The Borowitz Report Turns 25

A quarter century of making up the news.

In 2001, I started making up news stories and emailing them to friends. I had no idea that someday this would be how I’d make a living.

I just thought it would be a fun hobby, and way better than gardening, at which I totally sucked.

After a few months of sending out stories by cutting and pasting email addresses into the “To:” field, one friend suggested that creating a “website” would make it easier to “blast” my “posts.” This also made it easier for people to share them, and my readership started to grow. Slowly.

Me, waiting for the Internet to be invented so I could publish TBR.

For the next ten years, I wrote The Borowitz Report every day and gave it away for free. I didn’t make a nickel—in fact, after paying to maintain the website, I lost money. Some people thought I was crazy, and they had a point. But I was having too much fun to stop.

In 2012 The Borowitz Report moved to The New Yorker, which published it for the next eleven years. There were some memorable moments, like the time the Chinese media believed my story about Donald Trump wrapping the White House’s phones in tinfoil.

In 2024 The Borowitz Report returned to its roots as an independent newsletter. I decided to make all weekday posts free so that TBR would be available to people who couldn’t afford it when it was behind the New Yorker paywall. I’d rely on just one paid feature a week, on Sunday, to keep TBR solvent.

When the new TBR went live on March 19, 2024, I held my breath, not knowing what to expect. Would this work?

Well, thanks to readers like you, The Borowitz Report now reaches people in more than 200 countries. That’s slightly more countries than Trump has bombed, and significantly more than he can pronounce.

And being independent has given me the freedom to offer you new features, such as long-form commentary, original reporting, and podcast interviews with everyone from Paul Krugman to Jane Goodall.

In 2024 TBR relaunched with a new logo and many new features.

I’ve been honored to host a TBR book club where authors like Dave Barry, Robert Reich, and E. Jean Carroll have answered subscribers’ questions, to collaborate with the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes after her work was censored by the Washington Post, and to showcase music from the brilliant Jesse Welles.

Best of all, TBR now has a comments section, where every day I get to interact with you and enjoy your humor, kindness, and wisdom. At a time when many of us feel alone, you’ve created something special: a community.

One final thing, and I hope you’ll forgive me for getting serious: in the 25 years I’ve been doing this, political satire has never faced the existential threat it faces today. The attempts to silence editorial cartoonists like Ann Telnaes and comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert are attacks on our democracy.

I’ve watched with increasing alarm as the mainstream media have bent their knee to a wannabe dictator. And that’s why, as the crucial midterms approach, I’m more grateful than ever that I don’t work for one of these craven corporations. I work for you.

Thank you for your support, which, for a quarter century, has enabled me to do the work that I love. As long as you’re interested in what I have to say, I’ll keep at it.

Love,

Andy