New Media Giant: The Daily Wire

 One of the largest new media institutions on the conservative side of the isle is The Daily Wire, founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring, The Daily Wire focuses on conservative news coverage and content creation. In its early days Daily Wire was an online newspaper that posted curated opinion and news articles for readers to share. What set The Daily Wire apart was in part the timing of when the company was founded and its early adoption and optimization of social media in spreading their reporting and personalities. This early adoption of social media and later a focus on daily podcasts allowed The Daily Wire to capture a large share of the conservative new media marketplace.

Currently the largest part of The Daily Wires model, outside of news reporting online, is podcasts with their most popular being Ben Shapiro’s daily show The Ben Shapiro Show. Before founding The Daily Wire, Shapiro attended and graduated from UCLA for his undergraduate studies and attended and graduated from Harvard Law School. Shapiro's Daily Show focuses on a number of issues, first and foremost the news of the day then at the end of the show, there is usually a focus on culture war issues or conservative culture issues. A large part of Shapiro's popularity centers around his analytical style of thinking and explaining issues as well as his ability to make issues easily understandable to people who can only consume an hour of news a day. Compared to other political daily shows, Shapiro’s show can be described as in depth and information heavy. Other personalities at The Daily Wire include Jordan Peterson, Michael Knowles, and Matt Walsh among others.

The reason The Daily Wire has continued to grow and expand is its increasing diversification in content that it offers on its paid subscription program. Whereas other media outlets stick to just focusing on news, The Daily Wire offers free and behind paywall news stories, extra length daily shows, documentaries, feature length films, and even kids content all centered around a conservative world view. This diversification and increase in content production has allowed The Daily Wire to have over 1,000,000 paid subscribers as of 2022. Daily Wire hosts have also increased publicity for the company by testifying on Capitol Hill to Congress on a number of issues, including culture war issues, censorship, and government bias. Recently, founder Ben Shapiro testified before Congress on biased advertising standards present in the agency GARM, this led to the agency eventually being disbanded.

With their recent successes, The Daily Wire is showing no signs of slowing down and has actually been increasing their content to produce more movies and documentaries, which have been increasingly gaining traction. Furthermore, political campaigning from Ben Shapiro and other Daily Wire hosts helped a number of Republicans in the House and Senate win their races this electoral season. With the Conservative administration in the White House, Daily Wire press coverage will only continue to increase and gain more popularity and notoriety, in my opinion.