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Andy Borowitz is bringing his signature political satire to Substack.
Just a few months after the satirist parted ways with The New Yorker amid cost-cutting at its parent company Condé Nast, he is re-booting the column on the newsletter platform.
“I always knew this day would come,” Borowitz tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “When I agreed to let The New Yorker license it in 2012 I held on to the domain name Borowitzreport.com, and I kept renewing it at GoDaddy, I just kept on renewing, because nothing lasts forever and things change. And I knew that someday I’d be back in charge of my own destiny again, and that day has arrived.”
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While his New Yorker column consisted exclusively of his signature comedic news-style pieces, at Substack Borowitz is planning a broader bouquet of content to live alongside those items. The core Borowitz Report newsletter (consisting of the satire he is perhaps best known for) will be free, though paying subscribers (Borowitz is charging $5 per month or $50 per year) will get additional longer-form content, live Q&As with him, as well as the ability to comment on his pieces and chat with each other.
“I’m going to be doing some special subscriber-only content like some pieces that are not in that Borowitz Report format,” Borowitz says. “For example, I’ll be covering both political conventions this summer. And as we get into the fall, and we have more like debates — I don’t know if these two are capable of debating each other — it remains to be seen, or if they want to, but I’m going to be I’ll be covering the debates… you’ll be able to watch along with me and chat with me during the debates.”
He may even (shudder) do a podcast: “I’d never actually had a regular podcast before, I always wanted on my gravestone to say ‘he never had a podcast,’ because I thought that would be a mark of distinction,” Borowitz quips. “I may ultimately now fall off the wagon and do a podcast, which is a horrifying thought that I have betrayed my own sense of standards.”
It’s part of a plan to reach more people in more places, ultimately creating something of a community bonded by love of comedy and politics.
“My lifestyle doesn’t really permit me to do a lot of touring because I’m a parent and I’m at home and I don’t really want to be on the road,” Borowitz says. “But there’s so many places in the country, especially red states, where people feel very isolated, and very alone, and they don’t have a community of people they can talk to who maybe they’re a little bit more in sync with. It’s great to be able to reach out to people like that and talk to people in Kansas or Kentucky or Wyoming.”
Borowitz launched The Borowitz Report in 2001 as a satirical newsletter (he says he used Mailchimp at the time, before it was cool), ultimately bringing it to The New Yorker (where he had been a contributor) in 2012.
Borowitz says he was initially connected to the team from Substack a few years ago, but he was still under contract with The New Yorker, so the discussions didn’t go anywhere. He reconnected with them just days after his exit from the publication last year, inspired by Substack writers like historian Heather Cox Richardson and his friend, the political cartoonist Liza Donnelly.
“I love the fact that it’s this kind of larger community,” he says. “I liked the notion that somebody who had discovered Substack because of someone like Heather Cox Richardson, or Robert Reich, or somebody like that might stumble upon me, who maybe has never heard of me before, maybe doesn’t read The New Yorker, has never, you know, been on my Facebook page.”
That network, combined with Substack’s tech stack and support, was what pushed him over the line to join the platform, and make it the home for The Borowitz Report moving forward.
“This is like [Borowitz Report] 3.0. The difference this time is that the technology and the financial structure of newsletters is just completely transformed,” he says. “Technology is destroying our lives but it’s also making newsletters better.”
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