The Beehiiv Media Collective will add the longtime CBS News travel editor Peter Greenberg, former IndieWire editor-in-chief Dana Harris-Bridson, and tech and politics reporter David Covucci to its ranks. The collective now includes about 30 journalists that’ve gone independent.
Greenberg will launch The Upgrade on September 15, “bringing his investigative approach to the process and business of travel.” Harris-Bridson will launch Flamingo Media in January 2027 to cover “the increasingly interconnected market spanning entertainment, creators, brands, platforms, technology and capital.” And Covucci will expand FOIAball, which uses public records to uncover stories inside college football, to do even more reporting on “the powerful institutions and forces surrounding college sports, including political influence, surveillance technology, labor rights, and wealthy donors.”
Beehiiv, unlike (ahem) some of its newsletter platform competitors, does not take a percentage of paid subscription revenue. Instead, publishers that have outgrown the free plan pay a monthly subscription to Beehiiv. Members of the Media Collective get that monthly fee waived, as well as other perks like media liability insurance and pre-publication review.
When looking for candidates for the Beehiiv Media Collective, chief customer officer Preeya Goenka said she looks less to fill a specific, super-original niche than writers with a clear vision and the ability to stick to a publishing schedule.
“It might sound funny, but the actual topic or the industry is almost the least important part of what we look for [for the Media Collective],” Goenka said. “It’s more like, do they have a really good sense of like what they want to write about?”
“A sense of consistency in publishing is one of the key factors for growth and for success,” Goenka said, using three times a week as an example. “A lot of times people are like, ‘Hey, I have this idea and I’ll publish like when I have the time.’ We’d love to support them however we can, but they’re probably not the right fit for this program.”
Since the launch of the Media Collective in 2025, its members have earned more than $5 million. One major success from the Beehiiv Media Collective is Oliver Darcy’s Status, which now has four full-time employees, plus part-timers working on sales and the podcast. The newsletter has 130,000 subscribers, including “several thousand” paid, Darcy told Peter Kafka in early August.
Like other success stories from the collective, Darcy worked for years at a legacy newsroom (CNN). Other members were recently with Wall Street Journal (Joanna Stern), Vanity Fair (Richard Lawson), Washington Post (Dave Jorgenson), and CBS News (David Begnaud).
You can read more about the Beehiiv Media Collective here.
