# The Free Press [[Bari Weiss]]'s publication, launched on [[Substack]] as *[[Common Sense]]* in January 2021 six months after her resignation letter from the *New York Times*, renamed *The Free Press* in 2022, and sold to [[Skydance-Paramount]] on **October 6, 2025** for a reported **$150 million** — the day Weiss was named editor-in-chief of [[CBS News]], reporting directly to [[David Ellison]]. At the sale it had about 1.5 million total subscribers and more than 170,000 paying ones, up 86% in a year, on early money from [[Marc Andreessen]], [[David Sacks]], Howard Schultz and Allen & Company. Paramount's release said the brand would keep "independent" operations; Weiss's remit was the network. ## What it is Editorially, *The Free Press* is the institutional form of the [[Intellectual Dark Web]] moment: a center-to-right outlet whose organizing story is that legacy media and the universities were captured by a progressive orthodoxy, and whose beats follow from that — campus speech, gender medicine, public-health dissent, DEI, and a consistently pro-Israel line on the Middle East that the *New Statesman* reported in 2025 had produced blind spots in its Gaza coverage. It runs the satirical weekly "TGIF" (by Nellie Bowles, Weiss's wife), a podcast slate, and a live-events business; its house style is the long first-person essay by a defector from an institution. It shares audience, funders and guests with the [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] and the All-In podcast circle, and Weiss is a founding trustee of the [[University of Austin]], which is the same project in academic form. ## Why it matters here The sale is the reason the page exists. Paramount had settled the President's lawsuit for $16 million in July 2025, secured the [[FCC]]'s approval of the Skydance merger, and then — rather than hiring a network news executive — bought a Substack and installed its founder over a 98-year-old news division, removing [[60 Minutes]]'s executive producer and, by June 2026, its most senior correspondent along the way ([[Scott Pelley Firing]]). The [[CBS News]] page lays out the six-step sequence; *The Free Press* is the piece that supplied the new editorial identity. The deal also priced the heterodox-newsletter category: $150 million for a publication with $10–15 million in revenue is a multiple that says the buyer was purchasing a political positioning and a person, not a business. ## See Also - [[Bari Weiss]] · [[Common Sense]] · [[Substack]] · [[Substack Timeline]] - [[CBS News]] · [[60 Minutes]] · [[Scott Pelley Firing]] · [[Skydance-Paramount]] · [[David Ellison]] · [[Paramount Timeline]] · [[Media Capture]] - [[University of Austin]] · [[Intellectual Dark Web]] · [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] - [[Matt Taibbi]] · [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]] · [[Media Company Timelines Hub]]