In his farewell newsletter column Alterman stated that he opened a Substack page also entitled, Altercation, on January 21, 2023,[1] and that although publication plans were only in development, he was accepting free subscriptions.

[6] His doctoral dissertation, completed in 2002 with Barton Bernstein as primary advisor, was entitled, Two lies: the consequences of presidential deception.

[citation needed] Alterman was hired by MSNBC in 1996, appearing as a commentator on the cable channel and writing a column posted on its website.

Media Matters for America hired him as a senior fellow and agreed to host "Altercation", effective from September 18, 2006.

Regular contributors to "Altercation" included the sportswriter Charlie Pierce and the historian and military officer Robert Bateman.

On December 22, 2008, Alterman announced that "Altercation" would be moving to the website for The Nation in 2009, and would appear on a less regular basis than its previous Monday to Friday schedule.

[13] Alterman's first book was entitled, Sound & Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy, which won the 1992 George Orwell Award.

His It Ain't No Sin to be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen (1999, 2001) won the 1999 Stephen Crane Literary Award.

[citation needed] His seventh book, published in 2008 by Viking was entitled, Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America.

[14] Also in 2008, Alterman published a lengthy essay in The New Yorker on the decline of American newspapers and the future role of new media news sites.

Three years later, in 2015, his tenth book, Inequality in One City: Bill de Blasio and the New York Experiment was published.

He was called "the most honest and incisive media critic writing today" in the National Catholic Reporter and the author of "the smartest and funniest political journal out there" in the San Francisco Chronicle.