When Donald Trump retook office last January, many national newsrooms braced for what lay ahead. There was the expected firehose of news, with the president issuing dozens of executive orders in his first week alone. Then there was the fear and tension over the president’s history of attacking and suing news organizations over unfavorable coverage. Meanwhile, audience trust in media was at an all-time low.

While it was a turbulent time for traditional media, it opened a window for independent journalists like Marisa Kabas, who is not beholden to covering Trump’s every move, nor saddled with decades of institutional distrust. On 27 January, she received a massive scoop she published in her newsletter, the Handbasket: the US office of management and budget was freezing federal grants. Getting to that news first only led to more exclusives and subscribers.

Since then, Kabas has published scoops about the US Tennis Association banning trans athletes from competing as women and the hiring of conspiracy theorist Gregg Phillips as the head of Fema’s office of response and recovery. Today, the Handbasket has more than 31,000 subscribers, including more than 4,000 paid, making the newsletter 100% reader-funded.

Marisa Kabas, founder of newsletter the Handbasket. Photograph: Cooper Fleishman

“Being independent is a form of resistance in that it’s going up against the old ways of practicing journalism,” she said. “I feel like I have more latitude to come at systems of power, because I’m not answering to anyone.”

Kabass Handbasket is one of many small, independent journalism outlets gaining audience trust and scoops during a time when mainstream media outlets fear censorship or litigation from Trump. Over the past year, Trump has barred the Associated Press from the White House press pool, defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, opened Federal Communications Commission investigations into NBC and sued the BBC for $10bn; ABC and CBS have settled their own multimillion-dollar defamation suits with the president. The administration’s anti-DEI and conservative stances have also coincided with major cuts and controversial hiring decisions at legacy media outlets. CNN dismantled its “race and equity” team in the summer; NBC News did the same with its teams dedicated to covering marginalized communities at verticals like NBC Out and NBC Asian America. In October, CBS News hired conservative commentator Bari Weiss, who, as its editor-in-chief, recently pulled a 60 Minutes segment on a brutal Venezuelan prison holding Trump administration deportees.

Add to this unsettling media landscape Americans’ interest in having more independent news outlets for the “health of our democracy”, according to a 2024 Free Press survey, and it’s a recipe for journalists to strike out on their own and cover the issues corporate media has shied away from. Today, more than one-third of all journalists identify as independent creators, publishing news and content outside of traditional media, according to a recent Muck Rack report.

“As national outlets have capitulated to recent government demands that they cover the current administration in a particular way, that contributes to a sense that certain media outlets aren’t actually acting as the representative of the people,” said Jeremy Caplan, director of teaching and learning at the City University of New York’s Newmark school of journalism. “That also has the potential to diminish trust and to turn people’s eyes towards independent creators, who they can get a sense of as individuals.”

Reporting on topics mainstream media shies away from

Independent journalists who cover issues under attack by the Trump administration have also seen rising audience numbers in recent months.

Frustrated with the lack of full-time media staff roles covering the transgender community, Evan Urquhart founded Assigned Media in 2022 as a blog where he, as the sole author, factchecked anti-trans propaganda in mostly rightwing media. In the years since, the blog has become a fully fledged news platform with Urquhart as editor-in-chief, supervising about 20 contributors producing original reporting, op-eds and two newsletters. The site currently has more than 2,100 free subscribers, more than 600 paid ones and nearly 59,000 Bluesky followers.

“The trans community really doesn’t trust legacy media because they feel that their stories aren’t being told, their perspectives aren’t being incorporated, and that propaganda is dominating the narrative,” he said. “I really want them to be able to understand that there is a core of journalism that is very valuable and that can serve them, and also tells the stories that they think are important.”

Evan Urquhart, founder of Assigned Media. Photograph: Leise Jones

In June, reproductive rights journalists Garnet Henderson and Susan Rinkunas launched Autonomy News, a worker-owned independent publication covering abortion, birth control and gender-affirming care. In June, they published a scoop about Planned Parenthood, the US’s largest abortion provider, considering letting its affiliates abandon abortion care to keep Medicaid funding (the organization called the report “false” before confirming it three months later). In October, they published a collaboration with Mother Jones on the legal fight over abortion pill “reversal” claims, which was cited at the annual conference of the Society of Family Planning.

Other small independent outlets like Bolts, founded by Daniel Nichanian, are also covering stories often missed by mainstream organizations, like local organizing around prison conditions. Worker-owned outlet 404 Media, founded in 2023 by Vice’s Motherboard alums, has covered how ICE uses cell phone data to track people’s locations and how the Trump administration has scrubbed government pages. Co-founder Joseph Cox pointed out that the site’s reporting on ICE and local law enforcement using automatic license plate-reading cameras led to the camera company changing how its product functions.

“It’s disabled certain searches in California, Vermont, Oregon and Illinois, and they’ve all been removed from the national lookup tool,” he said. “And more fundamentally, it’s just radically changed people’s understanding of all of those cameras we put around our town.”

Why audiences are seeking independent journalism

Journalists striking out on their own may seem new, but it has roots in the early days of the internet. Online publications like HuffPost (formerly Huffington Post), Gawker and BuzzFeed started as blogs in the early aughts, often with updated posts, which became the current standard format for news websites.

“The internet enabled people to create their own destinations online,” Caplan said. “At first, those were few and far between, but they grew, and it enabled a generation of new kinds of sites like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, for example, in those early days, and then subsequent generations, which included projects like Mic, Upworthy and Vox.”

Susan Rinkunas (left) and Garnet Henderson celebrate Autonomy News’s launch, June 2025. Photograph: Susan Rinkunas

Those sites shaped a robust media landscape of the 2010s, including reporting on the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements and insider politics that mainstream media often missed. While online media’s early days were bolstered by billions of dollars in ad revenue, advertising dollars moved from internet news to tech companies like Facebook and Google over the next decade. Falling revenues led publications to be put up for sale and eventually purchased by corporate owners or private equity firms that laid off news staff or shut down news sites entirely, leading to the industry’s current contraction. In 2025 alone, more than 17,000 people were cut across media, up 18% from 2024, according to a recent report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

As attention has shifted to influencers across social media, videos and podcasts in recent years, Caplan noted, audiences have become more attracted to independent creators and niche reporting. While the blogs of the 2010s often had large teams and websites, independent journalists tend to run their own publications alone or with a partner, thanks to easy-to-use newsletter platforms like Substack, Beehiiv and Ghost.

“One of the powerful elements that attracts people to individual creators is that they can see this person and understand what’s driving this person,” he said. “Those individuals, in many cases, feel less constrained because they’re not driven by a corporate agenda.”

Navigating legal risks and concerns

Reporting on hot-button issues during the current political climate with a litigious president carries certain risks. Before Autonomy News’s launch, Henderson and Rinkunas approached Lawyers for Reporters, which provides pro bono legal services for news organizations, to supply pre-publication review for any investigative or accountability reporting.

For even more legal protection, the journalists secured an Immediate Needs Fund grant – supported by the MacArthur Foundation via the non-profit Tiny News Collective – which they’re using to pay for media liability insurance. “We talked about from the very beginning that we wanted to be able to do this ambitious investigative work, but that requires resources,” Henderson said. “Not only in terms of the tremendous amount of time that investigative reporting takes, but also that you need legal review. I’m certainly sleeping better now that we have media liability insurance.”

Kabas and Urquhart both have lawyers who read over any stories of concern for their respective publications. Still, they note the need for greater legal infrastructure for independent journalists. To prevent potential censorship, Urquhart has moved Assigned Media’s servers outside of the US and is looking to move the site off an American-based company.

404 Media founders (from left) Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, Jason Koebler (on floor) and Joseph Cox. Photograph: Sharon Attia

“There’s been a lot of stuff that, on paper, shouldn’t be legal, that nonetheless has managed to happen under this administration, and I’m very eyes-open on that,” Urquhart said. “I’m concerned about legal and government suppression, more broadly. I take it very seriously. I try and be really aware of what the risks are.”

Caplan said more independent journalism projects are likely to pop up in the coming years, but collaboration will be key as they navigate not only legal risks, but also infrastructure issues like trainings, health insurance and protection from physical harm.

“For that independence to remain strong and vibrant, we need some institutions that essentially help support those individuals and independent journalists and independent news organizations,” he said. “We already have some of those, but we need to see those continue to grow and flourish.”