Nicholas Carlson on Why He Left Business Insider, His New Start-Up Dynamo, and The Future of Media

Nicholas Carlson, CEO and editor in chief of a new video-focused media company Dynamo, has navigated some of the most significant shifts in digital journalism throughout his career. He went from working at a trade publication called internetnews.com to blogging for Gawker and eventually rose to the top of Business Insider, where he served as global editor in chief.

“They paid me $12 a post,” Carlson recalled of his humble beginnings at Gawker, in an interview with Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club. “So, I would wake up, write seven posts, go for a walk in Inwood Hill Park, come back, and write seven more.”

At Business Insider, Carlson oversaw the growth of the newsroom to more than 600 staffers and the outlet’s first Pulitzer Prize, for an illustrated investigation on a Chinese internment camp. Business Insider was known under Carlson for drawing the ire of the wealthy and powerful with its hard-hitting reporting, which sparked legal threats from the likes of Dave Portnoy.

Carlson’s biggest challenge at Business Insider came when it reported on alleged plagiarism committed by Neri Oxman, the wife of hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. The billionaire threatened legal action and assailed Business Insider in a frantic campaign waged on X, formerly Twitter, as well as behind the scenes, which prompted Business Insider’s parent company Axel Springer to initiate a review of the piece. Though the review found the reporting to be accurate, Axel Springer’s waffling on the story sparked controversy.

Carlson stood by the reporting, despite that pressure from Axel Springer. He ended up leaving Business Insider last May, a decision he said had nothing to do with Bill Ackman and all to do with a new idea: Dynamo, a video-centric media company that will start with 12 to 18-minute YouTube videos. The first Dynamo show, which he announced on Press Club, is set to launch in the second quarter of this year and will be called Business Explains the World.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a rough transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: I want to go back to the beginning. Before you had an illustrious career as a journalist and ran a large newsroom that scooped up a Pulitzer Prize, you worked at Merrill Lynch. Do I have that right?

Nicholas Carlson: That’s right. I did.

Why?

My aspirations when I left college were a bit silly, and it’s fun to think about now. I wanted to be a short story writer. I thought that was a job for some reason. You read about people like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a patent clerk, and Stephen King, who worked at an industrial laundromat. So I thought to myself, “What I’m going to do is get a day job, and then at night, I’ll work on these stories.” I did that for about three weeks, and I realized I couldn’t do a job that I didn’t enjoy—“hate” is too strong of a word—but just wasn’t for me, for money, and then do something I loved for free. Stephen King’s dedication to writing, just cranking away on spec because he had to, is amazing. I couldn’t do it. So I thought, “What’s something that’s similar to short story writing, but is a profession?” I think I was at Merrill Lynch for about three or four weeks. On the weekends, I just didn’t feel like myself. I was wondering, “What is this feeling?” So, I just dove into applying for jobs in journalism, sending out hundreds—over 200, I think. I got an interview at a place called chainstoreage.com. I thought, “What is that?” I had one interview, and they looked at my resume and said, “No, you’re not a journalist.”

You got rejected by chainstoreage.com?

I sure did. Another fun moment from my job-hunting time: A friend of mine had an aunt who worked at Bloomberg, and she said, “Look, I can’t get you a job interview, but I can get you an informational interview.” I’m sure you remember those. So, I sat down with this older editor in Bloomberg’s gleaming rocket ship of a headquarters. He looked at my resume and just went through it, and I will never forget this: He said, “Nobody cares, nobody cares, nobody cares, nobody cares.” It was tough. Eventually, I got a job at a trade publication called internetnews.com. No one I knew had heard of it, and I hadn’t either, but it was a trade publication. I tell aspiring journalists all the time: Go work for trade publications. It happened that the editor-in-chief at that publication had also been a client associate at Merrill Lynch, and she saw something in me. She gave me a shot. Her name is Erin Joyce, and I’m always grateful for her.

So you were at that trade publication, and then what happened next? You went to Gawker?

Yeah, I was there for about a year and a half. They had this funny rule where you weren’t allowed to aggregate, and you weren’t even allowed to cite another publication’s reporting. It was very old-school and silly for them, as we’ve all learned since, but great for me. I would open up the paper and read whatever Kevin Delaney had reported about the Google plane or the YouTube acquisition the day before, and I would try to re-report it. That was great practice. Also, no one was reading it, so it felt like I had a lot of space to work with. I wanted to be somewhere more fun, so I noticed Choire Sicha—who’s now a writer at New York Magazine but has had many big roles in media—posted something saying, “We’re hiring at Gawker.” I applied, but Choire said, “No, you’re not for us, but you could maybe work for this thing called Valleywag.” I met with Owen Thomas, the editor, had a drink with him, and ended up there, where I stayed for a year. Just a year, but when Gawker finally closed for the first time, they listed the most prolific writers for the company ever, and I was in the top ten. The reason was that they paid me $12 per post.

The pinnacle of digital media.

I don’t know if it was the pinnacle because digital media is always changing. Everything is digital media now, in a way. But it was a time when it felt like a village, where you knew everybody writing on the Internet. Of course, you didn’t, but you were watching what was happening at Gizmodo and Engadget. Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton hated each other and were the two barons of digital media. It’s funny to think about now, but it was a really small community. It was a fun time.

The cliff eventually came for Gawker, and for a lot of other digital media properties that scaled too fast, got too big, and had the rug pulled out from under them in various ways.

Many times.

Many times over. Did you see that coming at the time? Or did it feel like this was the future of news and nothing could stop it?

Again, I was fighting to get a job. I really benefited from coming into the industry at a time when I couldn’t get hired by print publications—which is where I wanted to work, where we all wanted to work. They wouldn’t even give me a look. So I ended up getting hired by a digital publication. I always tell people: if you can catch a wave and be part of a movement, take it. I’ve worked hard, and I think I’m reasonably talented, but I also benefited from entering the journalism industry during a period when a new medium was taking off. It felt like we were part of something booming. That said, I do think that cycle is ending. The website era is going through a tough phase. It started a few years ago when Facebook began pulling back.

Although we’re back in business now.

I guess so. If that’s real —

Bring back Mic.com. I want to see all the 2012-era websites back.

Yeah, if Zuckerberg’s announcement means they’re stepping back from content moderation and bringing back what they call “civic discourse” on Facebook, maybe referral traffic from Facebook will return.

It could.

That would inflate a lot of businesses again.

How did you get to Business Insider?

You mentioned seeing the rise and fall of Gawker, which got too big. I got laid off from Gawker Media. It’s funny—it’s not entirely accurate to say I was laid off. We were all perma-lancers. One day, I got a call from the editor saying, “You’ll no longer be getting assignments.” It felt like losing a job, but technically, I didn’t have one. No health insurance, no severance—nothing.

That’s tough.

Yeah, it was brutal. I come from a pretty solid background, and I’ve been fortunate in that way. If things really went south, I knew I could rely on my parents.

You could always move home.

I could always move back home. I felt that at the time. I also had the privilege of being in an industry where, when you get laid off, you’ve done work that’s public. I did pretty well at Valleywag, so I could walk around to other, healthier blog shops and say, “Do you want to work together?” The story I always tell about moving to Silicon Alley Insider—which is what it was called at the time—is that it was a small tech blog set up by Kevin Ryan and my current partner, Henry Blodget. It was intended to be the TechCrunch of the East Coast. It’s funny to think about that now, but back then, the idea of a regional tech blog felt important. My first encounter with Henry was after I misread a Yahoo earnings call statement and posted a snarky Valleywag piece about it. Henry absolutely crushed me in an essay on Silicon Alley Insider. I don’t know if it’s still available since archives get cleaned out sometimes, but he crushed me. There was also a guy named Peter Kafka there. I’m sure you know him. He was a great tech reporter and blogger. In the summer of 2008, he reached out and said, “You should come over here from Valleywag.” At the time, I thought, Excuse me, my next job will be at The New York Times. Of course, I didn’t say that to him, but I was thinking it. Then I got laid off and was like, Peter! He was leaving Silicon Alley Insider at that moment, but he introduced me to Henry. I met Henry, who had a big career as a stock analyst that went sideways, but he was rebuilding with this company. I also met Julie Hansen who was the president, who told me a story about Henry. She said his wife knew he was on the road to recovery when she heard him laughing while working. That resonated with me—the point of this work is to create something meaningful that lands with people. Henry and I hit it off, and I joined Silicon Alley Insider. So I went from one tech blog to another. I was a blogger. They gave me some equity, which at the time, I was like, Thanks, I guess. Around the same time, Dan Frommer, Jay Yarow, Joe Weisenthal, and I joined, and together, we turned that thing into a thing, along with Henry. It felt like we were inventing a new medium.

It grew to a newsroom of hundreds. By 2017, you’re the global editor in chief. What was it like going from being laid off from Valleywag to overseeing an international newsroom?

There were some bumps along the way — 2008 to 2017 is a long time. The biggest lesson I learned; when I joined, it was a startup, so everyone wore multiple hats. I was managing people, but I got into this to write. I had a big team of 14. I thought I was okay at it, but I had one staffer who told me, “It feels like you only care about your writing and not about teaching me what you said you would.” Meanwhile, I felt like all I did was employee reviews. It was terrible. Around that time, I broke a few big stories, including the one that made my career—getting Mark Zuckerberg’s college instant messages, which revealed a lot about his character. So I was like, You’re right. So I became Business Insider’s chief correspondent and wrote some big stories, one of which got me a book deal. While on book leave, I had the idea for a media company that didn’t need a website—something that lived entirely on social platforms. Business Insider is able to do what the Wall Street Journal was doing for much less money because it’s on the internet. What if you could launch a media company that didn’t need a website? People had already had this idea, but a lot of this goes into what Dynamo is now. When I came back, I pitched the idea to Henry, and he said, “We just raised money from Axel Springer. Why don’t you use this concept to expand Business Insider into Insider?” So we built a small newsroom—three full-timers and nine interns—and turned it into a video-only publication. That was my first editor in chief job. Eventually, we did add a website.

So you gained a lot of management experience with a smaller team before scaling up?

Exactly. I led that team for two years. Then in 2017, Henry decided to focus on being CEO and asked me to be editor-in-chief. My mission was to merge the newsrooms and fully transition Business Insider into Insider. That shift didn’t fully stick—it eventually reverted. It’s Business Insider again, and I think that was the right move. We really thought it through and learned a lot of lessons from it. By the time I became editor-in-chief—or, as we called it back then, global editor, which was kind of a silly title—I was also a parent, so I had become a much better manager.

Let’s talk about Dynamo — your new venture. What was the idea behind the company? How did you come up with it?

Yeah, so the idea behind the company—there are all sorts of inputs. But one of the core inputs for me is that I’m a storyteller. That’s why I wanted to be a short story writer. There’s something about creating a story and seeing people react to it—all that work that goes into it. I love it. I really do. As a journalist, I always felt it’s our responsibility to, of course, do the hard work of finding the information. That’s a big, expensive, hard part. But the other hard part is ensuring that information is received by people. That’s a big challenge right now. For me, that’s why we did a comic book at Business Insider—several of them—and one won a Pulitzer Prize. That’s why I’m proud we won a National Magazine Award at Business Insider with a video. The idea was, let’s meet people where they are. That’s the idea behind Insider. Be on Facebook, be on Twitter. For me, it’s a matter of technique, medium, and brand. Dynamo is a confluence of those things. The medium is video. When I started Insider, it was funny—I was a writer starting a video team. But what I understood further is that video is the world’s favorite storytelling form. I love books, but movies hit you differently. Movies are the thing people remember. I love the medium. It lands so effectively with people and continues to grow. In terms of technique, it’s about doing it in a fun way. People like Cleo Abram and John Harris are taking complex ideas and bringing them to people at scale. You walk away with a sophisticated insight, and I find that inspiring. Brand or purpose is another thing. People trust business publications—Business Insider, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal—regardless of their politics more so than they do other publications. Many publications are coded red or blue, even unintentionally, and that’s a blocker for reaching people. Business conversations are often the same fact set but a different conversation. So you can relate to people. We live in a world where trust in media is low, and we’re not agreeing on facts anymore. As a CEO, I want to build a great business. But the motivating factor is talking to people in a way they’ll hear and having a different conversation than everyone else.

What kind of content can we expect from Dynamo?

You can expect 12 to 18-minute YouTube videos. We’re going to launch a show in the second quarter. Here’s some breaking news: it’s called Business Explains the World. It’s a show where business isn’t necessarily the question—it’s the answer. A fun example is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. On TikTok, you see those North Sea videos eventually—ships battling 160-foot waves, oil platforms almost knocked over. I see that and think, What’s the business story? If you do a little research, people used to die doing that job. What happened? Major manufacturers came out with innovations—engineering innovations. So let’s explore that. Let’s have a great animation that talks about how engine stabilizers came about or how helicopter rescues got better. What is the business story there? Taking a step back, what does this say about global trade in an interconnected world?

That kind of content does really well on YouTube.

Fabulous.

But whenever someone in media talks about a video startup, it sends a shiver down the spine of media folks because of the infamous pivot to video. Vice, BuzzFeed — they collapsed in part because video is expensive. The rug was pulled out by social platforms. Did that make you think twice about embracing video? How do you make video profitable?

I joke, but I spoke with a CEO — not Henry [Blodget] — who admitted they didn’t think about the economics upfront. It was just go.

Because they treated their businesses like Uber, with VC money that would last forever.

It’s multifactorial. I come from watching Henry, who only raised $70 million and spent $30 million. Vice, BuzzFeed, and Vox raised hundreds of millions. They had multibillion-dollar valuations. When you have that much money, you go to the board meetings and they are like, Are you spending it? We gave this money to you for a reason. Spend it fast. I think that this industry is more incrementalist. What I saw from Henry was focusing more on metrics and economics. The other thing that happened, Vice focused more on being cool— like a fashion label or a perfume brand rather than a publication. So there are flaws from focusing on metrics too much, but one of the benefits is people are actually consuming you a lot. Places like Vice, their focus wasn’t, You need to see this or you’ll die. It was, You need to seem cool or else you’ll die.

Vice was cool.

Yes, incredible work, like the Charlottesville video. But as I create Dynamo, I want it to be cool. But the idea that that’s the thing I’m solely focused on, that’s where it gets you in trouble.

So is the idea to be nimble, and start small-scale cautiously?

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. We want to be a nice big business, but I’m not walking around telling anybody… I admire much of what Jon Brady did, but he talked about being Disney a lot. Disney is a $30 billion company, which is a lot more than just a website, right?

It’s heavily diversified.

Exactly. Thinking like that can lead to overextending. Dynamo is a unit economics-focused journalism company. That means understanding what product you’re making, how much revenue you can get from it over time, and making sure you spend less than that. That’s what we’re going to do.

The media industry faces serious challenges. Are you optimistic about its future, and do you see the future in video?

I think video is a future. There are a couple of other mediums too. My cousin is an aspiring journalist. She got a fellowship at Business Insider without telling me. We talked about where to go next, and I told her to look at what people are actually using and what’s useful to them. Trade journalism is functional. It creates delight. There are pockets of that everywhere. People are building careers by being educational, topical, and helpful on TikTok. It’s a good career path, but they’ll need to learn lessons about journalism. Some of those we think of as old-school rules, but they’re there to protect the company. Newsletters also have a big future, no matter what your politics are. Bari Weiss, for example, has built an audience that wants her content and cultivated journalists who want to work for her at reasonable costs. The other key piece is newsletters are a distribution medium that is durable because once someone subscribes, you have a direct relationship with them. So I’m bullish on newsletters and, of course, video.

When you left Business Insider, one person who celebrated was Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager. Last year, he launched a campaign against Business Insider after it published a story about his wife, Neri Oxman, and allegations of plagiarism in her academic work. The story was accurate, but Ackman tried to pressure BI and its parent company, Axel Springer, to retract it. Can you walk us through what happened?

I can’t recall every detail, as it was a year ago, but he talked a lot about lawyers. We published tough stories about lots of major figures. That’s the job of a publication like Business Insider — to illuminate for our readers the impressive, amazing things about these figures and also the truth wherever it leads us. That was the guiding spirit throughout. He was quite upset and I completely understand why. But I will just say that I’m very proud of the work we did at Business Insider. You leave a place like that after 16 years, and there were obviously hard parts, but all of it was part of an adventure that was just fantastic.

Business Insider under your leadership did hard-hitting investigative pieces on figures like Elon Musk and Dave Portnoy. Those stories drew the ire of the subjects. And I’m sure you have a lot of experience with this, these sort of people object to stories that are not fawning.

I’ve experienced being covered by publications. It sucks. It’s terrible. You think, That’s not exactly right. But it is the obligation of the journalist to be fair, and I think we were fair. We really worked for that. At the end of the day, you can’t let that reaction determine what you publish.

This one caused a bit of an uproar at Business Insider because — unlike your stories about Elon Musk and Dave Portnoy, and I imagine this is partly due to the fact that Bill Ackman is litigious and was tweeting a lot about it — Axel Springer announced a review of the story, which caused some concerns at Business Insider that Axel Springer was intervening in a story that Bill Ackman wasn’t really disputing the facts of. Why do you think Axel Springer announced a review of this story, and did that concern you at all at the time?

It’s tough. I think what I can say, honestly, is that it was a tough moment. We worked through it. It was a lot of communication back and forth following that. It was tough. A lot of these questions you would have to ask Mathias Döpfner and the crew at Axel Springer who had that reaction and announced that review. But we worked through it, and had good communication after a tough moment.

The review found that the story was accurate. You said that in a note to staff. Bill Ackman tweeted that you were lying or unaware. His contention was that the story was anti-Semitic because his wife is Israeli. What did you make of that charge?

It’s obviously nonsense.

You ended up leaving Business Insider. So did John Cook, the investigations editor. Katherine Long, who wrote the story, is still there. Bill Ackman celebrated those departures like they were a triumph of his crusade. Did that have anything to do with your departures? 

You’d have to ask John why he left. He’s got a great job at The Wall Street Journal now. I love Business Insider and always will but The Wall Street Journal, their new editor Emma Tucker, she’s doing an amazing job.

She’s also poaching some of the best journalists in the game.

Matt Murray is someone I admire also, but that place has been revitalized in a way that is really cool. They do great work. And they publish tough stories too. I left Business Insider because I had been there 16 years. I had a career coach, I recommend executives have career coaches just to have someone to talk to. I remember thinking, When do I leave? I knew that at some point, I wanted to go start something on my own. It’s always a question of when. Over the past couple of years, I felt maybe it was getting to be time. There’s a great CEO there now, her name is Barbara Pang, and she’s got a great vision and the support of Axel Springer. There’s a new editor, Jamie Heller, she’s excellent. One thing you see in business all the time, is a CEO leaves and a new team comes in. Henry and I spent 16 years developing a rapport. It was very hard to replace with a brand-new CEO. I was an editor in chief handed to her. Without acrimony, eventually it becomes, Maybe now is the time. It’s a moment of rebuilding and reinvesting in your career in a way that is kind of like starting a new job. So it was like, Do I want to start a new job here or with this thing I’ve already trademarked the name for? As I said before, I started thinking about a start-up in 2015 when David Folkenflik put out this thing and I said, ‘Henry, should I build a new company?’ And he said, ‘No, do it here.’ It was great and amazing. I’m so glad I took his advice because I learned a lot of lessons, but fast-forward 10 years later and it’s like, Ok, Maybe now’s the time. Another way to answer this question is if I had stayed until next spring, I promise you there would have been another billionaire who would have been upset with us and tweeting about it. And then people would ask if I left because of that. Well, no, we’re Business Insider, what we do is publish tough stuff, including tough stuff on billionaires.

One of the odd elements here is that Axel Springer has an interesting relationship with Israel. It makes its employees sign a pledge supporting Israel as a state. That played into this because Bill Ackman was accusing the reporting of being anti-Semitic. The Washington Post reported that was the reason this was so scrutinized by Axel Springer. The New York Times even reported that Mathias Döpfner floated firing you. Do you think that’s why this came under such scrutiny, because of the Israel connection? What did you make of that reporting?

For the audio listeners, I just did the whole collar pull thing. It was a tough moment. All that reporting was fascinating to read. If I may offer some thoughts on Axel Springer, Germany, Israel, and Jews: Axel Springer is a German company that takes German responsibility for the Holocaust extraordinarily seriously. Even after I was leaving, so a sign of our amicable departure from each other, they invited me to the executive summit this year for the whole company, and it was in Poland. So we went to a concentration camp, we went to Auschwitz. You’re walking about Auschwitz with people whose parents, not grandparents, but whose parents were Nazis. You go into a room and there’s the shoes, the hair. And you realize the responsibility any decent person feels toward that outcome and their family, making sure that kind of thing never happens again. So if there’s hypersensitivity around that. Perfectly understandable. I try to provide some grace around that.

When I first found out about the policy, I thought it was strange for a media company to have an ideological stance for its employees had to sign onto.

Well, our country has a terrible history around black Americans. Look at some of the policies in some of our newsrooms and the way our newsrooms react.

Speaking more generally, you covered a lot of rich people who got very angry. We live in a time where it feels more daunting to take on these stories on wealthy and powerful individuals. Does that concern you?

Yes. We have a problem. We have a big problem. If you were to start a company right now, and you wanted to do that kind of work, it would be very difficult. And here’s why. Anybody can sue anybody for any reason. And if you’re really rich, you can hire a really expensive attorney. I don’t need to name them, but they’re out there. Clare Locke. If you get a note from Clare Locke, it’s very expensive to deal with. That’s the problem we have. So there are good laws in certain jurisdictions, They’re called SLAPP laws, where it’s like, Oh, you’re gonna do this but then you’re going to end up paying for our legal fees.

So a judge dismisses a case if it’s nonsense and you have to pay the legal fees.

But very wealthy people can jurisdiction-shop, they can go anywhere in the country they want. And that’s a big problem. It is chilling. The lesson for people who are hoping to make a difference in this area is that you need to have a thriving, successful business like the New York Times, who does not mess around when it gets threats like that. They respond in a way that is clear. They’re good. Not to be name-droppy, but I once met the Sulzbergers. I said, ‘What you have done is remarkable.’ The way that they stand up to those kinds of lawsuits all the time is amazing and it’s important. For journalists, being written about is gross. You read a story about someone you like, and it says things you don’t like. But we need to be in a culture where people can talk about the truth. So one of the things you can do is make an organization like Dynamo, to talk about the truth in a different conversation than what it’s going to mean for next year’s election. I love the New York Times, but I open it up and it’s like ‘Democratic consultants think this is their plan for…’ Everything is through the lens of what it means for the next election. And I just think people are really tired of that conversation. They actually do want to talk about why Finnish prisons are better than American prisons. I don’t know whose side that policy would be on, but it’s a conversation we need to have. We just don’t need to talk about it through the lens of, Is my team going to win the election? Let’s save that for sports. Those are two problems with American journalism. Everything is politics-coded and Clare Lock and others, they are entrepreneurs themselves. They have found a scene, and it’s a very rich scene with pissed-off, very rich people who just send nonsense lawsuits. That is discouragement enough because it is expensive to respond to.

You had success fending off these lawsuits. Dave Portnoy’s suit failed. The Bill Ackman suit, I don’t think ever happened. Are you happy to not have to deal with this anymore?

Yeah, did I like getting scary letters? No, I loved publishing tough journalism, but it won’t be a focus at Dynamo for a long time. Because there are plenty of other stories to tell.