Untangling the news

Peter Landau, managing editor of Newsjunkie, spoke with Isaac Saul, the founder of Tangle, a newsletter-based media outlet that aims to present a wide range of political perspectives in a single daily product. He discusses his editorial model, business strategy, and the challenges of covering politics without taking sides.

You started as a newsletter instead of a traditional publication. Can you tell me why that was your introduction to the market?

I always loved the newsletter platform. I think, at the time, it was a really intimate way to interact with readers. It was different from relying on social media traffic or podcasts or digital or print. It’s really unique and special to show up in people’s inboxes and email back and forth with an audience.

I also felt like it was a really good pathway for a business. In 2019, when I started Tangle, I didn’t necessarily imagine it would turn into the big operation that it’s turned into today, but I did know that building a personal audience—where you wanted to have subscriptions and memberships—a newsletter was a really good way to do that.

And Substack was just in its early days at the time, so there was a platform there that was really easy to get started on. I’m no longer on Substack, but at the time it was very simple to just write my articles and press send—a mailing list with my stories, which felt really convenient.

What did you take from your time at the HuffPost and A Plus into Tangle, and what didn’t you take?

I’ll start with what I didn’t take first. I think at both Huffington Post and A Plus [news site focusing positive stories—ed.] I learned the perils of relying on social media traffic, SEO, and advertising revenue to run a business. I think those incentives make it really hard to have a news operation that’s putting out not just quality work, but also work that avoids sensationalism or partisan hackery. When you’re competing for clicks, search results, and advertising revenue—and they’re what your business is founded on—you have to find a way to grab people’s attention. And it’s often really hard to do that when you’re trying to produce content that’s more measured or balanced or even-handed.

Both Huffington Post and A Plus, I think, were and are news outlets that offer a lot of value in this space. I don’t mean to diminish the work that I did there or the positive elements of them as news outlets, but I also saw things that I felt were broken and that were the result of these corrupted incentives that I wanted to avoid.

But yeah, more than anything, I think I just realized I didn’t want to have a business that ran on ad revenue. And if you’re relying on social media for all your traffic—which we were at A Plus, and in some ways were at Huffington Post—then if the social media platforms change, you’re in big trouble.

That being said, at Huffington Post, I learned how to operate in a really big newsroom. I learned how to cover breaking news. I learned really stringent editorial standards. I learned how to write fast. I had great reporters around me, people who had lots of experience in the industry. And at A Plus I had all of that, and we were also building a brand-new media platform.

That was my first attempt at creating a new media startup, and I learned a lot of lessons from the ways we succeeded. And I also learned a lot of lessons, ultimately, in how we failed, and brought those to Tangle for sure.

Tangle is, or it wants to be, nonpartisan. So what does that mean in practice? Or is it just branding?

Look, the straightforward definition of nonpartisan is not having a commitment to a particular ideology or, in this context, to a particular political group or alliance, which we don’t. There are obviously news outlets who are very overtly shilling for the red or the blue side in our kind of tribal duopoly that we have here in America.

If you read a Tangle newsletter from top to bottom, I believe you’ll have a more holistic look at the news than you will reading any other news outlet in America right now.

At the same time, what we describe is viewpoint diversity. So when we say nonpartisan, what we mean is that we’re going to air a really wide range of perspectives in our content—in our newsletters, in our YouTube videos, and in our podcast. If you read a Tangle newsletter from top to bottom, I believe you’ll have a more holistic look at the news than you will reading any other news outlet in America right now.

We’re going out and finding people who are making arguments from the center-right perspective to the far-right perspective and from the center-left perspective to the far-left perspective, and then a lot of heterodox thinkers in between too. And then, of course, we produce our own kind of original analysis from me or one of our staff writers every day.

I think that just adds an extra kind of personal, interesting element for our readers to consume. That’s kind of what we think about when we say nonpartisan. Of course, we’re victims of the nomenclature of the time. There’s definitely an element of it that’s branding, but we do really try hard to make sure our audience is just getting exposed to a wide range of views.

How do you define fairness when you’re covering a political issue? There are certainly different perspectives, but then there’s also stuff that maybe shouldn’t be given attention because it’s just crazy.

It’s one of the really big challenging questions that we have.

I would say generally my disposition is I’m not the arbiter of truth and I’m not the arbiter of what is in bounds or out of bounds. If we were only publishing views and perspectives that I thought were palatable, then the newsletter would not be about viewpoint diversity—it’d just be about the viewpoints that I find acceptable, which is not the point of the newsletter.

Candidly, sometimes we publish stuff that I find really offensive or gross, or I think is crazy. But that’s the point, right? It’s not about me—it’s about the arguments that are dominating the day. So there are times when I see arguments that are being popularized on the left or the right that, for various reasons, I might find silly or abhorrent or offensive. But we share them oftentimes in the newsletter because if enough people are embracing those arguments, then they’re a part of the dialogue and we feel like we need to share them with our audience.

It’s a really hard thing and it’s a big challenge. We don’t want to publish overt mis- or disinformation. We avoid publishing things that are verifiably untrue—things that we can disprove with a little bit of research. But we do share arguments with our audience sometimes that are edgy or might be offensive to some people.

How do you decide on the viewpoints from the left and the right? Just to dig a little deeper into that question, if somebody was talking about anti-Semitic tropes, would that be within the realm of what Tangle would cover as a legitimate perspective?

It’s really interesting. There are certainly people who I think have published commentary specifically about Israel or in the wake of the war in Gaza on October 7th that I personally feel includes anti-Semitic dog whistles. But there are often arguments that are being published in mainstream progressive or conservative news outlets.

And sometimes, yeah, we will share things like that. And the sort of safety pin that we have that we can pull is that we have this section every day in the newsletter that is our own unique analysis in writing. And so on the days where a piece like that is published, I wouldn’t let it go unanswered.

I would address it in my own argument and analysis and why I felt like it was anti-Semitic or why I felt like it was a dangerous line of thought. But yeah, the answer is: if a writer is out there profiting off of or proliferating a view that we as an editorial team might find really offensive—or even anti-Semitic—we feel like that argument needs to be addressed somewhere in our content.

We don’t always make that decision, but I would say we err toward a sort of free speech–maximalist view, where we want to put those arguments in the arena and kind of deconstruct them, and we find more value in that than ignoring them.

I would say “both-sides-ing” is probably the criticism we get the most from our audience—which is always interesting, because it usually happens from both sides on the same day.

Are you giving equal weight to unequal arguments, or do you worry about “both-sides-ism”? And what’s the editorial process to find that sweet spot?

I would say “both-sides-ing” is probably the criticism we get the most from our audience—which is always interesting, because it usually happens from both sides on the same day.

But the general premise is, when we are sharing—like a really common one might be climate change, right? There’s a scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that humans are contributing to it.

What I’ve found is often the debates are not really anymore about whether climate change is real. It’s about what the policy solution should be and whether the costs we’re incurring are worth it.

And when we really dig in, I think we find that there are actually really reasonable, thoughtful debates happening in these areas. That’s what we try to surface.

When you’re covering topics like this, how much of the product is your voice, since you’re such an integral part of Tangle, and how much is an institutional editorial voice that you’ve developed?

I think for the first few years it was all me. I was the one writing the take every day. So once we got traction and I started bringing in subscribers, I realized that I didn’t want a kind of cult-of-personality newsletter. I didn’t want my voice or my take to be the truth or the final say.

And so as soon as I had the money to start hiring other editors and writers and allowing them to contribute to the newsletter, I started doing that. What I think has happened is we have an editorial process that’s so rigorous and includes so much viewpoint diversity among our editors that there is a particular tone and style that is, I think, measured and thoughtful and addresses strong arguments that are potential counters to the case—whatever the writer is making—that are just the product of working in the Tangle environment that you see in most of the newsletters.

So I don’t necessarily think we have a really distinct institutional voice in every piece of writing. My style of writing is really different from my managing editor’s, who I would say is a little bit more academic and thoughtful, and I’m a little bit more brash and personality-driven, I think, in my writing.

That sort of voice, I don’t think, has been fine-tuned yet. But I think the style of argument, the thoughtfulness, the fact that you won’t really see super brazen, unhinged claims coming from us—that sort of stuff is a product of the editorial environment that we have.

And in terms of your audience, have you done any research as to where they land politically?

For a long time, the numbers were about 40% of our audience was liberal, 30% was conservative, and 30% self-identified as independent. These are based on surveys that we put out once or twice a year to our audience. So it’s our most engaged readers who are taking the surveys.

Also, we know from polling research that liberals are much more likely to take surveys like that and share their political views, their salary, their demographics, and all that stuff than conservatives are. So I suspect that the real numbers are probably even a little bit more balanced than that—and maybe a little bit more right-leaning.

In 2024, we had a big feature done on our work by This American Life, which is a public radio podcast, NPR, and that brought in a ton of new readers. It basically doubled our audience in the span of a month. And the public radio audience today tends to be more liberal than conservative, so it skewed our audience a little bit more left.

In one of our surveys last year, I think the numbers were more like 50-20-30: 50% liberal, 20% conservative, 30% independent. We’ve dealt with a shift there that we’re trying to correct for, because we want to be a big tech media organization and we want balance among our readership, just like our content. That’s something we’re working on for sure.

Have you ever gotten pushback for an article from your audience?

All the time. Every day we get pushback, and we take a lot of feedback from our audience. What we’ve found is that among the people who are subscribed to our newsletter, the level of trust is really high—and also equal, whether they are conservative or liberal, which is really cool.

I think that’s probably the best use-case test for us. We can have a Trump voter and a Kamala voter who are both subscribed to our newsletter. If we ask them to rate their trust in Tangle on a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, they will both give a four or five rating.

We survey our audience regularly, we get feedback and criticism from them regularly, and we find that often offers really valuable data points to improve the product.

Are you worried about creating your own ideological bubble with your audience and your editorial?

Definitely. I think audience capture is a thing that a lot of news organizations face. There’s a phenomenon that we see all throughout the media, which is when a news organization publishes a story that their audience really likes and wants more of. And then that news organization just publishes the same version of that story, recycled and slightly different, over and over again.

I worry about building an audience that’s just extremely centrist or moderate. I think centrism is a political ideology in and of itself. If you have point A and point C, the correct answer isn’t always point B. Sometimes one side’s right and the other side’s wrong.

I don’t want people to necessarily moderate their politics. That’s not what I’m trying to do. It’s a good outcome, because I do think our politics are a little extreme, but more than anything, I want people to just be critical thinkers, have some skepticism, be respectful of people’s views they disagree with, and have humility that they might not be right about everything.

Those are the kinds of values and outcomes and principles that I really care about.

Is neutrality even possible in today’s journalism?

Yes, I think it’s something that’s possible today. I never like the kind of “objective” or “neutral” language. Politics are personal. We’re all products of our own personal experiences.

I don’t think there is any journalist who is truly objective or neutral. I don’t think that’s real. I think there are journalists who are fair. There are journalists who are hacks. There are journalists who are trying to do an honest job, and there are journalists who are trying to inject their viewpoints into every story they publish.

I know who they are by reading all the commentary and content that’s out there. And it’s not hard to spot once you start spotting it. But I know a lot of really liberal journalists who work at big mainstream outlets, and when I read their reporting, I don’t know what their politics are, because they’re really thoughtful and careful.

The same is true of some conservative journalists. It has nothing to do with whether they’re neutral—it’s about whether they’re trying to be fair and honest.

I’m a person with opinions and experiences, and I’m sure I have blind spots. But I try really hard to be fair-minded in my work, and I think that’s what matters.

New Journalism proved that point—that the reporter being in the story brings a perspective. But to go back to Tangle, you focus on one story a day. Why that structure?

My view when I started was that there were a lot of short-form, quick-hit newsletters—Axios, Politico, Morning Brew, the Skimm—trying to pack 20 different stories into one email.

I sensed that people wanted a deeper understanding of the biggest debate of the day. When I started Tangle in 2019, the Democratic primary was kicking off, and there were all these major debates happening.

I just wanted to go long on one topic a day so people could really understand it.

Pretty quickly, I realized that most days there’s an obvious choice for what the topic should be. There’s usually one story dominating the news. So we give our audience a way to spend 10 or 15 minutes with one topic and walk away feeling like they really understand it.

I’m curious what you think about attention spans in our fragmented media environment, especially since you’re doing deeper dives.

It’s a huge issue. The next generation is consuming news in 30-second sound bites, sometimes even less.

But I think the problem is sometimes overstated. Gen Z still reads. They still go to college, write papers, and read books. They have inboxes. They can be reached.

I do a lot of college speaking, and I meet tons of thoughtful students who can sit through a 30- or 45-minute lecture.

We’re asking people to form a new habit—to spend 10 or 15 minutes with us. That’s a challenge. We’re not entertainment. We’re not influencers. But I think there’s still a big market for that.