Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. So this show actually began with our show's own experience, booking guests. Over the last few months, we began to notice that more and more of our favorite journalists and columnists and reporters were no longer with mainstream media publications, and oftentimes they were no longer with

any publication at all. Of course, there have long been freelance journalists, but the point of

freelancing was to sell your services to the big publications, and in fact, that was pretty

much the only way to survive. Nowadays, that's not true. It's by no means easy to make it as an independent journalist or in one of the new collectives or worker co-ops, but it's possible.

And that seems like it may become pretty important as corporate media is being gobbled up by billionaires who are installing figures more aligned with their politics.

Like, for example, Barry Weiss, who had been a junior editor at the

New York Times, who set out on her own and built her substack, the free press, into a media

company that was aquired by CBS. It's a new day in media, and things are getting weird, and here

to help us understand what's going on. We've got three independent journalists who I really love,

deeply respect. Nick Valencia, former CNN correspondent.

He's now the founder of Nick Valencia News. Welcome.

Hey, I'm so grateful to be here, Alexis. Thank you for having me.

We've also got Alicia Kennedy Food and Culture Writer, founder of from the desk of Alicia Kennedy.

Welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

And we've got Brian Merchant, writer, reporter, author, founder of the newsletter, Blood and the Machine, also author of a book by the same name. Welcome.

Hey, Alexis.

Brian, your career, let's start there.

You've all had these different trajectories, but stipulating that I have known you as a widely respected tech journalist and author.

Just like, give me like five, six years of what it's been like on your LinkedIn, you know?

Well, you'll, if you look five years back, let's see, it's even hard to keep track because...

Something like last decade, yeah.

...