The Free Press (online newsletter)

The Free Press (formerly known as Common Sense) is an American Internet-based media company based in Los Angeles, California, founded by Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles. The newsletter was first published in 2021 while its associated media company officially launched in 2022.

History
Weiss and Bowles launched Common Sense on Substack in January 2021 after Weiss’ resignation from The New York Times. The newsletter was named after the political pamphlet of the same name by Thomas Paine. It covered politics, culture, and current events.

In June 2021, as part of Common Sense, Weiss launched the podcast Honestly, which has since featured guests including Kim Kardashian, Bill Barr, and Andrew Yang. Other guests have included Benjamin Netanyahu, Chris Christie, Tyler Cowen, Will Hurd, Ro Khanna, Walter Russell Mead, Tim Scott, Larry Summers, Peter Thiel, and Tim Urban.

Weiss rebranded Common Sense as The Free Press in 2022. In 2022, she expanded The Free Press into a media company, with staff writers (including senior editor Peter Savodnik and Olivia Reingold ) and a subscription-based business model. The Free Press also hired Andy Mills, former producer of The Daily, to develop audio programming for the company.

By October 2023, the company employed about 25 staffers in New York City and Los Angeles. Journalists and writers who have written for The Free Press include Emily Yoffe, Michael Shellenberger, and Joe Nocera. Regular contributors include Douglas Murray and Vinay Prasad.

In January 2024, The Free Press released a documentary called "American Miseducation." The film's synopsis is as follows: "The Free Press correspondent Olivia Reingold travels to America’s most elite colleges—from UPenn to Columbia—to find the origins of campus antisemitism and to ask how the smartest people in the country became the source of so much hate."

Events
The Free Press expanded into events in 2023, holding its first event in September 2023, a debate over the sexual revolution featuring Grimes, Louise Perry, Anna Khachiyan, and Sarah Haider. The sold-out event at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles was attended by 1,600 people.

Reception
As of October 2023, the site has 75,000 paid subscribers and 520,000 total subscribers.

Vanity Fair called The Free Press a "salon for the disenfranchised" in response to the notion that the room for certain viewpoints is limited in legacy media.

Coverage
The founding of the University of Austin was first announced in then Common Sense, in an article by founding president Pano Kanelos.

In December 2022, The Free Press published information about the Twitter Files after Twitter CEO Elon Musk provided Weiss with access to records of Twitter's internal communications. The information Weiss discussed included blacklisting of accounts and suppression of trending topics. Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger shared the inaugural Dao Prize for Excellence In Investigative Journalism, awarded by the National Journalism Center, for their Twitter Files coverage.

In early 2023, Megan Phelps-Roper hosted a podcast series at The Free Press titled The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, featuring interviews with Rowling and others on all sides of the cultural conflicts surrounding the author and her views on transgender people. The podcast had over 5 million listeners.

In late 2023, articles from The Free Press condemned the attack on Israel by Hamas and criticized legacy media coverage of the ensuing war for the spread of misinformation. Around October 22, vandals wrote "Fuck Jews" outside the office of The Free Press.

In 2024, The Free Press first reported on a video of NYU professor Amin Husain denying sexual and gender-based violence in the 7 October attack on Israel and describing New York as a "Zionist city" at a Students for Justice in Palestine rally. As a result, NYU suspended Husain.