Independent Newsletter Spotlight: Samantha Grasso of Discourse Blog
Discourse Blog was founded in March of 2020 by eight former staff members of the news site Splinter, who wanted to build an independent platform to cover politics from the left.
The story of Splinter is all-too familiar: a beloved website accrued a loyal audience only to get chewed up and spat out by private equity pitbulls. In 2019, Univision’s Fusion Media Group sold it to G/O Media, which shuttered the website a mere few months later due to “finite resources,” laying off its entire staff. (Earlier this year, Splinter was revived along with Jezebel by Paste Magazine).
When Samantha Grasso, a former Splinter staffer and now a co-owner of and the art director for Discourse Blog, was laid off three months into the pandemic, prospects were dim: media outlets were panicking, shutting down, and dumping staff left and right. For a time, she worked as a contractor at AJ+. With a nothing-to-lose mindset, she and her former colleagues made a WordPress, seeking to restore and continue the “rowdy, confrontational, weird as hell, leftist”spirit of Splinter.
Now publishing on Substack, the four-year-old Discourse Blog is an independent, worker-owned newsletter, known for its combative, bloggy commentary, which is both deadly serious and perfectly silly (also, their Friday “Bird of the Week” posts). They’ve accrued over 17,000 paid and free subscribers, and pay their staff of seven part-time employees with a subscriber revenue-based model.
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