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For the past seven years, I’ve been publishing TheRighting, a free newsletter for mainstreamers and progressives that informs them about thinking from the right. A daily collection of headlines from right-wing sources forms the beating heart of my enterprise. My modest subscription list has grown over the years from a handful of friends and family in year one to thousands of faithful readers scattered around the country. The growth trajectory has almost always pointed north.
Readers subscribe because they want to know what the right is saying by scanning the seventeen headlines I aggregate every morning. For them, it’s like a polar-bear swim in the chilly waters of right-wing media. A quick dip—two minutes to scan the headlines and absorb a sentence or two, and then it’s back to the warm welcome of MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or wherever they get the news that affirms their political beliefs.
When subscribers write to me they are almost always thankful that I’ve essentially relieved them of the task of visiting the dozens of sites I link to so they could learn what the right was thinking. In the age of Trump 1.0, thousands signed on to the newsletter just for that reason.
The day after the November 5 presidential election I lost a hundred readers. That’s a very big deal for a small enterprise. I had never encountered this on such a scale. Two or three times a year I had days where maybe ten readers would cancel. Even that rate of attrition would cause me to spiral into a minor panic. But this was something else.
So I queried more than a dozen unsubscribers at random to ask why they left. Almost all said that they wanted to completely turn off the chatter about the incoming Trump administration. Some actually apologized to me. Several said they were canceling subscriptions to the Times, The Atlantic, and other mainstream outlets as well as shunning any television news. (I see this phenomenon as distinct from that of news avoiders, who are often disgruntled with traditional journalism outlets, according to the 2024 Digital News Report.)
“I appreciate your due diligence, but I cannot fill my head with this shit any longer,” wrote subscriber Crista Coccia of Sonoma County, California. “They won, and the newsletter is no longer good for my mental health.”
Seventy-seven-year-old Rhode Island resident Ramsey David struck an equally morose tone. “Nothing lasts forever including democracies and me,” he wrote. “Don’t take it too personal. We cancelled the NYT, The New Yorker, Atlantic, podcasts and emails, etc. We are turning off the national politics switch.”
“Nothing good can come from following politics or news for the next several years, possibly our lifetimes,” wrote California’s Lynda Walz. “I used to care what the right wing thought—felt like I was doing my part by trying to understand their thoughts and motivations.”
I reached out to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic to see if they experienced any significant dip in their subscriptions following the election. They declined to answer the specific question about possible post-election subscriber loss that I posed to them. (As a publicly traded company, the Times discloses subscriptions on a quarterly basis. The last time the company revealed its subscription totals was November 4, a day before the election. The Times boasted of adding 260,000 digital-only subscribers in the third quarter.)
Declining viewership for TV and news websites is nothing new. Just this year, TheRighting embarked on a yearslong study comparing election year traffic in 2024 and 2020 for almost two dozen right-wing and mainstream websites. (Here’s the report for November.) Almost every website saw significant two-digit declines in traffic. TV news also trended downward especially since the election. Adweek stated the case simply in a subhead for its December 2 article on November’s cable news ratings: “Viewers abandoned CNN and MSNBC after election night.”
Will mainstream and progressive sites experience a similar loss of subscribers as audiences flee out of exasperation and even depression? It may be too early to tell, but certainly by midyear, if not earlier, we should have an inkling. The number of digital-only subscriptions to the Times, released as part of the earnings report in midwinter, will be an important indication.
As for TheRighting, while I continue to lose subscribers (although not nearly at the same rate), I have not lost faith. Engagement is up, meaning more readers are clicking on the content I’m presenting. And donations have increased, which indicates that my remaining subscribers want to fund my efforts to keep going.
And not every reader who goes AWOL disappears forever. “Just a note to say that while I had to take a break from all media for a few days, including your righteous summaries, I’m back,” wrote Paula Schaap of New York City.
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