The most-visited digital-first news publication dedicated to politics wasn’t Politico or Axios in May – it was the Hill, a Washington-based outlet that also still publishes a print product three days a week that gets delivered to the office of every member of Congress.
While the Hill is often left out of conversations about the most influential political news outlets, the publication has been quietly chugging along since it was acquired by the television conglomerate Nexstar in 2021 for $130m. Bill Sammon, the Fox News veteran who serves as senior vice-president for editorial content, said the Hill was profitable and had benefited from a surge of interest in the second Trump administration.
“I think we’re kind of having a moment right now,” Sammon said in an interview. “The viewership is engaged, and a lot of it has to do with, frankly, that there’s just so much going on in the news. It is a good time to be a journalist in Washington given the sheer volume of consequential stuff that’s just coming over the transom.”
On Wednesday, the Hill is starting a new chapter, announcing plans for a digital subscription service called the Hill Insider that will offer readers the opportunity to access newsletters, live interactive video calls and other premium features. The basic membership tier costs $5.99 per month (or $59.99 annually) and the premium tier costs $9.99 per month (or $99.99 annually).
The main website will remain free to read, however. “It’s additive,” Sammon said. “For the very most part, we’ve developed all kinds of new value-added content that we think is going to serve our readers as we understand what our readers want … For people who are really into this, they just want more of it.”
There is no shortage of direct-to-consumer subscription services available to media consumers, but Sammon said he was hopeful that the Hill’s offering would be sufficiently differentiated from the competition to become a meaningful revenue source for the publication, which began in 1994.
Media veterans like Sammon aren’t often available for hire in Washington. He became a free agent after Rupert Murdoch himself suggested that he be pushed out following Fox’s controversial coverage of the 2020 presidential election, an offering to the Trump super-fans who were unhappy that the network correctly called the election for Joe Biden.
In a 20 November 2020 email released as part of the voting technology firm Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox, Murdoch told his chief executive, Suzanne Scott, and his son Lachlan Murdoch that “maybe [it would be] best to let Bill go right away and make acting appointment”, which he hoped would send a “big message with Trump people”. (“Sammon was told the inevitable today,” Scott responded.)
“I have many fond memories – and retain lots of great friendships – from my time at Fox,” Sammon told the Guardian.
Sammon, who began his career as a print journalist, has been able to lean on his experience at Fox News by serving in a dual editorial role for NewsNation, the cable news channel that is also owned by Nexstar and works out of the same office.
“I don’t have a lot of skillsets in this world and they found the two weird skillsets that I have, and there’s a job for that,” he said. “You need to know about newspapers and you need to know about cable TV. Well, that’s actually something I can do.”
