Where content is truly king

John Harlow | April 11, 2025

As the podcaster who has, more than once, referred to herself as “Coffin Girl,” UCLA professor Kara Cooney is passionate about sharing her often controversial take on ancient Mediterranean cultures and burial rites. Energetically throwing herself into every corner of social media, she’s determined to both educate and entertain.

Sadly, since her earliest social posts two decades ago, the professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology has grown bored, frustrated or disappointed by pretty much every platform going. Cooney, like many serious communicators, has become tired of the big site algorithms that work against those not screaming for attention, as well as concerned about how many online sites just disappear: Bloomberg estimates that URL links to 38% of all internet sites working in 2013 have now vanished. Cooney wants some words to endure as long as the pharaohs.

So the professor is pivoting to new worlds — and she’s far from alone. As millions of online consumers have shifted their attention from legacy media sites such as The New York Times, X or Reddit toward the splashier visual worlds of Instagram, a whole new arena has emerged for thoughtful, engaging commentary and deeper reportage.

Cooney, for one, has never been so jazzed for the future of social media. She sees intellectual salvation in the rising tide of subscription-funded newsletters on sites such as Ghost, Kit or the currently dominant player in this new marketplace of ideas, Substack.

Kara Cooney

“2025 will be a transformative year. We will build new meeting places for grown-up conversation,” she says. “And those will be very different from the old ad-based, algorithm-dictated spaces.”

Like the rest of the internet, the new sites present something of a mixed bag. Some content is challenging and informative, some warm and whimsical — and some righteously rageful or downright disturbing. 

It should come as no surprise that such a new frontier would include a healthy dose of intellectual UCLA DNA. Bruin Substackers include a legendary athlete and a contemporary football powerhouse, psychologists and artists. All are unified by a determination to speak directly to a select, rather than mass, audience that values unfiltered (albeit occasionally in need of editing) authenticity.

The demand is clearly there. While traditional media stagnates, Substack’s audience has been growing by 13% a year. Founded in San Francisco in 2017, Substack now boasts more than 17,000 writers and 3 million paying subscribers. The writers own their material and can take it elsewhere if they get a better hosting offer. A handful are earning millions of dollars through direct reader subscriptions while paying 10% “rent” to Substack.

But it’s not just about the money. Creators feel they are punching above their weight with a richer, more civilized connection not available anywhere else. Here are 10 Bruins who are surfing this new wave of online connection.

The Egyptologist’s new world

In January 2025, Kara Cooney started employing a third co-producer on her Substack site, “Ancient/Now.” It’s a mark of confidence in her Substack mission, which combines a newsletter, a podcast, links to other sites and, for subscribers, a two-way video “meet and greet” called Ancient Office Hours.

This colorful mix of lively writing and archived chats, combined with some rigorous coursework, is an exhilarating, funny and occasionally strange journey into ancient cultures that feel both alien and familiar. The 3,000-strong audience, building on a core of devoted boomers who have followed Cooney through many online reincarnations, engage without rage — “They have helped me work through some big ideas,” she says.

Critics dubbed Cooney “The Hot Egyptologist” after her Discovery Channel documentary series Out of Egypt debuted in 2009. It’s a sobriquet she laughs off, while adding that her Substack is a way of “maturing out” of such silliness.

“Working in TV demands compromise, and books are so overly edited they lose humanity in the pursuit of perfection, but on the site I can let rip spontaneously,” she says. “I can take on topics such as the parallels between Ramses II and Donald Trump, for instance — something that irritates some historians who argue we can only identify with people from, maybe, 500 years back. This sense of modern exceptionalism is absurd.”

Cooney still counts more than 300,000 followers on Facebook, but she says that since COVID, its algorithm has prioritized more advertising-friendly posters. On Substack, where she’s been busy for two years, she says the content is “a real conversation between people who care.”

She continues, “Yes, there are neo-Nazis and anti-vaxxers on Substack, but that is humanity for you. I would not advise against using an iPhone just because horrible people also use it. Today, Substack is first draft. As AI smooths out the creases in the world, such authenticity will become the most valuable coin of the realm.”

This is an excerpt from a UCLA Magazine story. Read the full article here, and read the complete spring 2025 issue here.