“I’m a newspaper woman without a newspaper,” Bari Weiss said four years ago on the first episode of her podcast, “Honestly.”
Today Ms. Weiss still does not have a newspaper. But she was just handed the sterling silver keys to the Tiffany network.
On Monday, Ms. Weiss was named the new editor in chief of CBS News. The network’s owner, Paramount, also announced the acquisition of her start-up, The Free Press, for a price said to be about $150 million in cash and stock.
In its nearly 100 years, CBS has not seen a leader quite like Ms. Weiss. Neither has the media industry. Ms. Weiss, 41, has ascended the mountain of journalism on a slingshot. In 2020, she publicly resigned as an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times to start a newsletter on Substack. Today, she has one of the most prestigious jobs in news.
She achieved this without climbing the typical journalistic career ladder, and with no experience directing television coverage. She is richer in social clout than in Emmys or Pulitzers. And she is known more for wanting to rid the world of so-called wokeness than for promoting journalistic traditions. While newsroom leaders do not traditionally trumpet their personal beliefs, Ms. Weiss has described herself as a “left-leaning centrist,” a “radical centrist,” “a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice” — she is married to Nellie Bowles, a former Times reporter who now works at The Free Press — and a proud recipient of the label “Zionist fanatic.”
Yet she has also come to symbolize the power and potential of independent media. Her world is a patchwork of podcasts, newsletters and videos built around a common idea that legacy outlets have lost their authority and connection with readers. With that power up for grabs, several younger outlets have spent the last few years jostling for it: The Bulwark, Punchbowl News, Puck, Semafor.
Since its founding in 2021, The Free Press has amassed more than 1.5 million readers and $15 million in annual subscription revenue, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s finances. It throws parties for readers under 30; it throws parties for former world leaders, Google executives and “MAHA” influencers. In an interview, Hamish McKenzie, a co-founder of Substack, called CBS’s acquisition of The Free Press a “strong recognition that we’re in a new generation of media now.”
“What is undeniable is The Free Press built a new media business in a time when everybody thinks the news is dying as a business — and got it to a place of flourishing in a space of three years,” he said.
Paramount’s new chairman and chief executive, David Ellison, appears to have plucked Ms. Weiss from this world to help reclaim CBS’s relevance. He is not the only media executive to try this lately. Fox partnered this year with Barstool Sports, the “Ruthless” podcast and Brett Cooper, a YouTube star — though none of those creators were named editors in chief.
For Ms. Weiss, the appointment is an acknowledgment of her professional ascension five years after slamming the door behind her at The Times, accusing the paper of discouraging “bold” and “challenging” writing, and of failing to address “bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.”
In the aftermath, she devoted herself to free speech, building her profile on charisma, confidence and championing some conservatives while evading that label herself.
Her first newsletter was called Common Sense, a nod to Thomas Paine, the revolutionary scribe of the working class. In writing of “ordinary Americans,” Ms. Weiss positioned herself as a voice for millions “who feel that the world has gone mad.”
Yet as a public figure, it appeared her newest allies were mostly billionaires. The venture capitalists David Sacks and Marc Andreesen and Howard Schultz, the former chief executive of Starbucks, invested in her company. She attended the Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos. Kim Kardashian and Peter Thiel appeared on her podcast. Mr. Thiel, a tech entrepreneur, explained on “Honestly” how Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, provided “a great deal of cover” to other executives to publicly support President Trump.
The Free Press, similarly, provided shelter to those who formerly leaned left but were newly drawn to right-wing causes — a phenomenon once described by Ms. Weiss as a “tremendous political realignment.”
“So many of the things so many of us have been going on about for the past decade are, at last, going out of style,” Ms. Weiss said in February, in a speech at the so-called right-wing Davos.
Her publication has criticized corporate diversity initiatives and pro-Palestinian campus protesters. Its popular podcast “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” chronicled the backlash over statements by the “Harry Potter” author about transgender women. Ms. Weiss has agreed that “cancel culture” is akin to “social murder.”
“They ousted good people for fake thought crimes and tried to ruin their reputations and their lives,” Ms. Weiss said of the “far left” during that February speech. (Their “insanity,” she said, included acknowledging Indigenous land, adding pronouns to email signatures and wanting to abolishing police and prisons.)
“Conservatives know two things above all else,” Ms. Weiss continued, after warning of similar rising extremism on the right. “That evil is real and that our precious civilization is human and therefore fragile.” She told The Free Press readers on Monday, in an announcement about the Paramount deal, that the publication’s values “now have the opportunity to go very, very big.”
It is unclear how much of this sensibility Ms. Weiss will inject into “CBS Evening News,” the former home of Dan Rather and Connie Chung; to “Face the Nation,” which premiered 70 years ago with an interview with Senator Joseph McCarthy; to “60 Minutes,” where Lesley Stahl has been a correspondent for nearly 35 years. Reached by text, the former “CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric said, “It will be fascinating to watch.”
Ms. Weiss has insisted The Free Press is not ideologically homogenous. In 2024, the publication said its staff was split equally between voting for Mr. Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris and abstaining.
It is theoretically possible to trace this political inscrutability to the integrity of CBS News giants like Walter Cronkite, who claimed to never vote along party lines. “The Free Press is a media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of great American journalism,” its introductory note proffered. “Honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.”
The difference lies in how much Ms. Weiss talks about her personal beliefs in public — and which ones she is willing to debate over, and with whom.
“I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal,” Ms. Weiss told the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal group, in 2023. “And that’s OK. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”
Jessica Testa covers nontraditional and emerging media for The Times.
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