Newsbreak Is Scummy. Here's Why You Should Avoid It.
Unless you are looking for a way to show more followers your Substack, you want nothing to do with it.
I’m a huge fan of the Big Two of indie writers: Medium and Substack. As a professional writer, I strongly encourage you to be on both of them because it gives you different followers.
Substack and Medium both have their own unique audiences, from what I’ve seen. Medium is great when it comes to curation and “hands off” marketing. Substack is all about Notes and putting your foot in it when it comes to marketing.
Of course, there are other platforms that have their own traction—including Vocal.media, the site I used to be an in-house writer and employee for. They have their pros and cons, but they’re definitely not that promising.
I’ve gone over this in the past, but today, I want to point out the sketchiest “indie writer” site on the net. It’s gotten even worse since I last reported on it with this article.
No, it’s not Vocal. It’s Newsbreak.
Newsbreak had all the trappings of a billion-dollar business.
In fact, it actually was founded by some very wealthy investors. The concept, as we were told, was simple: it wanted to be news that people adored, by “the little guy” who was locked out of traditional reporting.
People actually were very impressed with the app, as they should have been. The app was impeccably designed and made it easy for people to find local news. That’s why it raised $115 million in a single bout at one point.
For a while, Newsbreak actually paid very well. I joined way later, but I had friends who were making thousands per month there for evergreen content and trending topics. At my peak, I made about $1000 once.
One of the easiest ways for people to make money was by recruiting others—a technique that has been tried and tested. Many businesses do this as a legit way to get more users or clients.
Back in 2021 through 2023, most people would say that Newsbreak was pretty legitimate. I would have also given it the thumbs up, though I still had my issues with it back then.
The veneer started to crack for me when I explained that low earnings made me drop off the platform.
For a short-ish period of time, it was easy to actually go viral on Newsbreak. It was a good way to get new followers and also get more money. That didn’t last long. I started to see some ugly updates.
However, I started to notice a couple of cracks in Newsbreak’s veneer as time passed:
It was harder and harder to get any news to go viral as a small indie writer. Even when I was the first person reporting on something like an earthquake, I couldn’t get picked up. Instead of me, major news agencies like NJ.com were getting picked up instead.
The comments I’d get on my stories were often unhinged. I mean, it was glaringly obvious that these people were far-right. The comments they left blamed Biden for everything, including global warming. If I published feminist stuff, then I’d receive a lot of hateful comments. It got to the point that it was affecting my mental health.
When I wrote about why I stepped away from Newsbreak, all the comments immediately stopped and my traffic plummeted permanently. This is what makes me look twice. Why did all of my comments suddenly vanish overnight? It’s very strange and sketchy that my rant on Medium somehow managed to impact me getting hundreds of comments on my stuff. And yet, the proof was there.
Along with the difficulty of getting traction, I noticed that Newsbreak started to veer more and more right. It was an effect that reminded me quite a bit of what happened with FOX News. Back in the 90s, it was right-wing but still tolerable and reliable. Today, it’s recognized as propaganda. That scares me.
On Medium and my Substack, I published one rant about Newsbreak’s comments. After that rant, not one hate comment popped up on my feed. Suspicious, much? It’s almost as if they monitor what writers mention about them…
In recent months, people have started to discuss their own similar experiences with Newsbreak.
One of my friends,
, mentioned that he caught Newsbreak stealing his earnings. He’s far from the only one to bring this up. Others have mentioned that the articles that went viral would have their earnings slashed overnight. It’s even happened to me.Another Medium heavy hitter, Arlo Hennings, wrote about Newsbreak stealing his work. I don’t think he’s the only one who had this happen to him, though I myself never experienced this on the platform.
Newsbreak made waves on the writersphere again when Don Sabado wrote a whole article about how the platform “quiet fired” him by refusing to give his articles airtime. He’s far from alone. Virtually every top writer on Medium had the same treatment.
The overall verdict seems to be unanimous among writers: Newsbreak is exploiting writers, muting those the company dislikes, and also stealing from writers who work hard on their content.
It’s clear that Newsbreak no longer wants to be an “indie” brand.
Going on there today, I was unable to see many articles that were written by independent authors. They were almost all written by major news sites like ABC, News12, or NJ.com.
In other words, Newsbreak stopped caring about indie authors. They’ve become a news aggregate for major news sites that want to increase the amount of money they make on articles—nothing more.
If you were hoping for a decent income stream from Newsbreak, you won’t get it. That era is over. They got what they wanted from indie authors, now they’re steamrolling over the very people who made them popular.
Writers, you are not going to get paid from this platform. I’m sorry to tell you, but it’s true. I don’t even trust the metrics they use for traffic because I’ve caught them in lies about that myself.
But there’s a bigger issue here that scares me more.
It’s not just the quiet firings or the author muting that upsets me about Newsbreak. Hell, even the wage theft isn’t my biggest concern. My biggest concern about Newsbreak is how much the site seems to focus on right-wing, dog-whistle news.
I can’t be the only one who has noticed the sharp uptick in articles about the following:
Random attacks. I also noticed that a lot of these article titles tend to bring up whether a person is an immigrant or not. More subtly, I noticed that if the perpetrator is a person of color, they show his or her photo. If the perp is white, you actually have to read the article to see their photo.
Immigration stories. The Migrant Crisis of NYC was portrayed in a particularly bad light.
Memes and pet stories. Peppered throughout all this are pet stories and memes. These seem innocuous and often have a good cause behind them, but in recent years, troll farms started to use these “glurge pieces” to keep people engaged. Why? They noticed too much negative news harms engagement because people start to drop out when their mental health suffers. So, it’s not always as nice as it seems to be.
Anti-woman content. Notice a theme here? There’s a lot of low-key hate going on with this platform. It’s almost like a more techy version of FOX.
If I’m wrong and this is just on my feed, please tell me. Somehow, I don’t think it’s a “me only” thing.
This is far from the first content platform I’ve seen to try to be another FOX.
However, it’s the first platform I’ve ever seen to successfully rope left-leaning indie writers into recruiting readers for it. And that is terrifying because that means that there is still an ongoing battle to brainwash Americans into voting against their own interests.
Fear is what conservatism tends to float on. These articles are trying to make you scared and hateful. And, to add insult to injury, Newsbreak is also just feeding into the same cycle of right-leaning media that has done immeasurable damage to our society.
Seeing the propaganda taking center stage on this platform makes the high fundraising make sense to me. They’re looking to buy a platform in hopes of swaying elections, getting people to buy into hate propaganda, and upend democracy.
I guess for some folks, no price is too high for stripping freedoms.
No matter how you slice it or dice it, this is not the platform you want to be on.
I have a couple of mini-articles I was going to post on there, but I honestly don’t want to anymore. This platform makes me nervous. So, I’ll post them to the Tasteful Toast on Medium and others instead.
While I have had my misgivings about Medium before, I can proudly say that the platform would never pull the alarming stuff Newsbreak has been blatantly doing. Besides, I’d probably make more money publishing on Medium anyway.
Seriously, though. Watch out for this site. It’s not good news.
It's the same old story. Platforms like them pay well until they get rolling, then they all do the same thing: Get writers to write for free. Medium did it. Now Newsbreak's doing it. And let's not even TALK about YourTango, which actually gets you to PAY to write for them. I had their top article a couple of years ago that wasn't an astrology piece, and then fell on hard times and couldn't afford to renew my membership. They actually reached out to me to find out where I was, and I had to say, I had a major plumbing disaster and I can't afford to rejoin.
Offer to pay me anything?? HAhahahahahahahahaha.
However, I notice that pieces I wrote years ago for them are now being featured on msn and seen by who knows how many people. Nice exposure, but will I ever see one thin dime? Nope.
As long as millions of people want to write, they've got us by the balls. It's write for free or just don't write. Someone else laughs all the way to the fuckin' bank.
I wrote there for a bit. Very creative bookkeeping. They bait and switch writers. You’ll never get as many reads as you do before you qualify for monetization.