The Michigan Review, the University of Michigan’s historically conservative student newspaper, recently capped off over a decade of slow decline with a hacked website, a hijacked YouTube channel, and a series of ideological and personal conflicts between editors.
However, after getting through these troubles The Review has started to slowly grow once again, reimagining its online presence and slowly expanding its staff and article output.
Founded in 1982 by Thomas Fous, then chair of the U-M College Republicans, The Review was originally created as a conservative publication that would “confront the existing liberal establishment on Michigan’s college campuses,” according to an essay by Fous traditionally hosted on The Review’s old about page, which has since been deleted. While it never grew bigger than The Michigan Daily, U-M’s older student newspaper, it managed to hold a secondary yet still-visible role in the U-M student media scene as a platform for campus conservatives.
The Review of today has declined significantly compared to its peak in the late twentieth century. The paper lost its traditional office space in the Michigan League in 2009, and ceased publishing a print edition sometime in the following decade. Simultaneously, its output of articles gradually declined to the single digits per month due to a shrinking staff. Lindsay Keiser, a current Law student at Georgetown who was coeditor in chief of The Review for two years until her graduation in 2022, said the paper’s headcount declined considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When I go back on GroupMe, the Michigan Review chat from ’22 to ’23 had five people in it.” Keiser says. “When we were freshmen and sophomores under [previous EIC] Noah, there were at least ten people who would routinely come to meetings and float article ideas.”
In this relative desert of staffers and content, some members of The Review resorted to creative solutions in order to boost engagement with the paper. Tyler Fioritto, editor of The Review’s campus section from 2023 until his firing in summer 2025, says he recovered the paper’s old YouTube channel for use in livestreaming, a personal interest of his.
“The Michigan Review actually did have a YouTube channel back in 2016–17, and they had content, but they hadn’t uploaded in eight years,” Fioritto says. “I got that channel, owned by this guy that used The Review’s brand name, and I basically turned it into my livestream for The Review.”
While his use of the channel would eventually get him fired, initially his ideas were received positively by the rest of The Review. Fioritto would use the channel to livestream a conference hosted by Turning Point USA, document a No Kings protest, and debate a member of U-M’s Central Student Government. His other content ideas were less well received, however.
A majority of Fioritto’s streams didn’t include him in them—or any original Review content at all. Instead, Fioritto uploaded daily videos that solely consisted of hours of what he described as “republished” videos produced by nationally famous political personalities. These included liberal comedian Jon Stewart and leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, and could run for upwards of nine hours, all uploaded in a TikTok style vertical format with The Review’s YouTube handle pasted over it.
Fioritto says other members of the paper, especially Review coeditor in chief Robert Gioia, did not approve of these streams.
“They said ‘hey, this is not professional enough, this doesn’t look fancy enough,’” Fioritto says. “And I’m like, ‘but they’re doing well with numbers.’ He’s like ‘yeah, but we’re trying to cultivate a brand.’ I’m like, ‘you can’t cultivate a brand if no one knows you exist.’”
Eventually tensions reached a boiling point, and Fioritto was fired in August. In response, Fioritto changed the password to The Review’s YouTube channel, an act he did not believe constituted theft due to his involvement in recovering and operating the channel. Gioia declined to comment on whether he agreed or disagreed with Fioritto’s assessment, but did spend the next several months in a dispute over who rightfully owned the channel.
Gioia also alluded to problems with Fioritto’s behavior as a reason for his firing, but similarly declined to provide specific details. Fioritto said he was accused of unprofessional behavior, contributing to a toxic environment and harassment, all of which he denies.
While this dispute was ongoing, The Review was hit by an entirely different problem: online gambling advertisements. Starting on August 14, 2025, the site was hacked by a user named root, which used The Review’s website to spam ads for online gambling services in numerous different languages. The site became unusable, and was soon shut down by The Review.
Shortly after the old website was shut down The Review moved its content to Substack, a popular online blogging platform, along with its articles published 2024 and onwards. All parties involved in the then-ongoing dispute within the paper have claimed that the decision to shift to Substack was made prior to the hacking of the old site, though credit for whose idea it was varied. In an email, Gioia writes that the switch was primarily made due to usability concerns.
“Substack was more user friendly for our expanding multi-media operations—on YouTube, X, Instagram, and via newsletters—so it made sense for us to make the switch,” Gioia writes. “This has turned out to be a great idea, and during its last 90 days of operation, we hit just under 10 thousand site views.”
While the transition to Substack may have been beneficial from a content production standpoint, Keiser says she worried about the impact it might have on the perceived legitimacy of The Review as a student newspaper.
“There’s podcasters and all sorts of normal people that use Substack, [so] moving onto a different platform is probably for the best,” Keiser says. “The only problem that I have with it is that it sort of delegitimizes The Review as a university-initiated and sanctioned paper, because then it’s just like a blog, right?”
Eventually the conflict over the YouTube channel was resolved in mid-October. Fioritto paid The Review a lump sum to retroactively legitimize his acquisition of the channel, which he has since rebranded to Great Lakes Unfiltered. Neither party was willing to divulge the specific amount spent on the channel. Fioritto did say, however, that the number was in the “four figure range,” though “nothing close to $10,000.”
Since the details of their separation were finalized, both sides have gone their separate ways. While Fioritto initially said he wanted to expand GLU to rival The Review, he seems to have shelved these desires in favor of running for an Assembly seat in U-M’s Central Student Government, which he won on Nov. 20. Plans for a Substack and a news staff of his own have so far gone unrealized, and the channel continues to primarily repost the content of more famous livestreamers, with an occasional stream hosted by Fioritto himself.
The Review, meanwhile, has increasingly shifted its focus to digital media during its process of reconstruction. The paper launched a podcast that has interviewed Robert Doar of the American Enterprise Institute and U-M student body president Eric Veal Jr. since its inception, though it has not yet produced any content outside of those two interviews.
The paper’s Twitter account has also remained active—far more so than any other component of the paper. However, the account’s current singular mission is to provide live coverage of Michigan football games through Twitter threads. It has not been used to promote The Review’s articles or other works for some time.
While much of The Review’s digitalization strategy rests on members of the paper putting more work in to reach new forms of media, one aspect has required Review staff to put in markedly less effort than would have been required prior. The paper has increasingly used AI art for its thumbnails, which Gioia describes as “a great democratizer” due to the relative time it takes him to feed AI a prompt for an image compared to effort learning how to use Photoshop or other digital art platforms would require.
It is this increasingly online Review that students are once again joining. Starting from a group of three writers in 2024, the paper has expanded to include a working team of fourteen members. While production of articles remains slow, Gioia wrote that he hopes to continue the paper’s growth.
“Our growth has been a little fast, but its been exciting to cultivate,” Gioia writes. “It will be interesting to see how far The Review ends up going. More is on the way, so stay tuned!”
While The Review’s recruitment numbers are up, the paper new writers are joining is not necessarily the same one that existed a few years prior, let alone the one founded by Thomas Fous in 1982. Alongside its forays into digital media, the paper has also undergone an ideological rebranding. Fous’ essay outlining The Review’s conservative mission has been removed from the website’s about page, which now describes the paper as a provider of “uninfluenced, non-partisan university news.”
Gioia says he did not want the paper to be thought of as solely conservative anymore. “Our editorial policy is strictly nonpartisan and our current membership is politically diverse,” Gioia writes. “All sides of the spectrum—and those that are apolitical—are accounted for in our E-Board and general membership. The Review’s mission is to disrupt echo chambers by amplifying underrepresented voices on college campuses.”
Despite this ostensible shift, it’s unclear how much the paper’s editorial stance has truly changed. Writers from The Review were invited to participate in the National Conservatism Conference in September, and many Review articles dissenting from mainstream conservatism do so from a conservative perspective, such as A Conservative Case Against Liberation Day Tariffs.
No matter how much The Review has shifted, this is far from the first time in its history that the paper has undergone ideological or branding disputes. Keiser herself says she succeeded an editor in chief who preferred to bill the paper as a nonpartisan outlet, while she and her co-EIC adopted an openly neoconservative and libertarian branding.
“That is the history of The Review,” Keiser says. “And so in that sense I’m happy that the current iteration of the Editor in Chief and the staff feel that now is the time to go non-partisan if that’s what they think is best.”
On the other hand, Keiser isn’t sure what purpose The Review serves if it isn’t casting itself as the conservative alternative to The Michigan Daily.
“You’re welcome to quote me as saying that [the rebrand] is really disappointing, because, like, that’s the role of The Daily,” Keiser says. “The Daily has a politics section for people who want to be liberal, and it has all the other sections for everything else.”