Media

How Tim Miller and The Bulwark became 2024’s unlikely YouTube stars

Tim Miller doesn’t enjoy making the MrBeast face, the wide-eyed, open-mouthed smile of a million YouTube thumbnail images. But he acknowledges that the numbers don’t lie: It’s what his fans want.

“Why do people like to click on the crazy thumbnails? That’s a question for a psychologist,” he mused.

Miller, who came up as a Republican staffer — he worked on Jon Huntsman’s and Jeb Bush’s campaigns and co-founded the opposition research-focused super PAC America Rising before breaking with his party over Trump — is now the floppy-haired, open-collared face of Never Trump outlet The Bulwark, one of the breakout media successes of the 2024 election.

YouTube has been central to its surging popularity: The publication, which had 50,000 YouTube subscribers last September, had 631,000 as of Saturday afternoon and counting.

Much of that growth has happened in the last two months, and video is driving it: Since President Joe Biden dropped out from the race, the publication has netted 88 million views on YouTube (for scale, total views on all of The Bulwark’s YouTube videos from the prior five years were 64.2 million). The publication told Semafor it has been averaging 296,000 views per video since Biden’s withdrawal, making it one of the most-viewed-per-video producers in all of English-language news media.

Miller appears in 15 of The Bulwark’s top 20 most-viewed videos, many of them simple clips from one of The Bulwark’s podcasts, produced by video director Barry Rubin. A recurring segment, “Tim’s Takes,” features the former strategist giving solo monologues straight-to-camera with instant analysis of major topics; a nine-minute-long breakdown of Kamala Harris’ new television ad, titled “Kamala’s MOST POWERFUL AD So Far! Everyone Needs to See!” has gotten over 700,000 views since it was posted Thursday.

Miller, 42, who lives in New Orleans with his husband and daughter, had achieved ordinary political fame before his breakout year. He was a staple on cable news political panels, and co-hosted the final season of the canceled Showtime series The Circus in 2023. Now, he and his Bulwark colleagues are bona fide stars of political media.

During a lunch last week with this Semafor reporter in downtown D.C., a young woman stopped to ask for a selfie with Miller and Bulwark Publisher Sarah Longwell (“I can’t wait to send this to my mom,” she remarked).

Backstage at the Atlantic Festival that day, staffers for Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) posed for pictures with The Bulwark duo before they took the stage to raucous applause. Panel moderator Evan Smith, the senior adviser to Atlantic owner Emerson Collective, pointed out that The Atlantic doesn’t often prefer to host other non-Atlantic media personalities at its events, but made an exception for The Bulwark crew, a sign of their influence and popularity.

It’s a remarkable success story for an outlet with around 20 full-time staffers that never had ambitions to reach a mass audience, much less one primarily interested in watching its journalists on-camera.

Harris is getting out there

Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have done fewer interviews than any presidential ticket in recent history, a subject of running criticism from journalists and Republicans alike, and a source of nervousness for Democrats who note that Donald Trump tends to flood the zone.

The Harris campaign has emphasized that its time has been extremely limited by Harris’ last-minute nomination to the top of the ticket, and she doesn’t have time to do as much media as she would’ve in a normal campaign cycle. But in the final weeks leading up to the election, Harris and Walz both plan to increase their media appearances, with a focus on communicating through local outlets in battleground states, we’re told. That means morning and evening local television news broadcasts, with a handful of national news interviews as well.

Still, the campaign is also making some time for nontraditional media appearances as a way of reaching younger or less tuned-in audiences. Last week, Harris did Wired’s “autocomplete interview.” The campaign had also discussed other nontraditional venues, such as a potential appearance with Zane Lowe, the well-known DJ and host of an Apple Music show, to discuss Harris’ music taste.

The campaign has also used its appearances to send messages to voters about her priorities. Initially when negotiating over Harris’ interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, the campaign suggested a panel of exclusively male interviewers. It was a reversal of former President Donald Trump’s panel, which had been conducted entirely with Black women (including Semafor’s Kadia Goba), and it may be an acknowledgement that Harris hopes to speak to Black men, a group that Trump has been courting.

While Harris has limited her media strategy, there’s some evidence that her few media appearances have helped the campaign. The Democrat-aligned public opinion group Blueprint shared survey results this week that found clips from Harris’ interviews with CNN and 6ABC were viewed positively by at least six out of 10 voters and helped voters feel that they knew the Democratic nominee better.

Mixed Signals, media vs. tech edition

The dance-turned-fistfight between tech and journalism has been around longer than most of us have been in either business, and Jason Calacanis was there right at the beginning, when he launched a zine to cover the burgeoning New York internet scene in the 1990s. He’s since wandered between the sides, as a techie who helps moguls develop rational reasons for hating the media, a commentator who drives journalists crazy, and as a media figure himself; as a co-host of the podcast All In, he recently grilled Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance. On Mixed Signals this week, he offered a blunt assessment of what tech titans see in the media: In a word, “power.”

Listen for his enlightening — and at times combative — conversation with me and Nayeema Raza about that power and the rise of a new alternative media that provides safe spaces for CEOs.

Lorenz in limbo?

Taylor Lorenz still works at the Washington Post. We felt the need to share what’s essentially a non-story based on the constant stream of DMs, inquiries, and rumors about her employment status, which bubbled up again last week. Within the span of an hour on Friday, three people told Semafor that the tech and digital culture reporter was leaving the paper, potentially a consequence of her Instagram post earlier this summer with a caption labeling Joe Biden a war criminal.

It was the latest round of rumors and speculation about Lorenz, who is often the subject of deranged (and occasionally deserved) attention. Lorenz’s lack of output since her Instagram post and recent comments on social media about the weakness of legacy media in comparison to other platforms has only fueled speculation that she will not be a reporter at the paper for much longer. (Lorenz is currently on vacation and confirmed she still works there.)

The Post has not been aggressive in tamping down rumors. When asked over the last month about Lorenz’s status with the paper, a spokesperson has repeatedly told reporters there is “no change” in her employment — a denial, but not the strongest defense of one of the paper’s most high-profile journalists.

Katie Davies is the new US editor-in-chief of DailyMail.com.

⁜ Tech

Like and subscribe: YouTube this week rolled out a new Communities feature aimed at keeping fans on the platform. The tools allow creators to add additional images or videos in comments and surfaces complementary comments automatically to give creators greater visibility into relevant fan interactions.

⁛ News

Very Royal: Caught up with the British journalist Emily Maitlis at screening of A Very Royal Scandal (on Prime Video), where she noted: “That might have been the Queen’s last big decision — she OK’d the Prince Andrew interview.” — Ben

Sign of the Times: In our piece last week on the Times Tech Guild threatening to go on strike during the election, we noted that some newsroom figures were alarmed that the labor action could throw the paper’s election coverage into chaos. In a release shared with Semafor by the Guild this week, the Times newsroom union said it supported the actions of its colleagues in the sister tech union.

Other changes are afoot at the Times. A tipster this week informed Semafor that as part of a remodel of the Times’ D.C. bureau, columnist Thomas Friedman’s office, sadly, is being downsized.

Haute product: Substack is becoming a more important platform in the world of fashion media. Publications and subscriptions in the “Fashion & Beauty” category have more than doubled in the last year, generating more than $10 million in subscription revenue. Several Substackers threw events during New York Fashion Week. And during Paris Fashion Week later this month, Substack is throwing an exclusive dinner and a party.

⁋ Publishing

What happened at Guernica: Former Guernica editor Jina Moore Ngarambe spoke at length to Josh Hersh on the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Kicker podcast about the dangers of the online debate over “normalizing” or “centering,” points of view you don’t like, and avoiding seeing empathy as zero-sum.

⁌ TV

Morning in America: The average morning for a television viewer in Georgia right now is a horrifying onslaught of ads, as political advertising tracker Medium Buying points out.

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