Happy Splinterversary!

By Jacob Weindling | March 28, 2025 | 3:58pm

Illustration by Jim Cooke

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One year ago this week, new Splinter launched with me as Editor-in-Chief while I sat in a finance classroom in Boulder, asking everyone if they should vote for Joe Biden and slamming Elon Musk in what I thought would be one of the few times I would ever have to write about that asshole. The Messenger’s debacle in January 2024 was to our benefit, as it freed up our Deputy Editor Dave Levitan to really tell us how the climate charts are not okay, and establish new Splinter as a vastly credible outlet that centers the largest existential threat of our time.

In the following months, we delved into a coconut-pilled future filled with “Vice President Trump” literally dodging bullets, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza fully backed by a Democratic administration animated every second of the 2024 presidential campaign where Kamala Harris gave Dick Cheney a bearhug. The media exposed its complicity in more ways than one in the last year, and the Democrats showed their true colors yet again. This conscious decision to shift the party right was punctuated by moments like the Democrats denying the simple representation of a Palestinian American elected official from a swing state to stand alongside anti-choice Trumpers, anti-labor executives, and other assorted Republicans who the party welcomed into their very narrow suburban coalition that got smoked by Trump in November. The election shocked a lot of people, including me who got it wrong. Now Dave is reporting daily from inside the downfall of the United States federal government, and I am explaining why markets are having an existential crisis practically every other day. I even fell into being an occasional UAP reporter over the last year. Never underestimate how quickly things can change.

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Jen Kirby brought you news from Ukraine about Russia’s war in Ukraine, along with expert foreign policy analysis and reporting every week of new Splinter’s existence. Jen has carried us in this realm from the very start to establish our foreign policy bona fides. Roqayah Chamseddine began writing for Splinter from Lebanon, was displaced by Israel’s civilian bombing campaign along with millions of others, and she returned to Southern Lebanon to document Israel’s UN-condemned destruction for Splinter. Roqayah has interviewed people from Gaza about the horrific conditions they face every day, and she even filed a report from the funeral that Israel bombed in their electronic pager attack across Lebanon that was anything but targeted. Both Jen and Roqayah have proven invaluable to our mission to inform our readers about what is really going on in these imperial wars dividing the globe that the American press has done a very poor job explaining as a whole.

Jason Tabrys has welcomed our Paste and A.V. Club audiences to new Splinter with his expert insight into pop culture and politics’ inevitable crossover, even in the areas you don’t quite expect. Jared Yates Sexton spent much of last year previewing Trump’s authoritarian model and the Democrats’ less than uselessness to come. Tiernan Cannon has brought a much-needed Irish perspective to both American and European politics, and it has been awesome to watch him as a relatively new writer to this scene blossom under the banner of this good website. Tiernan’s American Empire series, which we have planned to run indefinitely due to the insatiable appetite of empire, were a prescient preview of the countries that would soon fall under Trump’s ire. Meanwhile, we are lucky to be in the orbit of Caleb Brennan’s bangers he writes for good websites like Splinter, The Baffler and The Nation.

I am so proud of and humbled by all the great work all our writers have done to rebuild this good website.

Splinter was a good website, and Splinter is a good website. This was the rallying cry of the former staff who built it out of the chaos of Gawker’s demise, and it is the honor of my life to be entrusted with overseeing its resurrection. I delineate between the two both out of respect for their work, but also to stress that they never went anywhere! Subscribe to Discourse Blog! Peter Thiel didn’t kill Gawker, he just dispersed it and birthed a new generation of rabble rousers that I aimed to make new Splinter a part of one year ago. Paste politics was one of those new rabble rousers that laid the groundwork for this moment thanks to Shane Ryan’s vision as EIC that you can still see in his coverage at Golf Digest. Paste politics did not die either when Google crushed political ad revenue in 2020. It lives on in people like me and Roqayah and Paste co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Josh Jackson here at Splinter. This good website is the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people, and I wouldn’t be here without them.

A year in, new Splinter is a success. I am a trained finance person so you will have to kill me to get the details of our financial situation, but I can assure you that we’re growing, not shrinking. I have been very explicit about how difficult Google makes it for all publishers to make money in their world that America’s anti-trust laws were enacted to prevent. That’s why we are asking people to subscribe to us, because it is simply not possible to build a sustainable publishing business on the back of Google ad revenues anymore. Subscriptions are up since we renewed and honed our pitch to start this year, and we are eternally grateful for all of you who have supported us. Every subscription really does make a difference because it makes us that much less dependent on Google to make money. Our business plan is working, and every arrow on every traffic metric is pointed up and has been pointed up the past year.

Our first month was admittedly a big struggle getting people to notice that Splinter had been revived. The first thing I learned upon taking the job is that the internet’s algorithms get very mad at you if a site is dormant for that long, and the large social media followings on Facebook and Twitter we inherited have been diminished by that dynamic too. Bluesky is actually much better for our traffic than either of them even though we have a fraction of a following there. But in our first year, we haven’t had to rely on any of that Silicon Valley crap to stay alive, thanks to you, our readers. According to Google Analytics, measured from one month after our launch to now, visits to Splinter.com are up 3,706 percent.

From the date Trump was nearly assassinated to now, homepage visits are up 916 percent. Visits to Splinter.com are up 48.8 percent since Trump’s inauguration, and in the last 30 days, they are up a very nice 6.9 percent, outpacing the typical 4 percent month-over-month growth we saw last year. This key figure that sites use as a core gauge of their progress has been up only every day since we launched. I cannot tell you how much this means to us, because it validates the direction we have new Splinter pointed in.

A year ago, I was a finance student. A year ago, Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate for president. A year ago, Trump was not viewed as the youth candidate. A year ago, Elon Musk was just an annoying guy on Twitter. A year ago, I still had my precious Rocky at my side. A lot can change in a year. The last one changed my life forever. Thank you for joining us, and we hope you stick around as we document whatever awaits us in the next one.