42 minutes ago
1
“How young is too young for a life in prison?”
“SpaceX debris is washing ashore. Who’s responsible?”
“Why schools get paid even when students fail.”
Those are the top headlines so far on Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s new Substack publication, The National Press, launched this week.
The National Press repackages some of the top stories from Sinclair’s 178 local news stations — which employ around 1,200 journalists — into a daily, 30-minute broadcast-style show. The program is hosted by former Newsmax and Christian Cable Network anchor Lyndsay Keith, who summarizes the stories and interviews the local journalists who first reported them. In the videos, Keith sits at a desk with a microphone; the dimly lit background is illuminated just enough to make out two American flags in a mug. (It gives off a true-crime YouTube podcast vibe.)
As Axios’s Sara Fischer noted on Tuesday, Sinclair has long been accused of conservative bias in its local news operation. The National Press is launching in partnership with New Media, the company behind Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and the two publications look somewhat alike (in part because they both run on Substack). New Media staffers will help create the content and maintain the site and the company will take a portion of Sinclair’s revenue from Substack, Fischer reported.
The National Press is currently free to access, but has paid tiers that include ad-free viewing, community chat access, and merch. Subscriptions start at $5 per month or $50 per year. The five posts on the site so far have between seven and 14 likes each.
Wednesday’s episode focuses on a story about how Michigan is reconsidering lifetime sentences for people sentenced between the ages of 18 and 20. It also tackles AI regulation debates in Congress, drawing on reporting by Capitol Hill reporter Ahtra Elnashar. The show doesn’t appear to be filmed in one take like a true TV news broadcast (Keith is first seen in a black blazer, then a brown one, before switching back to black by the end of the video).
Another video, “Worth Noticing: School Bus Incidents,” is just two minutes long and compiles stories of school bus crashes from around the country. From the text accompanying the video:
We trust school buses to get our kids from the safety of our homes to school every day. So why are we seeing so many serious injuries and incidents? Is this simply a string of unrelated tragedies? Are staffing shortages the problem here? Training gaps? Weak safety protocols?
We’re going to be following these stories. Have you seen incidents like this in your community? Is this something that is keeping you awake at night?
Because these stories are horrific; we’re talking about every parent’s nightmare.
The National Press isn’t Sinclair’s first effort to reach a younger, video-first audience. In 2015, it launched millennial-focused news site Circa, which shuttered four years later.
