An Interview With The Handbasket's Marisa Kabas
The writer and reporter talks self-publishing, media job scarcity, independent news ethics, growing her audience, and asking former female Rolling Stone staffers to tell their stories
When I first launched This Is Not A Test, I wanted the newsletter to 1) be a place where some ideas could live without waiting for the OK of an editor and 2) host deep-diving interviews with people I found fascinating. They didn’t necessarily have to be promoting anything, and they didn’t have to be entertainers. But are they moving the needle in some way? Are they grabbing people’s attentions? Are they doing something different, and is that thing in their own language? Marisa Kabas, independent journalist and publisher of The Handbasket on Substack, is one of those people.
I first started reading Kabas’ work a few months ago after discovering her exclusive report: “Women staffers of Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone get their turn to speak.” In her revealing feature, which described the Rolling Stone co-founder’s office environment as “a dictatorship” with a culture of “palpable fear” with the feeling of “an abusive family relationship,” Kabas spoke to numerous former female staffers about their experiences working either directly or indirectly with Wenner, who allegedly created a “trickle-down” atmosphere of blatant workplace sexism that lasted throughout his decades-long tenure. (Wenner left Rolling Stone in 2019. His son Gus Wenner is currently the CEO. In October, Rolling Stone also ran their own feature examining “rock journalism’s problematic past.”)
Kabas’ reporting was in direct response to Wenner’s now-infamous New York Times interview, which ran in September and was ostensibly to promote his penis-y book of male-musician interviews, The Masters: Conversations With Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Townshend, Garcia, Bono, and Springsteen. In the process of chatting with the NYT’s David Marchese, Wenner managed to torpedo what was left of his career by completely dismissing performers of color and women performers. His comments also got him kicked off the board of directors at the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, which he co-founded in the 1980s.
Though I came by The Handbasket because I closely follow music and entertainment news, Kabas’ Rolling Stone story absolutely reflects the reporter’s overlapping (and ever-evolving) beat, which she describes as “the intersection of gender, media, and politics.” Currently, The Handbasket’s homepage has stories closely following the George Santos saga, a local Kansas newspaper being unfairly raided by police, and Jewish art in the face of rising antisemitism, among other things.
Kabas was kind enough to let me steal her for a minute (I’m using Bachelor-speak because, as you’ll see, we are both card-carrying—and skeptical—members of Bachelor Nation) to discuss her career background, the “media diaspora,” launching The Handbasket, and to what extent the culture at Rolling Stone has actually changed post-Wenner.
First and foremost, and because we talked about this over email: Can I get your thoughts on the ending of The Golden Bachelor?
Am I allowed to share spoilers?
It's been long enough since the finale, I think. Yes.
After [Gerry Turner] dumped Leslie, it sort of took the air out of the room, and no one was particularly interested anymore. [Laughs.] I could tell the writing was on the wall. It was so obvious [Gerry] wanted a mom.
Yeah. I also wish Leslie hadn't turned the breakup on herself. I wish she hadn't taken the breakup to mean something was the matter with her.
That was really hard. I was reading something about how the the women on the show who were widows got a lot more credit than the women who are divorced. Actually, divorce wasn't even talked about very much. It was sort of like treated as a dirty word. And so I felt like Leslie was presented as damaged goods, because she had unsuccessful marriages, she wasn't a grieving widow, she wasn't as “noble” or as worthy of finding love again at this late stage, because she was never able to find it before.
YES! Even watching the standard Bachelor, contestants—usually women—who have been divorced tiptoe around it, like it could be a potential dealbreaker. Like, “I’ve been divorced, therefore there’s something wrong with me. That framing isn’t helping anyone. Especially not people, myself included, who have been divorced.
It's not a moral failing on anyone's part. And I think it's treated that way. I think the whole idea of that story that came out about how Gerry [Turner] wasn't the perfect prince that he purported to be—and it’s like, whatever, that's fine. I think [the producers] really wanted to present him as a born again virgin. Then they wanted to find a woman who was the same. Even though they're trying to buck stereotypes [with an older crowd] and create something different, it was the same old stuff. They wanted two clean slates to come together and forget that all the other messy stuff exists.
Well, now that we have that out of the way, I wanted to thank you for agreeing to chat with me! Ever since I read your “Women Of Rolling Stone” story in The Handbasket I’ve wanted to reach out and pick your brain a bit!
Will you tell me a little about your background, pre-Handbasket/Substack?
I was born and raised in New York, and I always wanted to be a journalist since high school. I went to journalism school at George Washington University. When I graduated in 2009, [it was the] peak financial crisis. [It was a] terrible time to get a job in journalism—about as bad as it is right now.
Yes. I keep telling anyone who will listen to me that 2023 feels like the worst year for media since I graduated in 2008/2009. And that’s saying something.
Yeah, I’ve never felt so hopeless about that the future of it, which sucks.
So I graduated into that in 2009. I worked in PR and adjacent communications-type stuff. [Then], I started as a freelancer for the TODAY show, writing about weddings. I wrote their Real Weddings column.
I was interviewing people about their weddings, just regular people. That was really cool. It was a good first gig to get my feet wet and learn about storytelling, and how to interview people. From there, I had a bunch of other freelance roles. My first staff job was at a website called The Daily Dot, which actually still exists today. I went there and met some of my best friends in the world. We've all since… gone into the diaspora. [Laughs.]
Oh my god. The media diaspora. I love that.
I worked briefly at Fusion, which is now a defunct website. I feel like every journalist now has “now-defunct publication” on their resume that’s in the journalism graveyard.
Yep, mine is MTV Buzzworthy.
Nice. Yeah, so I got laid off two weeks after the 2016 election. It’s been so incredibly turbulent since then. I briefly worked in politics. Not in campaigns, but I was helping to develop tech platforms for campaigns and elections. That was really fun. It was a good use of my energy at the time, in 2017-2018, when I was feeling so passionately about politics.
But I always found my way back to writing. I always knew that that's what I wanted to do. So I started freelancing again. I became a columnist for msnbc.com. In the spring of 2022, I saw the writing on the wall. I saw the direction that journalism was going and I said to myself, “I need to have a place of my own, no matter what that looks like, whether it's a WordPress site or if it means joining a Substack-type platform. I need a place where if I want to write about something, I know that I can. Even if my audience is 100 people, I'll know that I have someone to read, unvarnished, the things that I want to say.”
So [The Handbasket] really started out as a side project—almost, I guess, a backup plan. As I continued to freelance, I wrote 4000-word magazine features, I got paid to travel, but none of it ever went anywhere. Everything was a complete dead end. I would spend all this time working so hard, thinking, “If I impress this publication, they'll keep giving me assignments, and it will lead to steady work.” And it just never did. For a while I took it personally. Then, I think at a certain point, I realized they just don't have money. No one has any money.
When you say “a dead end,” do you mean that one successful freelance piece didn’t beget more editor commissions when you hoped that it might?
My ideal scenario was that [editors] would come to me for things that they knew I could write out. That's sort of a dream. That would make freelancing sustainable. Not ever knowing when you're gonna have a paycheck is not sustainable. I don't know, maybe it was naive, but I was hopeful. I kept thinking, “All it takes is one publication to really believe in me and say, ‘We're going to have you on a regular schedule writing for us.’” Because that's something I did years ago. I don’t think that really exists anymore.
I’ve definitely noticed the same thing. Staff jobs have always felt scarce since graduating into the Great Recession—frankly I didn’t think they could get any scarcer. But here we are.
Yeah. I got my first staff writing job at the Daily Dot because I was a regular freelancer for them. I basically came to their office and just never left. I kept writing, I kept taking every assignment that they would give me, and eventually I became a staff member. I don't think there's that same opportunity out there. Now, I think it's even harder to break in. To feel like I was constantly back at square one, when I've been writing for over a decade, it felt so demoralizing.
So I tried to be a person of action. I took the crazy Internet by the horns. I decided to go fully into my Substack [and] to commit probably 80 to 90 percent of my time and resources to working on that. It helped that I had a big story over the summer that that went super viral. It brought in a lot of new audience members and paying subscribers. It also helped me see that I can do this. There are people who like what I do, and it's going to be a grind. But I think this is the only option that feels hopeful to me at this point.
Tell me about that story that went viral?
In August, I wrote about this small-town newspaper in Kansas that had been raided by the police. I decided to pick up the phone a few hours after I saw that story break and call the editor and owner of that newspaper that was raided. The raid was Friday morning. We spoke Saturday morning. He told me that he believed he was raided because [the paper] had been investigating the chief of police in their town. That was not something that had been reported before in other papers in the state or locally. I don't know if they were afraid to report it or what, but because I had such free rein over my editorial choices, I said, “Am I allowed to report this?” [The editor was] like, “Well, I can't say it, but you can.”
That was a huge scoop: law enforcement punishing media for investigating them. So that’s what put me on a lot of people's radars.
You delve into a really neat range of topics on The Handbasket. When you first launched, did you think it would mostly comprise politics? How has it evolved?
I think at the beginning, it was more personal-type pieces or pieces I felt like I probably couldn't place somewhere else. Then, at a certain point, I had these ideas that I knew had mainstream appeal that should have been picked up elsewhere, and they weren't. Then I missed the window and missed the scoop. It was such a frustrating feeling because I was brimming with ideas, but I had nowhere to put them. And I wasn't monetizing my Substack—at that point. It was free. So I was like, I can’t just give away all these ideas. The concept of building the tracks before the train wasn’t in my head yet.
Around the time I started writing about George Santos, which was late December last year, I knew that I understood it better than almost anybody because I'm from this district, and I write about politics, and I had been paying really close attention. I pitched a couple of stories to large publications, and they gave me the runaround. It was just so frustrating. So I finally said to myself, “You just have to publish it yourself.” You have to have faith in your ideas and your skills, and just hope that people will will notice.
I felt like I had a large enough platform. [This was] when Twitter was still usable at the time, and that was my main place where I connected with people. I felt like I had enough of a profile to at least get a modest following. Then my first big story was interviewing Santos’ drag queen mentor in Brazil. If I had waited to pitch that somewhere else and get approvals and and get the okay from editors, I never would have gotten a scoop. It would have taken forever. So that was my first proof of concept. I was like, “I can do this on my own.”
Then later that day, I was on TV talking about it. It was this surreal, fast validation.
In the beginning, did you have any trouble getting sources to return your calls or emails if you didn’t have a big name like the New York Times or MSNBC backing you up?
I think because I was seeking out stories that other people weren't, that made it a little bit easier. The Kansas newspaper, for example. That became a huge national, international story, but right at that time, no one was reaching out to this editor to be like, “Tell me your story.” It was a big local news story, but he wasn't holding court with the New York Times and the Associated Press and ABC News at that point.
So just being nimble and getting in there fast or pursuing a different angle of a story is what allows me to have the access that I do. I don't think the President is going to answer my my email inquiries, but I think I have a pretty healthy understanding of who will or will not respond to me.
That doesn't mean everyone does [respond to me]—I have a lot of unanswered emails. But even with the Rolling Stone piece, for example, I think it helped being in the community. There was a level of trust and word of mouth. If one person said I was legit, then other people would come along. But it was also a leap of faith on their part. They didn't know exactly who I was or what I do. So it's a balance of going for things that you think are achievable. And then also hoping that subjects will see what you're doing and want to try something new.
I’m so glad you brought up your Rolling Stone piece. Obviously the fallout from Jann Wenner’s New York Times interview was major, and the magazine itself ran a “Where We Stand Now” feature where five female music critics reflected on representation (or lack thereof) in music journalism and where to go from here.
How did your roundtable, “Women staffers of Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone get their turn to speak,” come together? And what are your thoughts on Rolling Stone’s self-examination?
As far as how my piece came together, when I read Jann Wenner’s comments about women and artists of color, I was obviously appalled. But I didn't know if it would go beyond the journalism bubble. Would it just be a niche media story? And then I got a New York Times push alert that [Wenner] was removed from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which he helped co-found. It occurred to me that the original story must have gone much wider than than I understood, because this is something they think a lot of people care about, and not just media wonks.
So I thought to myself, if that's how he is comfortable talking about women, how did he treat them? What what could that have possibly been like? A lot of my sources were anonymous, and I can't say too much about how I got in touch with them, but one person led to another led to another. Because women talk. [Laughs.] We talk a lot. It was this completely untapped network of women who had these huge stories to share, but no one had ever asked them before. That's why I think they were so willing to talk to me about it, even though it wasn't some big prestigious publication. I genuinely wanted to hear what they had to say. That was the first time that ever happened. It just unfolded from there.
As far as Rolling Stone’s current reckoning with their past—how do I say this diplomatically—I think that they see themselves as completely divorced from the past, in their current iteration. And [Wenner’s tenure] wasn't that long ago. So I just don't think it's realistic to think that when Wenner finally was out of the picture, officially, I think in 2019, that somehow the problems were solved.
In reality, his son [Gus Wenner] is still at the helm, and from what I understand there's still not a very good culture there for women. All I can say is that I think in order to actually reckon with it, you can't just post splashy stories—you actually have to do something to fix the internal culture. And as far as I understand, that's not happening.
What do you envision as being the future of The Handbasket? Where would you like to see it go from here?
I'm trying to look further out ahead, just because I think that's necessary for growth. But right now it’s heads down, putting out content that I think my viewers will like. I'm trying to be mindful of who those readers are. As that number grows, I think I'm starting to understand them better. I know which posts they like and which they don't respond as much to. I think just continuing to stay really honest to my news principles and what I believe in... I had a good conversation with someone else with a Substack recently, she has a great deal of followers, she makes her living off of her Substack, and she's very generous with her time and advice. One of the things she we talked about was making a hard sell: asking, “please give me a paid subscription.” I said to her, “I feel kind of icky doing that, it feels uncomfortable.” And she said, “Get over it.” Literally [that’s] what she said: “Get over it.”
So after we spoke, I tried to be like, I need money to keep doing this, and good journalism requires funding. If you believe in what I do, then put your money where your mouth is—in a much more polite way. [Laughs.]
And it worked. I immediately got a bunch of new paid subscribers. At this point, every single subscriber is a big deal to me. I'm watching my numbers. Any time anyone pays for my writing, I just give them a piece of my heart. I'm so grateful to them, and I have to remind myself that I am worthy of their money and support. And that I have to keep it up. I'm responsible to people now. I have people who believe in me. That is a pretty good incentive to keep doing good work.
And as far as the future of The Handbasket, there's a lot of issues on Substack itself—as a platform. Right now I'm actually working with a bunch of other publishers to try to get some answers from the [Substack] leadership about why they're platforming Nazis, specifically. There's a story in the Atlantic recently about that.
I don't know if The Handbasket will always be at Substack, but it will always be itself and it will always be me.
Marisa Kabas writes about politics, media and gender and their many intersections. Subscribe to her independent newsletter The Handbasket here.