebody’s Gotta Win,” an election collaboration between Puck and Spotify’s The Ringer, is set to end in April, she said.
Puck, which she joined in 2022, was more suited to her self-driven (and self-promotional) streak than any other employer. “We’re kind of renegades,” Palmeri said, crediting Puck with helping find her voice.
“It was the closest place I had gotten to me writing directly to an audience, but it was still edited in a style that was not me,” she said. The tone was more “elite and impressive” than her natural voice; one example she offered was the frequent use of the word “indeed.”
To go independent, she is giving up her $260,000 base salary at Puck and funding her new venture with her savings. The dining table of her one-bedroom New York City apartment in brownstone Brooklyn has become her recording studio.
With an initial grant from YouTube, Palmeri bought about $10,000 worth of equipment, and tested and hired editors. (She and YouTube both declined to disclose the size of the grant.) In return, she has committed to publishing about four videos per week.
Investors are also interested in Palmeri, she said, though she has not decided whether or when to take their money. She would prefer to accept “squeaky clean” funding from both ends of the political spectrum, she said: “This is a trust business.” She has also considered a new line of credit or a small-business loan.
“I’m willing to bet on myself,” Palmeri said. “There’s no one over me telling me, ‘This is the headline, this is the angle.’ You don’t like it? It’s me. There’s no one else to blame.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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