Announcing the NonZero Network
A way to separate signal from noise
There’s big news in NonZero Land! Today, we’re launching something we call the NonZero Network. It offers new ways for you to benefit from the work of other Substack voices that we particularly respect—voices we want to amplify in an increasingly crowded and noisy media environment.
Before I say more about the network, and the logic behind it, here are two of its key features:
Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter/Podcast get a 50 percent discount on a one-year paid subscription to any newsletter that is part of the network.
All NonZero subscribers, paid or unpaid, will get a weekly summary of highlights selected from network newsletters—and, mixed in with that, highlights from a few non-network publications that we think also deserve your attention. (If you don’t find this useful, you can opt out while still getting other issues of the NonZero Newsletter.)
The network is launching with five founding members: Paul Bloom’s Small Potatoes, Derek Davison’s Foreign Exchanges, Mark Leon Goldberg’s Global Dispatches, Kaiser Kuo’s Sinica, and Glenn Loury’s The Glenn Show.
You’re probably familiar with some or all of these names. (For one thing, all five—Paul, Derek, Mark, Kaiser, and Glenn—have appeared multiple times on the NonZero Podcast.) If you already know you want to take advantage of the 50 percent discount to any of these newsletters, just click the coupon below. But if you’d like to first hear more about the idea behind the NonZero Network, read on.
As you may have noticed, these founding NZNet members aren’t bound by a common ideology. (In fact, there’s probably no major policy issue that all members of the network align on.) But they do have other things in common:
First, I respect their integrity and their intellectual honesty and their commitment to reasoned analysis.
Second, all of them bring something to the discourse that would otherwise be underrepresented—a distinctive ideological angle, maybe, or a particular set of intellectual interests, or a sense for how the world looks from some non-American vantage point that is often overlooked.
Third, and maybe most important, is their independence.
By “independence,” I don’t just mean that they have a newsletter rather than a New York Times column or that they have a podcast rather than a show on CNN. By that standard, Bari Weiss’s Free Press Substack newsletter was an “independent media” project even though it was from the beginning backed by many millions of dollars from the (highly ideological) VC firm Andreessen-Horowitz and from billionaires like David Sacks (Trump’s AI and Crypto Czar).
Indeed, the NonZero Network is partly a response to the growing difficulty of spotting the truly independent voices on the “independent media landscape” of newsletters and podcasts—finding the mom-and-pop stores amid the Walmarts and Amazons.
In short: The NonZero Network aims to boost trustworthy voices as they compete with big-time partisan outlets backed by institutional money on one side, and AI-powered engagement machines that don’t even have a worldview on the other. NZNet therefore aims to help you separate the signal from the growing amount of noise.
It would be disingenuous of me not to note that our own mom-and-pop store will benefit from this—that part of the idea of NZNet is to help NZNews. In fact, if you take advantage of one of these 50 percent discounts, the proceeds will be split evenly between us and the other newsletter. And it works the other way around: Paid subscribers to member newsletters get a discount on NZNews subscriptions, and those proceeds, too, are divided between us and the other newsletter.
This reciprocity is both a reflection of our mutually supportive relationship and a kind of cement that, we hope, will help sustain it. And it means that those of you who are already helping us keep the lights on at NZNews can help even more by choosing to support one of our founding NZNet members.
So, without further ado, here are those discount links: