Just the News

What you're reading

Just the News is a US digital political news site founded in 2020 by veteran reporter John Solomon, formerly of The Hill, the Washington Times, and other outlets. It pitches itself as a politics-and-investigations site that covers Washington from a conservative-leaning vantage with a particular focus on stories the editorial team sees as undercovered by mainstream press. The audience is national, conservative-leaning, and weighted toward readers who follow Beltway political stories, election-administration coverage, and the post-2020 conservative investigative beat.

Format is web-first plus podcasts (the John Solomon Reports daily podcast), newsletters, and an integration with Real America's Voice cable channel. Ownership is Just the News, a private operation founded and led by Solomon. The site is best known for Solomon's reporting on the 2016 election and its investigations, sustained coverage of election-administration questions, FBI and DOJ stories from a perspective critical of those agencies' handling of Trump-era investigations, and a faster-cycle conservative-political-news operation that overlaps with but is distinct from the larger Right-band outlets.

Ownership & funding

Just the News (private; John Solomon). Funded primarily through ad-supported.

Pure ad-supported funding shapes the editorial product in well-understood ways. Page views drive revenue, conservative-audience engagement drives page views, and stories on election integrity, FBI-and-DOJ accountability, and Beltway political conflict drive that engagement. That commercial logic produces the editorial mix Just the News ships: high-volume political-news rewrites and aggregation, original Solomon-bylined investigations on the marquee beats, and a podcast slate that monetizes the audience habit. The lack of subscription revenue means the site is fully dependent on ad markets and platform decisions, which constrains its capacity to fund slow investigative work outside the marquee beats.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places Just the News at Lean Right with a factuality rating of Mixed.

nwsly rates Just the News as Lean Right because the editorial mix and framing consistently align with conservative-leaning priorities: sympathetic coverage of Republican figures, adversarial coverage of Democratic figures, prominent placement of election-integrity stories, FBI-and-DOJ criticism through a conservative frame, and headline voice oriented toward conservative-audience engagement. The Lean Right rather than Right rating reflects that the site sits closer to mainstream-conservative register than to movement-conservative register — less culture-war content than Daily Wire or Federalist, more Beltway-investigations content than Daily Caller.

Just the News breaks pattern occasionally when its investigations cut across party lines — Democratic-aligned figures, fundraising operations, and consultants have been targets — but the editorial direction holds steady on the marquee beats. The Mixed factuality rating reflects two distinct sides of the operation. The Solomon-bylined investigations are sourced and document-driven and have surfaced original material on FBI-and-DOJ handling of specific cases; the aggregation and rapid-response work has a thinner corrections record, and specific stories (particularly on 2020 election claims) ran ahead of what the underlying material supported. Readers should check bylines and treat investigations and aggregation as different products under one masthead.

Editorial vs news side

Just the News does not maintain a strict wall between news and opinion. The reported pieces carry visible framing in word choice and emphasis, the podcast and newsletter are openly opinion, and the labeled opinion content sits on the same surface as the news. There is no neutral news layer; the whole product is conservative-leaning political journalism by design. Readers should treat the publication accordingly — Solomon-bylined investigations carry more weight than aggregation, the podcast is opinion, and the framing is consistently conservative.

Why we include them in nwsly

Political news site founded by John Solomon in 2020.

Just the News earns its slot because Solomon's reporting on FBI-and-DOJ handling of Trump-era investigations and on election-administration questions has surfaced original material that mainstream outlets covered later or in different framing. Including it gives nwsly visibility into a specific stream of conservative-leaning Beltway investigations, with the factuality caveat keeping individual aggregation pieces from getting load-bearing treatment in a brief. In the Lean Right band it complements the Dispatch (Never-Trump policy) and the Wall Street Journal news pages (centrist-conservative business) with a different conservative-investigations register.

Recent nwsly briefs citing Just the News

Coming soon — feed from /today and /catalog will populate this section.