We hit 10,000 subscribers!

And we're celebrating with my first-ever discount!

Author

Kat Tenbarge
December 10, 2025

My fiancée surprised with me number 10 balloons. She also took these photos.

I am so incredibly grateful for all of you. Thanks to your readership, Spitfire News just surpassed 10,000 subscribers. This is a major milestone, and I’m so proud we got here in just nine months.

Thank you for taking a chance on me, letting me into your already crowded inbox, and a huge thank you to those who have upgraded their memberships. I don’t take your generosity lightly. It’s the reason I’m able to continue reporting and writing independently. When I got laid off in January this year and started building this newsletter, I had no idea if this could be sustainable. Because of you, I now know it can be. You got in on the ground floor, and the ride is just beginning.

To mark this occasion, I’m offering my first-ever discount: $10 off an annual subscription to celebrate 10k subscribers. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to read my paywalled stories, join my growing Discord community, and get unparalleled access to me and my work, now is the perfect opportunity. This discount won’t be around forever!

I also wanted to take this opportunity to share the ten stories I’m proudest of so far. These are also some of the stories you all loved the most. They drove the most engagement, reader responses, and upgrades.

The Blake Lively story that isn’t being told

This was the story that started it all! After I found out I was getting laid off, I dedicated about a month to reporting out this 3-part series. The first installment explores allegations that celebrity PR teams can manipulate the court of public opinion on Reddit. I investigated suspicious patterns that implied someone was toying with information regarding Blake Lively’s sexual harassment case against Justin Baldoni.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve developed a beat reporting on the amplification of pro-eating disorder culture on algorithm-driven social media platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram. This time, I wrote about how inadvertently training my FYPs to surface this kind of content has impacted my own body, as well as the political undertones of internet culture that instructs women to shrink ourselves.

Sociologist Nicole Bedera is one of the smartest people I know, and I wish everyone would read her groundbreaking research into how the Title IX system actually does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do when it comes to protecting the rights of gender-based violence victims on campus. Instead, it actually harms them more. But if you don’t have time to read Bedera’s book On the Wrong Side, you can read this Q&A with her instead.

In late July, I wriggled my way into a special media briefing hosted by OpenAI for the purpose of indoctrinating my peers into worshipping generative AI tools like ChatGPT. That may sound like an exaggeration, but if anything, it’s an understatement. This is what the company wants journalists to think, even if it comes across as dystopian to anyone paying close attention.

Reporting on how the internet swayed the outcome of the 2022 defamation trial was a watershed moment in my life and career. In many ways, it radicalized me. An entire online culture was weaponized to gaslight, smear, humiliate, and fine an abuse victim for writing an op-ed that did not name her abuser. Three years later, this is why I’m still talking about the case.

Is Taylor Swift really in her trad wife era?

I was terrified to publish this piece, and it went on to become one of the most popular ones I’ve written so far. Even as a Swiftie, I have a lot to criticize about the pop star’s political positioning in her latest era. And I know what kind of consequences can await those who critique her, which is why I was afraid to hit “Post.” But fear not: Spitfire News readers are discerning pop culture consumers.

This reflection was a year in the making. Soon after the election, I quit tweeting—something I didn’t even think I was capable of doing. But the toxic environment crafted by Elon Musk became untenable for this feminist journalist. I left, and unlike the pundits catastrophizing about Bluesky, I’d do it over and over again if I could.

While researching controversial internet personality Eugenia Cooney for one of my many collabs with Matt Bernstein (and I know a lot of you are here from A Bit Fruity), I stumbled across something even more confusing: AI-generated videos of Cooney, posted by a prolific fan account on YouTube. It was some of the strangest AI slop I’ve encountered so far. So I dug into the evolving fan-created AI landscape, and this piece ended up inspiring another wild AI fandom story I wrote for The Verge.

Livie Henderson isn’t a celebrity. She’s a former delivery person in a small city in New York. But after she spoke up about being sexually harassed on the job, she was smeared on TikTok in the same way that actresses like Amber Heard and Blake Lively have been. I reported on how Livie first became a target and how her local PD retaliated against her for reporting a crime, too.

Coming full circle to my most recent piece, I’m especially proud of how this deep dive into popular discourse around celebrities losing weight challenged my prior assumptions about the topic. What I came to realize is that obsessing over a famous woman’s thinner figure is still a part of eating disorder culture, even if it feels like combatting it.

So there you have it! 10 stories, 10,000 subscribers, and $10 off a subscription to get a year’s worth of reporting, writing, and insights from yours truly. Thanks again for reading this far, and I can’t wait to show you what’s next for Spitfire News. Until next time.