Thank you Jessica Yellin, the brilliant creator of News Not Noise for last night’s live video chat. As those of you watching know, I knew Jessica a little bit when she was in New York/DC as the Chief White House correspondent for CNN. But I haven’t seen her in over a decade. So it was great to catch up!
All these years later, what an evolution she has effected! In 2013 she left CNN, wrote a satirical novel, Savage News, and then in 2018 she created the wildly successful platform on Instagram that is News Not Noise, that’s also here on substack.
I reached out to Jessica because I wanted to know how she chooses her stories for News Not Noise, and how she then figures out how to report them in a way that is meaningful and not shrill. Whatever she’s doing, it clearly works, because she has nearly 200,000 subscribers here! And that’s separate from her followers on Instagram and You Tube.
We kick off discussing Iran, and how to cover that in a thoughtful, impactful way, when there is literally so much noise out there. Jessica explains that she’s hearing from her subscribers, many of whom are women, they’re concerned their kids could get drafted if there’s another war. That’s not a story that the Beltway reporters would think to cover.
Then she gets into the story of her career post CNN. And just before the ten-minute mark she explains how she knew there was an audience of people turned-off by the crisis-driven tone of cable-news. These people didn’t want to suffer a “panic attack” whenever they switched on the news. They wanted to understand, calmly, how the news affects them. And yet Jessica struggled initially to persuade investors that there was a market for telling stories in a new way.
At the thirteen-minute mark, we hit two stories we are both interested in reporting aspects of because they certainly affect all of us: Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and Immigration.
Jessica says she now works just as many hours as she did when she was at CNN - “it’s non-stop” - but we agree that it feels different working so hard when you are accountable to yourself, not someone else. It feels a lot better! And it’s great to feedback from your subscribers, which we do here.
At the eighteen-minute mark we get into what I’m learning about what works and what doesn’t on my substack. And how I’m trying to balance book reporting with delivering quality content.
Around the twenty two-minute mark Jessica asks me about The Idaho Four, my new book with James Patterson, and why it’s taken so long for the alleged suspect, Bryan Kohberger, to get to trial. I get into that, and I explain why this book is different for me than my previous ones. It’s much more personal.
(You will be hearing a LOT about the Idaho Four from here on! I will want to know what all of you think of it when it’s published on July 14. Remember, you can pre-order it here.)
We conclude talking about other court cases in the news, like Diddy’s, and also Gavin Newsom’s.
Which brings me to the fact that this week Adam Klasfeld and I are moving are weekly chat this afternoon at 4.30pm because tomorrow he will be in Nashville, Tennessee for the Kilmar Abrego Garcia hearing.
See you later!
And, Thank you
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