• by Ray Schultz , October 6, 2025

Politics aside, the $150 million purchase of The Free Press by Paramount is good news for the publishing industry, according to a post by Substack co-founder Hamish Mckenzie.

“While much of the commentary about the deal has focused on the characters involved, we believe the most remarkable feature of this story is that a media startup went from zero to a nine-figure outcome in the space of three years, at a time when many have been led to believe that news is a dying business,” Mckenzie writes. 

It won’t be the last of its kind -- and indeed, there is “an immense opportunity for ambitious new media founders to build a new generation of institutions,” Mckenzie contends.

Mckenzie adds, “The Free Press is one such institution, and it is one among many on Substack, collectively accounting for millions of paid subscribers. Among this new class are Sarah Longwell’s politics collective The Bulwark, Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim’s Drop Site, Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen’s The Contrarian, Richard Rushfield and Janice Min’s The Ankler, Mike Solana’s Pirate Wires, Jerusalem Demsas’s The Argument, and JD Flynn and Ed Condon’s Catholic news outlet The Pillar, to name a few.”

See MediaPost’s coverage of the news here.