Veteran political journalist Ryan Lizza’s he-said, she-said Substack series on the Olivia Nuzzi scandal may have been a viral hit, but the “flood” of new subscribers didn’t translate into a financial windfall.
“On the money part, not enough,” Lizza said on Semafor’s “Mixed Signals” podcast when asked about how much money he made off of the 25,000-word series. “Olivia left me with a $127,000 legal bill that is still unpaid. There’s nothing that can compensate me for the damage that her recklessness did.”
Lizza’s Substack deep dive —which stems from Nuzzi’s alleged “digital relationship” with US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while she was engaged to Lizza—became a focal point of media industry gossip. The reporting drove eyeballs to his site, but Lizza said his decision to keep 60% of the content outside of a paywall meant the readership wasn’t really monetized. Not to mention the shared Substack passwords and PDFs that bounced around media industry group chats, removing the need to actually sign up for his newsletter.
“The original piece got a lot of attention and a flood of subscriptions,” Lizza said. However, he was skeptical about long-term retention. Many of them “are not people that are going to stick around.”
He’s still pretty bullish on the independent Substack journalist route, though. “There is still that sense that somehow writing something in a book or a magazine is different than doing it on Substack or a podcast. And that is not the world that we live in anymore.”
Plus, “I think we did better than [Nuzzi’s] book, but that’s a very low bar,” he said.
Nuzzi declined to provide a comment to Semafor for the podcast.
You can listen to the full interview on Mixed Signals from Semafor Media wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube.