April 23, 2026
Hey, it’s Ryan.
I hope you’ve been enjoying our daily newsletters. I see you haven’t become a paid subscriber yet.
No judgment. You’re stretched. Childcare, car payments, medical bills that showed up without warning. The math stopped working for a lot of people a while ago, and nobody in power seems particularly interested in fixing it. We know you have options for where every dollar goes.
But here’s the thing. Billionaires are buying up the press, gutting newsrooms, and replacing independent journalism with outlets that answer to their interests. And one of the few things standing in the way of that is readers like you chipping in to keep independent operations like this one alive.
So I need to ask you directly: can you step up and become a paid subscriber today?
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 and spent years assuring journalists and readers that he was a hands-off owner who believed in the mission. Then, as his business interests collided more and more with aggressive reporting, the hands came on. Stories got spiked. An endorsement that the Post’s own newsroom supported got killed.
Bezos didn’t buy the Post because he loves newspapers. He bought it because owning a major American news institution is useful. And when it stopped being useful in the right ways, he stopped pretending to care about journalism.
Bari Weiss did the same thing at CBS News Radio, just faster and with less pretense. She didn’t try to reform it. She gutted it. A functioning broadcast operation with a genuine commitment to news, gone because she could. Because when billionaires and their ideological allies control enough of the media landscape, they get to decide what survives.
This is the pattern. It is not a coincidence. It is a strategy.
I spent enough time in legacy media to know what editorial capture looks like. It doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as a question from a senior editor. It shows up as a source who used to return calls and suddenly doesn’t. It shows up in the stories that never get assigned in the first place.
AlterNet America was built to fight that. No corporate ownership. No advertiser relationships that create pressure on coverage. No access journalism where reporters soften their work to protect their proximity to power.
What we have is readers. If the reporting isn’t good, you leave. If it is, you stay, and ideally, you invest.
The people doing this aren’t stupid. They know that if enough newsrooms fall, if enough reporters take buyouts, if enough outlets get hollowed out or shut down, the public stops expecting anything better. Learned helplessness is the whole game.
But the strategy only works if you tune out.
Here’s what your support has already done: it helped launch AlterNet America as the number two rising news source on Substack. It’s helping us bring on new voices and line up exclusive live interviews with analysts and journalists you’ll actually want to hear from.
A paid subscription is how this continues. It’s how we keep the lights on without making the compromises that would make the lights not worth keeping on. Subscribe today. Tell someone who’d care. Help us build the journalism that billionaires are actively trying to make impossible.
It still exists. Whether it survives is up to you.
— Ryan Rose
Co-Founder & Managing Editor of AlterNet America
P.S. If you can’t afford to subscribe, we completely understand. Please share our newsletters with people who need to know. We need everyone with us. This moment demands it.