Newsletters could be the next (and only) hope to save the media

Newsletter businesses are by no means new: Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness empire, started as a newsletter back in 2008; Morning Brew, which launched in 2015, now brings in more than $20million in revenue.Business analysts such as Ben Thompson of Stratechery and Bill Bishop of Sinocism have built substantial readerships around their insightful tak... See more

“I think writers have always realized their own value; there just weren't a lot of options in the post-2008 recession for how to make good on it,” says Anne Helen Peterson, who writes the newsletter Culture Study. “But all of this feels very cyclical to me. The economy tanks, writers get laid off from their publications, writers go freelance, write... See more

Newsletters are booming right now: since the pandemic started, the number of readers and ‘active writers’ on Substack have both doubled, and other providers such as Mailchimp have seen similar spikes in users. Newsletter platforms are attracting big names: Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, New York Magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan and Buzzfeed’s Anne ... See more

While launching a premium newsletter might sound appealing for writers, it can also take a long time for creators to attract enough paying readers to make it financially sustainable. “The two types of people who seem to be making it work right now. They either have an existing kind of audience – Andrew Sullivan is certainly one – who can jump in an... See more