Many thanks, for making Joy's House a Substack Bestseller!

Thank you to all of my readers ... and #reiders!

It’s all because of you…

I set out on this phase of my Substack journey on February 24, 2025, freshly “liberated” from my day job. Having launched this site a little over a year ago, at the suggestion of my savvy social media friend

Yashar Ali

… who insisted that as a writer and a journalist, I needed to be on Substack (though it took me years to listen) … I hadn’t really committed. At the start of the year, I had a grand total of nine thousand subscribers, who mostly came to this page (then called “And another thing with Joy”) to read my occasional posts, and to live chat with me as I sat on set at 30 Rock during MSNBC special coverage. That modest growth ended abruptly in January, when my then boss, the MSNBC president, told me I wasn’t allowed to have a Substack. I didn’t delete it, though. I just stopped posting. So on my “liberation day,” I started writing here again. Fast forward six months, and those nine thousand readers now exceed one hundred sixty eight thousand … and Joy’s House has become a …

I could not be more grateful for the support of each and every one of you subscribers, especially those who’ve taken the extra step of supporting this publication at the paid tier, which will enable our little media company, Image Lab Media Group, to expand and grow. I also owe major bigups to the Substack team — Bailey and Catherine and the tech support gurus who have kindly stepped in anytime I’ve had a Gen X moment and couldn’t make something technological work, or when a subscriber has had an issue that I couldn’t fix on my own. I’m also grateful to my fellow Substackers — from

Steve Schmidt

to

Wajahat Ali

to

The Conscious Lee

and

Katie Couric

and

Ava DuVernay

and

Dean Obeidallah

and

Anand Giridharadas

and

Ahmed Baba

Scott Dworkin

and of course my buddy and fellow corporate media exile

Don Lemon

— all of whom have shared their Substack Live time with me. I couldn’t appreciate all of you more, and I promise to keep bringing you my unfiltered thoughts, timely lives with friends, the latest posts from The Joy Reid Show (please subscribe over there as well, if you haven’t already. It’s 100 percent free!) And for my paid tier Reiders, more of the exclusive live chats and coming soon, behind the scenes footage and stories just for you.

Thanks again to everyone who has supported my journey into independent media. Let’s keep building, and keep fighting for the media, and the America, that we want and deserve.

Bless up, fam!