After 23 Years, The Borowitz Report is as Successful as Ever

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Andy Borowitz was one of the first writers I met who truly understood the value of a personal newsletter.

I met Andy in 2017 when we both worked at the New Yorker. Many of the reporters and editors I knew saw newsletters as a tool for driving traffic to their stories. Andy saw it as something bigger: a way to build relationships with his audience, entertain people, sell books, and get loyal readers out to ticketed events he hosted around the country. 

His newsletter list was at the center of his success — and had been since a time when many of us still used a dial-up modem to log into our email accounts.

Some quick background: Andy is an accomplished writer and producer in Hollywood, most notably the co-creator of the Will Smith-led sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” In 2001, Andy took some of the humor commentary he was doing for outlets like NPR and launched his own self-titled comedy blog, called the Borowitz Report. He built a loyal audience by writing political satire about whoever was in the news at the time. (March 2001: “In Another Bearish Sign, Greenspan Runs Out on Check at Sizzler.”) A newsletter went out whenever Andy published a new story.

Over its first decade, the Borowitz Report newsletter mostly lost money. He wasn’t running ads in the newsletter or trying to monetize it directly, even as the cost of sending emails went up. His revenue came from selling books (like 2004’s “The Borowitz Report: The Big Book of Shockers”) or tickets to events like stand-up sets and storytelling sessions.

In 2012, the site and newsletter moved under the umbrella of the New Yorker, and Andy continued to write headlines, some of which, unfortunately, are just as relevant today as they were at the time. (May 2015: “Scientists: Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans.”) During my time at the New Yorker, Andy’s newsletter was one of the most popular in our portfolio. Any time we sent a Borowitz Report out to the nearly 250,000 readers on his email list, we saw a spike in traffic. Andy’s emails regularly saw open rates around 55-60% — and this was in a pre-Apple Mail Privacy Protection era when that meant something. It was a hugely popular newsletter (particularly, I’ll note, among members of my immediate family, who liked to forward me the Borowitz Report even after I explained that I was usually the one hitting send on those very newsletters).

But in December 2023, the New Yorker laid Andy off. Three months later, the Borowitz Report reappeared in inboxes, this time as an independent newsletter published on Substack. (I asked how Andy convinced the magazine to let him take his email list with him — a rare situation in this business. He declined to comment on that.) Most of the headlines felt familiar — June 2024: “New York Woman Panics at Prospect of Four More Years With Trump,” he wrote about former First Lady Melania Trump — but now, Andy mixed in new content alongside his left-leaning satirical stories. He published a series of fictional haikus from Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. He ran a journalistic interview with politician Adam Schiff. He started putting some content behind a paywall, and according to Substack’s public metrics, he has tens of thousands of subscribers paying $50 per year or $5 per month for the newsletter — meaning that a paid newsletter that launched in March now brings in more than $500,000 in annual revenue. (Before Substack and Stripe take their cuts, of course.) As of this writing, his overall newsletter audience has grown to more than 389,000 subscribers. 

In June, Andy and I discussed this next chapter for his newsletter. Why did he go independent again? What’s his plan for the paid newsletter? Why expand beyond satirical headlines? And why — after nearly a decade of writing headlines about Donald Trump — return for yet another presidential election? Andy walked me through the state of the Borowitz Report and why this time, things are a little bit different.

(This interview has been condensed and edited.)

You started the Borowitz Report in 2001 as an independent publication, and now you’re back operating independently in 2024. What’s changed this time around?

One is, when I started in 2001, you couldn’t monetize a newsletter — or at least not unless somebody was doing a newsletter in specialized areas, like precious metals or investments. People had newsletters that people would pay for. But for a joker like me, who’s just expressing his opinion and doing jokes, there was not a model. I didn’t see the Borowitz Report as a money-making venture at all. I still don’t. I enjoy doing it, and it’s a form I like to write in. I like writing these short, satirical news pieces, and it started for me back in college or even high school, doing stuff in the school newspaper. What I’m putting out is pretty similar. It hasn’t changed much over the last 25 years. The difference now is that the technology has improved so much that you can do a lot more with the newsletter than I could in 2001. 

In 2001, we were still in the era of dialogue. People weren’t doing video, and they weren’t doing audio and streaming; it just was not a thing yet. The two biggest changes would be that one, now you can have a paid subscriber list, and two, the technology has improved so much. 

While you were at the New Yorker, there was this huge shift towards independent writers with large followings launching paid subscription products. Had you been tracking this or thinking about doing it with the Borowitz Report at some point?

I had actually been approached by Substack two years ago — two years before I eventually moved. At the time they approached me, I was under contract with the New Yorker. I’d been writing for the New Yorker since 1998. I was flattered, but I felt like one should have loyalty to the place where one works. I wasn’t looking to move at that point.

In 2023, Condé Nast had all these cutbacks, and I was one of the people caught up in that. Suddenly, I was no longer under contract, and it gave me the opportunity to think about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to keep the subscriber base that I’d been writing for for so long. I didn’t want to suddenly say to hundreds of thousands of people, “Okay, so long! I am sailing off into the sunset.” Because I could have done other things, certainly, but I felt like that was too valuable a community to have assembled over such a long time to be cavalier about leaving it. I knew I wanted to keep some version of the Borowitz Report going. 

The question to me was, “What else could I do?” Because after over 20+ years, I didn’t want to just do the satirical pieces. I knew that would be the bread and butter of what the market would want. But I thought, “Is there an opportunity to expand my portfolio beyond that and do some other things?” Because I have done a lot of other things in my career — they just haven’t been reflected in the Borowitz Report until now. Now we’re building it out and doing some other things, and that’s been exciting and fun and challenging. 

You’re doing podcasts, you just did an interview with Adam Schiff, you’re doing Trump haikus. What else is part of the subscription product that you’re building out? 

It is, as you would say in your business, a freemium newsletter. Most of the content is free and will always be free. There are people who, going back to 2001 when I started doing the Borowitz Report, have grown accustomed to getting it for free. Interestingly enough, at the New Yorker, it was not free because they would get the newsletter, but the newsletter would include the headline and a preview, and then they hit a paywall. This version of the Borowitz Report is more back to the old version — you get the entire story in the newsletter, and you don’t have to click on any links. The question is, if most people want that, what are the added things that you can layer on top of that to make it interesting for people to pay? Because it’s $50 a year or $5 a month. 

The first couple of pieces I did were longer pieces that were funny but factual. They weren’t satirical news — they were a little bit more like the book I wrote a couple of years ago called “Profiles in Ignorance,” which is writing about real stories, real facts, politicians, and people in the news. They’re funny because the politicians are idiotic. The first two were about Eric Trump, and then somewhat presciently, the second one was about Kristi Noem, who became kind of a big newsmaker, just coincidentally. Those were cases where the news kind of conspired to make something a little more timely. They were the first two things I did. [I thought], “Okay, I’ll do some long-form journalism — more analysis than journalism.” 

One day, I stumbled on this notion of writing some haikus [by] Marjorie Taylor Greene. She is a favorite character of mine. She provides a lot of good material. I enjoy the haiku form. That was a surprisingly successful piece in terms of people buying paid subscriptions off of that. Then I had the idea, “What if I had a contest where readers would submit haikus about what Trump is thinking as he’s on trial?” I got hundreds of submissions. Then we decided to put it to a vote to see which was the best one. I shared the five best I chose, and we got it down to a runoff. Then, finally, we had a winner, and I interviewed the winner. It was something that caught on, and readers liked it. 

If I’ve learned any lesson from this, it’s that I don’t want to let the readers lead me too much. If they don’t like something but I like doing it, I’m going to keep doing it, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean more subscription growth or even if some people unsubscribe. This is my playground, and I’m going to have fun with it. Hopefully, people will come along with me. Also, when you have a platform that enables you to try so many different things like audio or video podcasts, it’s worth trying some things and seeing how they go. When I interviewed Adam Schiff, that was a pretty serious interview — it wasn’t a lot of comedy. He had a few jokes. But I was mainly curious about things like, “What’s the future of our democracy?” I was asking him as somebody with a lot of gravitas and knowledge to educate my readers, and he did a great job of that. But I was surprised by how much people wanted that. People wanted a podcast, and I’ve been swearing for years that it would say on my tombstone, “He never did a podcast.” Now I’ve fucked that up because I’ve gone and done it. It’s not going to be a weekly thing — I don’t have the bandwidth. I don’t want to staff up and have a podcast company. I just want to do some videos occasionally. 

I’m going to do things like Q&As with my audience so they can submit some questions. We’re going to have live chats during some events, like during the first presidential debate. If it’s horrible, I think we shouldn’t be obligated to watch it alone. We should be able to watch it with people we love or at least people we agree with. If people enjoy that, we’ll do more live chats during things like the conventions. We have this opportunity to do different things because of the software, which is very good and very easy to use. 

I don’t have a master plan. So far, paid subscriptions have been growing very rapidly. I’m sure, eventually that’ll flatten out over time. Hopefully, it will continue to evolve as my interests keep changing as I learn more from the audience — again, not to be completely led by them, but as I take input from them. 

I saw you live a couple of years ago at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and you filled out a 3,000-seat theater. It does not surprise me that many of your fans have followed you to a new platform. Substack’s leaderboard says you have tens of thousands of paying subscribers after just a couple of months. Are you surprised by the response?

I’m 100% surprised. I can say that sincerely. You just never know how these things are going to play out. When we launched on March 19, within the first few hours, we realized, “Wow, a lot of people want to pay for this.” I’ve been in entertainment for a long time — for decades, I have to admit — and you just never know. William Goldman, the screenwriter, had a great saying about Hollywood: no one knows anything, and I stand by that. 

My son told me he was less surprised, simply because of the thing that you mentioned, which is that if you can fill up a theater with people who are willing to pay to see you live, that’s at least a good indicator that somebody’s willing to pay to see you. One of the nice things about doing video on the site is that it’s not the same as a stand-up experience. The tone is different. It’s more of a conversation, it’s a little bit less performative. I think the success of the live shows could have predicted this a little bit. But again, it came as a shock to me because until you put yourself out there, you don’t know, and that’s what’s scary about doing anything entrepreneurial. It can be very rewarding when you see it working. But I don’t take my subscribers, either free or paid, for granted. Whether they’re giving me time or time and money, there’s a value to that currency, and I want to make sure that at least they’re getting what they’re here for. I do my best to satisfy.

When I first met you at the New Yorker, you told me about how you used social media as a testing ground for satirical headlines. Has your headline-writing process changed at all?

Well, I was coming up with headlines long before social media. I think when I started doing the Borowitz Report, there was Myspace. I wasn’t going onto Myspace and testing out jokes. Once Facebook came along, and especially once I had a substantial number of readers on Facebook, it became a good way to both entertain those readers and also road-test some jokes. I would throw out some headlines, and if something caught on, I would sometimes say, “Okay, well, that might be worth actually writing up into a whole story.” When I say a whole story, I mean all four paragraphs of a story because Borowitz Report stories are short. 

The only way the market testing on social media has changed is that Facebook’s algorithms have changed. My content on Facebook doesn’t get shared as widely as it did, say, five years ago. I’m dealing with a much smaller sample size when I put a joke out there. It’s not reaching 200,000 people — it’s reaching maybe 20,000 people. [Ed: Andy has more than 1 million followers on Facebook.] I don’t want to be too dependent on what even those 20,000 people say because, at the end of the day, what matters is what makes me laugh, what I think is funny.

You’re writing a newsletter during the third Donald Trump presidential election. After you left the New Yorker, you had the ability to walk away and say, “I no longer need to write jokes around Trump anymore.” What brought you back for more?

I mean, isn’t that the definition of insanity? 

I would love to stop writing about Donald Trump. I think many people share that view. It was funny the first time. It was funny back in the 80’s when he was this annoyingly stupid, loud, brash, New York character. I would love to see this chapter of our history and of my history end.

People are under this mistaken impression that Trump is easy to write about from a comedy point of view, and he isn’t. It’s very hard to make jokes about somebody who’s already a clown. I have much more fun writing about somebody like Mitt Romney, who was so impossibly square. Trump is already so over the top and such an exaggeration that it becomes challenging to do anything about him. To answer your question, I think I was driven a little bit more out of the sense of trying not to let my audience go. Unfortunately, part of that bargain means I have to keep writing about Trump since he’s still in the landscape. I gave it some real thought about maybe stopping doing topical news. I have done other things, and maybe I should do other things, or maybe just spend more time walking my dog, which is also a pleasurable experience, certainly more than writing about Donald Trump. But here I am, Dan. It’s too late. There’s no turning back now.

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