Marisa Kabas, a Brooklyn-based independent journalist, was struggling as a freelancer until she turned to a new medium for her reporting — Substack, an online platform that lets writers publish content directly to an audience. Since 2022, Kabas’ reporting has gained traction after breaking major news stories like the freezing of federal grants by the Trump administration and a police raid on a Kansas-based newspaper that was investigating the alleged sexual misconduct of the police department’s chief.
On Wednesday, Oct. 8, Grinnell’s Rosenfield Program hosted Kabas, who spoke to Grinnell faculty, students, and some of The S&B editorial team on her reporting trajectory and process of developing The Handbasket. The Handbasket, founded in 2022, is her online newsletter hosted by Substack.
“I was fine publishing The Handbasket whenever I had something to write that I thought an editor wouldn’t want or that was more personal in nature,” Kabas said. Kabas’s first post was a reflection on her experiences being a woman in media.
For the first six months of The Handbasket, Kabas was working for free. During that time, she did not offer a paid subscription.
Kabas said she got her big break in August 2023 while scrolling Bluesky, a social media platform similar to Twitter. She said she had seen a link to a news story from the Kansas Reflector on a local police raid on the Marion County Record, a small newspaper in Marion, Kan.
Kabas interviewed Eric Meyer, the owner of the paper. Meyer told Kabas that the Marion County Record had been investigating the local police chief, who took part in the raid, for allegations of sexual misconduct at a previous job.
“I had this moment where I was like, ‘hey, did I just get a major scoop?’” Kabas said.
Instead of pitching the story to another publication, who would have needed to confirm the story and would have allowed time for someone else to break the news, Kabas decided to break the story herself.
“It was instantly an online hit,” said Kabas. “My instinct that it was a big deal was right.”
The Handbasket has only grown since the publication of that story. According to Kabas, the site now has 30,000 total subscribers, with almost 4,000 paid subscribers.
Unlike other news outlets, which are funded through advertising, Kabas funds The Handbasket through paid subscriptions and partnerships with nonprofits. Kabas is The Handbasket’s only employee and her own employer.
The language Kabas uses on her site is different from mainstream outlets. Some outlets might explain the legality of an action by a government official in a story by referencing certain subject experts — Kabas doesn’t do that.
“I think that a lot of people use “experts say” as a crutch, because frankly, they don’t want to get sued,” Kabas said. “I think it’s a matter of just knowing that certain things are inherently true. Like going outside and saying it’s raining.”
The differences in Kabas’s independent journalism compared to mainstream news resonated with students who attended the event.
Isaac Vosburg `29 said that he doesn’t like the way mainstream media has covered the war in Gaza, which Kabas said she is not afraid to call a genocide.
“I feel like I’ve seen news descend into this kind of state,” said Vosburg on the language the media uses to describe the war in Gaza. “Having someone who is an independent journalist really represents kind of the best of that world.”
Salma Hassab `27 said she attended the talk because she wanted to learn more about independent journalism. Hassab said she is critical of mainstream news.
“I think there’s a real erosion of critical thought that happens when you just accept whatever a news source is purporting to be true as truth without kind of analyzing it in any way,” Hassab said.
Hassab said she empathized with the kind of journalism Kabas spoke about. “She understands the pressures of being offered millions and millions of dollars to sell out and how persuasive that is.”
Vosburg did have one criticism for Kabas. “She had mentioned it can’t get any worse,” referring to comments Kabas made about press freedom in the United States. “I think it can, and I think it will.”
