What Substack wants in Trump’s Washington (2025)

Just before he delivered his welcome toast to the crowd below, McKenzie spoke with The Washington Post about Substack’s aspirations in Trump’s Washington, the company’s growth, and its evolving relationship with the traditional Washington press corps and legacy media organizations.

The Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

You hosted a party at the same time as the correspondent’s dinner. Why?

Media is changing. The whole system is changing. It’s not just some old institutions going out of business or struggling, or that people spend a lot of time on social media now. The whole system is changing — whether you like it or not, it’s just real that the old institutions represented by what’s going on at the White House correspondents’ dinner are not in the same health as they once were. They’re based on a model that made sense 100 years ago. It doesn’t make sense for 2025. There’s a vast universe of independent voices building something new and you’re seeing that in Substack. This party represents a gathering of those people and a representation of that kind of spirit.

How do you coexist with the mainstream press?

We’re all part of a giant media ecosystem. The traditional legacy media is still a sizable part of it. Some of the institutions are going to make the jump from the old world to the new world. … Some of them will be around, and they’ll forever be an important part of the media ecosystem. But Substack expands the media ecosystem, expands what’s possible for who can participate, who can have a voice, who can be heard, who can be influential in how the discourse takes place. So I don’t see legacy media as being in competition with Substack.

I see us being part of an ecosystem together and in fact, I think there’s lots of complementarity, lots of mutual benefit to building things together. If you look at the Substack ecosystem, it’s not based on trying to own publishers. It’s based on trying to hold publishers up. And that’s true whether it’s a small, individual independent publisher or a new institution like the Free Press or the Bulwark. Or legacy institutions that are figuring out how to use Substack stack to grow; the New Republic is a good example of that at the moment. There’s been a sort of default stance that Substack is a threat. And people are now in the mainstream media just starting realizing that maybe they’re a partner for good.

Substack has grown a lot in the last year. Last year around this time, we had more than 3 million subscriptions and now we have well over 5 million paid subscriptions. The number of voices on the platform has grown even in politics, which has been a stronghold for Substack. The people who are more focused on video rather than text have grown. Jim Acosta runs a live news show on Substack every day from his phone. But Mehdi Hasan, Don Lemon, Joy Reid — a bunch of people who are more associated with television are showing up on Substack now.

Do you feel like Washington is changing?

Washington culture and political culture, in particular, in the media is in a moment of volatile transition — the volatility of a transitional state is brought on by the disruption of the internet 30 years ago and how the effects of that massive disruption just started to be sorted out. And so we’re in the chaos moment where the old pillars are being destroyed, essentially. And the chaos moment is dominated by the owners of social media and the people who most successfully harness the whims of social media. But we’re moving into a different moment. I call it the “garden moment,” which is going to be a system where independent voices actually can get power as well.

What do you want Substack to be in Trump’s Washington?

In times like this, when there’s lots of chaos, you need a place for sense-making and you need people you can turn to who you can trust. Substack is their place. The voices that you know are not trying to sell you a particular agenda. Or if they are, they’re transparent about it. You learn to trust them over time. You hold them to account over time, over the course of a subscription relationship. And they get rewarded for their integrity. A huge part of being rewarded for integrity is having courage and having been willing to speak up for what is important and what you believe in and willing to speak truth to power.

I'm a former journalist. I care about journalism a lot. I care about the media. I care about the people who do their work in this city, whether they're on the politics side or the media side, whether on the left or the right or in the middle.

And what I want to be part of, if I’m one of them, is something that’s growing, something that offers hope, a place of sanity and calm. The other party [the correspondent’s dinner] — which I’m not trashing — it’s a party to celebrate the First Amendment. That should be saluted. These people do important work helping people to try to understand each other.

But the reality is: that old system is shrinking; it’s not growing. So I think people want to be part of something that’s growing and have hope.

Jesús Rodríguez contributed to this report.