
The News
Two prominent New York journalists are launching a scoopy new media venture aimed at storming the city’s interlocking scenes of media, culture, and power.
Lachlan Cartwright and Ravi Somaiya’s new Breaker Media will be rooted in “downtown New York, where all the best stories break,” said Cartwright, an Australian who has done tours of duty at the New York Post, Daily Beast, and Hollywood Reporter, and recently wrote a confessional of his time at the National Enquirer during President Donald Trump’s rise.
Breaker will launch as a $12/month weekly newsletter and podcast to start, and will also put on the occasional play (why not). The outlet intends to be local to Downtown Manhattan, where both men live, the way the Southern District of New York is a local prosecutor’s office.
“There’s more stories per square foot than anywhere else in the world,” said Somaiya, a former New York Times reporter and Vice News Tonight correspondent who more recently was senior digital editor for the Columbia Journalism Review.
Somaiya also once worked at Gawker — he and Cartwright met soon after he crashed Vanity Fair’s Oscars party in 2010. That, they said, is one point of reference for Breaker, along with Spy and Private Eye.
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The two spoke to me in their temporary quarters in the West Chelsea Building — a sprawling warren of studios that Somaiya said mirrored their ambitions of using the media beat as a window into Manhattan’s corridors of power and culture.
“If you open any door, it’s like a whole weird world: It’s money, power, scandal, weird sh**, art, fashion, music, downtown.’
“Our aim is to tell people things they didn’t already know, and we’re trying to recapture that old thing you used to have, like when I fell in love with magazines — you just don’t know what’s on the next page,” he said.

Ben’s view
Somaiya and Cartwright are green card holders from the United Kingdom and Australia, respectively — two media cultures largely immune to American self-seriousness at a moment that is both serious and extremely confusing.
They both have track records of breaking news aggressively, and while it’s easy to decry media navel-gazing, it’s also obviously true that the culture wars lie at the heart of American public life in 2025.
They said they hope to skip over the current, tired divides — woke and anti-woke, reactionary and resistance.
“The only reactionary we are is to boredom,” said Cartwright. “We are against boredom and boredom only.”
“Totally against boredom,” Somaiya added.

Notable
- Breaker will join a handful of other daily and weekly newsletters about media. I asked Somaiya and Cartwright to free-associate about their rivals. Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources? “Establishment.” Oliver Darcy’s Status? “Upstart” Dylan Byers’ In the Room? “Access.” And Semafor Media? “Competition.” (Flattery will get you everywhere...)