“There’s been endless talk since the election about House Democrats being mad at the ‘Squad,’ and others saying, ‘What do you want, for activists to just not exist? For there to be no left-wing members of Congress?’” Yglesias told me. He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong-for instance, abolishing or defunding police-and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party. In our interview, Yglesias explained why pushing back against the “dominant sensibility” in digital journalism is important to him.
“There was an inherent tension between my status as a co-founder of the site and my desire to be a fiercely independent and at times contentious voice,” he wrote in his first post on Substack, adding on Twitter, “I’m looking forward to really telling everyone what’s on my mind to an even greater extent than I do now.” But as a relative moderate at the publication, he felt at times that it was important to challenge what he called the “dominant sensibility” in the “young-college-graduate bubble” that now sets the tone at many digital-media organizations.Ĭonor Friedersdorf: The perils of ‘with us or against us’ His managers wanted him to maintain a “restrained, institutional, statesmanlike voice,” he told me in a phone interview, in part because he was a co-founder of Vox. Like Andrew Sullivan, who joined Substack after parting ways with New York magazine, and Glenn Greenwald, who joined Substack after resigning from The Intercept, which he co-founded, Yglesias felt that he could no longer speak his mind without riling his colleagues. But his absence as a staffer (a Vox spokesperson noted that he will continue to host a podcast, The Weeds) will make the publication he co-founded less ideologically diverse at a moment when negative polarization makes that attribute important to the country. The move may prove a good fit for Yglesias, who began his career as a highly successful independent blogger before blogging at The Atlantic and then elsewhere.
The journalist Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, announced today that he is leaving that publication for the paid-newsletter platform Substack, so that he can enjoy more editorial independence.
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