This week, our team at COURIER hit a huge milestone: we passed 6 million followers and subscribers across our network. 🎉 What makes that especially remarkable is our recent growth trajectory - 1/3rd of our total owned audience, or 2 million followers, has been added since October 1st. About one million of them have been added to our network since Election Day.
This significant growth since the November election has signaled to us that despite the mainstream media narrative that many Americans are “tuned out” or “exhausted” by Trump’s chaos, our audiences are highly engaged and are seeking more content about what’s happening in Washington and elsewhere.
Last week, I shared a bit of a deep dive into our growth on one key platform, Instagram. Below, you can find a breakdown of how our audiences stack up on each major platform, as well as what percentage are coming from our local network vs. national brand:
On Instagram and TikTok, the data shows our accounts are growing faster than nearly every major legacy media brand. Their reach and engagement are also off the charts. On Facebook, our local outlets boast followings much larger than most local news or political accounts in their respective states, giving our reporters and social correspondents an outsized influence on shaping the information diet of millions of Americans across states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
While this rapid growth has been extremely encouraging, we recognize that we have so much more work to do. Conservative media outlets and other content operations on the Right have had a decades-long head start building audiences online and off. They also have the advantage of algorithmic amplification of outrage bait and inflammatory content - the kind of bad content and misinformation that moves very quickly on some of these platforms. However, while right-wing networks are primarily focused on shaping the national narrative through culture wars and disinformation, we have a unique opportunity to build strong informed movements of opposition to their extremist agenda at the state and local level in battleground states that will have an outsized influence on the electoral map next year.
This year, we have ambitious, mission-critical plans to more than double our footprint on many of these platforms by investing in a new suite of products and talent that will usher in a new, bigger phase for COURIER. If we learned anything from the past 10 years, it is that in order to protect democracy and advance progress, it is essential that we don’t cede the internet to the right, and that we win the information war. COURIER is positioned to lead the left in this effort and we can only do this with your support. Please reach out to me to learn how you can help us expand our reach even further - I’d love to chat.
In the meantime, maybe log off a bit to have a relaxing weekend!
Tara
What I’m reading this week
The New Kids in the Room: The White House press office is keeping its friends close (CJR, 2/19)
“...by elevating friendly right-wing provocateurs to an equal footing with more mainstream, established voices, officials are also making it clear who they’re more interested in hearing from—and the type of question they’re interested in being asked.”
Joe Rogan’s Infatuation with Elon Musk Is Angering his Fans (POLITICO, 2/19)
“A 1.5 million subscriber subreddit message board dedicated to Rogan — where fans of his podcast congregate to discuss the show and any other Rogan-related drama — has in recent days been overrun with memes and other posts complaining about Musk, the Trump administration and Rogan’s recent regular, full-throated defenses of the work of DOGE, the Musk-led initiative to slash federal spending.”
The Evolving Journalism Landscape (Project C, 2/17)
Here is an excellent breakdown from Liz Kelly Nelson on what she calls “the evolving journalism landscape.” The report attempts to explain how news is produced and distributed online in 2025.
Joe Rogan Dethroned by Anti-Trump Podcast in the Charts (Newsweek, 2/18)
I hate to mention Rogan twice in one newsletter but here’s a bit of good news to end the week: our friends in the progressive media ecosystem, MeidasTouch, officially passed Joe Rogan in monthly podcast downloads to become the most listened-to podcast in the U.S.