The Business Insider website. (Status)
Earlier this month, Business Insider quietly lifted the paywall across the vast majority of its website. The change was not announced publicly—perhaps because it directly undercuts the story chief executive Barbara Peng and Editor-In-Chief Jamie Heller have spent the past year trying to sell to staff and readers: that BI was moving away from the old traffic hamster wheel and toward a subscription-centered future built on producing journalism worth paying for.
But weening a website like BI away from a traffic-centric model is no easy feat. The speed-obsessed publication was engineered to dominate search websites like Google, and for years its audience grew accustomed to consuming its journalism for free. Once the company erected a stiff paywall, traffic cratered. According to a SimilarWeb analysis provided to Status, the site drew 104 million visits in September 2024; in comparison, this September, it drew just 64.4 million—a staggering 38% year-over-year drop, and among the lowest levels in recent memory.
That matters because BI’s traffic is still inseparable from its revenue. Which is perhaps why, Status has learned, Axel Springer executives convened a high-level review this summer with BI leadership after…
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Bari Weiss speaks at a conference. (Screen grab via YouTube)
Both Sides Bari: If you’ve been wondering how Bari Weiss will reform CBS News, a newly surfaced video from the Jewish Leadership Conference offers a clear look. Earlier this month, Weiss spelled out her editorial philosophy on stage, but video of her remarks only started bouncing around social media in the last day. On stage, Weiss said she wants to position CBS News to appeal to viewers on both the center-right and center-left, describing her approach as “redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate.” As an example of that discourse, she pointed to a recent debate hosted by The Free Press between Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch, saying it showed that “people that have wildly different opinions” can have “good-faith, very passionate, very charismatic disagreements and still like each other at the end of the day.”
🔍 Zooming in: Weiss framed this concept as something fresh and new. Of course, it's not. It’s a recycled “both sides” formula—one that legacy outlets have repeatedly made the poor choice of embracing. The core problem with this playbook is that…
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