A letter to the 300 axed Washington Post staffers from Carole Cadwalladr

There is life for journalists after being sacked by a major brand, says Cadwalladr.

Founders of The Nerve, five women pictured sat on and standing around a sofa with a grey backdrop — Founders of The Nerve, from left to right: Lynsey Irvine, Sarah Donaldson, Carole Cadwalladr, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter. Picture: The Nerve

Solidarity on a terrible day. A craven tech bro has sold you out.

The Post is a symbol, both for journalism and America, and for Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis to axe 300 of you in a single day, including those currently reporting in war zones, feels like an augury.

But as a journalist who worked for the Guardian for 20 years and who, alongside my colleagues, was binned in a similar fashion less than a year ago, I have important information to impart: do not give up.

When our management decided to dump our beloved newspaper, The Observer, we, as a news organisation, fought back: we went on strike. We didn’t win – a board of mainly non-journalists led by a banker saw to that – but we went down fighting. It isn’t over until it’s over.

One week after 100 staff and freelance journalists were “banged out” of the Guardian’s offices (an old Fleet Street tradition, don’t ask), we started planning a phoenix project. What if we set up our own news outlet? Was that even possible?

[ The Observer was taken over by Tortoise Media Group in March 2025 with at least 20 staff taking redundancy and many other long-serving freelances and casuals, including Cardwalladr, losing their jobs ]

We were inspired by a crop of insurgent new outlets in the US (Zeteo, Drop Site News, The Contrarian, 404 Media, Status) and the UK (Byline Times, DoubleDown News, Declassified, Mill Media). And, also by the sense of agency that came from going on strike. Standing in solidarity for the journalistic values we believed in and having a laugh in the process was the genesis of the idea for what became The Nerve.

What if we could try to do journalism in a different way? What if we didn’t have to ask permission? What if we could persuade a community of readers to build a new kind of journalism with us?

“We” are three senior editors. Jane Ferguson, (the former editor of the Observer New Review section), her deputy Sarah Donaldson (who’s leading the project), Imogen Carter (another senior editor), The Observer’s former creative director Lynsey Irvine and me, an investigative journalist and writer.

At the time, we assumed we needed money and investment. That’s what everyone told us. Especially as I was the only writer and we had ambitions: for meaty investigations, for public interest reporting, for reviews by great critics, and to pay the paper’s two most popular columnists – Stewart Lee and Philippa Perry – who’d elected to come with us.

But in the end we opted to simply just jump off the cliff. Our USP as a team is that we know how to execute – we’ve worked together for nearly 20 years – so that’s what we did. The others invested their Guardian payoffs in the project and I was being supported by a Substack newsletter I’d hastily set up. We started with nothing.

It’s why we chose the name, The Nerve, because you can’t tell people to have nerve unless you can show it yourself. And having nerve we believe is the quality, more than any other, that’s needed right now.

So, here’s how it’s going. We focus on what we believe are the three subjects that define our age: culture, politics and tech. We produce two beautifully curated newsletters a week, a website, thenerve.news, and a newly launched YouTube channel

We don’t paywall but we offer membership benefits with live and virtual events.

We bust our three-month target in the first week.

We’ve landed several major investigations (a whole run of stories on a Russian spy ring, Larry Ellison’s capture of Tony Blair and Palantir’s dangerous enmeshment in the UK state).

We’ve published a pilot print product. Our Bluesky already has four times the followers (17,000) of our old newspaper. Our Instagram posts reach up to half a million people. We’re paying for everything out of revenue. We’ve now received grants from two incredibly generous philanthropists to support our expansion into video and public interest investigations. And if we can maintain the same, modest rate of growth, we will be sustainable in a year.

For the number nerds: our monthly growth is in double digits. Our conversion rate (free to paying subscribers) is 12% – three times the industry standard of 3 to 4%. And the open rate of our newsletters is an incredibly high 60%.

I was a Guardian lifer. I would never have given up the reach of a global news platform. For the last decade, I have worked flat out to expose what I hope everyone can now see is a Silicon Valley-enabled global far-right insurgency. And what’s mattered to me more than anything is for that work to have impact.

And here’s the most stunning finding to report. Between the Nerve and my personal Substack – How to Survive the Broligarchy, which is just over a year old – I get up to 200,000 unique views per article. That would be a very healthy performance for an article on The Guardian.

We’re only four months in and it could all go horribly wrong but speaking personally I don’t care. The world is on fire. The entire media industry is a shitshow. And the only interesting, impactful thing to do in this moment, I believe, is to be bold and brave and to try something new.

What looks like “security” isn’t. If a news organisation decides to dump an entire title or a broligarch can axe 300 journalists in a single day, it’s not any sort of sustainable or reliable model.

You can’t rebuild the Washington Post overnight but you can try. Beehiiv, the newsletter platform we use, put us on their media collective programme which includes paying for our monthly legal cover (in the US it also provides a medical insurance stipend). Mostly, we’re excited and proud to be part of a growing independent network that’s led by journalists and that understands why a free and independent press matters now more than ever.

[ Beehiv founder Tyler Denk has offered ex Washington Post journalists one year of commission-free access to the platform ]

To the battered and bruised journalists of the Washington Post, I have this to say: democracy doesn’t have to die in darkness. There is another way.

Your ally in arms, Carole

PS If you do want to take the leap, get in touch: carole.cadwalladr@thenerve.news.