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.[1][2] The newsletter was first published in 2021[3][4] while its associated media company officially launched in 2022.[1]
Weiss rebranded Common Sense as The Free Press in 2022.[7][8] In 2022, she expanded The Free Press into a media company, with staff writers (including senior editor Peter Savodnik[13]
and Olivia Reingold[14])
and a subscription-based business model.[7][8]The Free Press also hired Andy Mills, former producer of The Daily, to develop audio programming for the company.[1]
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."[16]
As of October 2023, the site has 75,000 paid subscribers and 520,000 total subscribers.[17]
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.[15]
Coverage
The founding of the
University of Austin was first announced in then Common Sense, in an article by founding president Pano Kanelos.[18][19][20]
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.[11][21] The information Weiss discussed included blacklisting of accounts and suppression of trending topics.[6][22] 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.[23]
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.[24][25]
The podcast had over 5 million listeners.[26]
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.[27] Around October 22, vandals wrote "Fuck Jews" outside the office of The Free Press.[28][29]