I’m Darren Samuelsohn and this is The love, journalism Show. First time visiting? Please sign up for my love letter from the beat.
Today: Isaac Saul, founder of Tangle. I tried to bring him onto my Insider team in 2020. He had a better idea
Isaac Saul landed on my radar in early 2020. His emails summarized the day’s news, how journalists were covering it and ending with a neutral take on what it meant.
I was a Politico reporter covering the Trump White House, about to leave two decades of full-time writing for a role at Insider where I would hire, build and lead my own team out of Washington. Isaac stood out as a great fit.
We spoke in March 2020, and I pitched him on joining. He wasn’t interested in applying. I am glad.
Back then, Isaac was an editor by day and a newsletter writer by night. His first issue had gone to 13 people. He stuck with it. A year or so later, he quit his day job and went all-in on Tangle.
Now he has a team of a dozen journalists, and he says there are more than 600,000 people on his mailing list.
On the latest episode of The love, journalism Show, I asked Isaac why he chose this noble profession. He went from sports reporter at Pitt into politics, and he saw a gap: “The media ecosystem wasn’t really working for the people that I was really close with.”
I reminded him that in March 2020 he told me he was dreaming about doing this full-time. Here, he explains what happened between the dream and the decision. He asked his employer for six months and told them, “I’m trying to build this off ramp for myself.” Then, paid subscriptions turned on, and 500 people out of 3,000 signed up.
Isaac helped love, journalism at its 2023 launch, too. He read some of my earliest copy. I reached out then to compare notes, since he has been at it longer and closer than I have.
As I returned this year for my third tango on Substack, we talked about the 2026 landscape and what it looks like today for a journalist working on their own. His read: "an incredible saturation of the space,” and “we’re kind of approaching peak newsletter.”
Tangle is a special creation. It gives you sides, and then a take. I asked how that compares to my time in the trenches of climate policy, where I took the science as given and covered the argument over whether to act. In my experience, the market settled that debate.
Isaac pushed back on the two-sides frame. “It’s never two sides. It’s almost always 12.” When I asked whether that holds for January 6 or the rule of law, he said of the election fraud claims: “If the election had been stolen in 2020 and I could report that, I would have won a Pulitzer.”
On Sept. 29, Isaac launched a YouTube channel under his own name. He is also starting a separate newsletter for the opinion essays that have been sitting in his drafts folder. His first target: the fear campaigns of election season, and how to decide your vote “without succumbing to fear.”
And like every guest, he answers the closing question: did journalism love him back? “For me, the answer is yes. And I understand that I’m lucky to be able to say that.”
