The Age of Peak Newsletter Approaches
Good morning.
This has obviously been one hell of a news week. In fact, it seems like I could say that at the start of each newsletter. It’s hard to comment on national or global news in a newsletter like this—I want to keep the focus on what I set out to do, which is try to document what’s happening in the industry I work in and what I’m learning and paying attention to each week. But sometimes it's really tough to maintain that focus.
Maybe I need to start a second newsletter, where I share more of my non-industry thoughts or writing. That’s probably not a good idea as I’m doing my best to keep up with this one and we’re already entering “peak newsletter” age. Plus, I just read Anne Helen Petersen’s new book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation and starting a second newsletter kind of goes against everything that book covers. (But maybe is in line with the focus of this week’s edition?)
I don’t know where I’m going with this preamble, but I guess I just wanted to say, like most of you, I have a lot on my mind and it's sometimes hard to stay focused.
Now, onto the newsletter.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with a major development in the “Google vs. Publishers” story that has been playing out throughout the year. Axios’s Sara Fischer reports that as part of a new product called Google News Showcase, Google will pay publishers over $1 billion during the next three years “to create and curate high-quality journalism.” This latest investment is more than 3 times Google’s previous pledge of $300 million, made in 2018, to support the news industry. Google News Showcase will first launch in Germany and Brazil and will give publishers greater tooling to package and add context to stories than what currently exists in Google News. The panels that exist for Google News Showcase will drive to publisher pages, which allows them to monetize on the traffic, which has not been the case with Google’s current incorporation of content into it’s increasingly native spaces. Fischer has way more detail in her piece, and all of it sounds promising for publishers around the world. And a huge investment like $1 billion sure seems great on paper, but can that figure, when spread across multiple news organizations, really make a difference? And can these changes and new features really shift the relationship between Google and news organizations? I have no idea.
The biggest news story of the past week full stop was the announcement that President Donald Trump had tested positive for COVID-19. And Sarah Ellison at the Washington Post wrote a piece looking at how the White House’s handling of that news—specifically their inability to give or provide any definitive statements or information about Donald Trump’s health—played out in reporting over the weekend.
In other tech platform news, last week The Verge and Bloomberg both covered Facebook’s recent push to drive users further to content and conversations in their Groups product. In the Great Facebook Family and Friends Algorithm Shift of 2018, Groups became a much bigger focus of Facebook’s strategy, and publishers have tried over the last few years to use them to increase audience engagement. Facebook’s latest push to surface more Groups content could be beneficial for publishers who have invested in creating and maintaining groups, but as both The Verge and Bloomberg point out, Groups have also been the home of extremist, white supremacist, and conspiracy theory groups that have spread incredibly dangerous information. This latest change could further give those groups visibility. And as some have pointed out, the job of moderating that content will fall onto the admins of individual Groups and not on Facebook itself, which is problematic and nothing close to a comprehensive plan for containing lies and misinformation. (Update: On Tuesday afternoon, Facebook announced it was banning all forms of content from QAnon.)
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece looking at the success Axios has had even amid the COVID-19 pandemic. As other publications have faced layoffs and major hits to their revenue, Axios is on track to increase revenue by over 30% year-over-year and has not had any staff reductions. Newsletters are Axios’s primary product, and sponsorship of those newsletters represents over 50% of their revenue. And starting in 2021, Axios will be adding localized newsletters to their offering, starting with Denver, Des Moines, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Tampa Bay-St. Petersburg. Axios has also received a surprising amount of revenue from licensing and consulting on its own software.
Next up, we have a few stories coming out of Condé Nast:
Last week, Condé Nast announced the hire of their first-ever global chief diversity and inclusion officer. Yashica Olden will step into the new role and “be responsible for developing and implementing diversity and inclusion strategies across the company’s entire portfolio.” The hire comes after the well-documented issues the company has with creating an equal and diverse culture, and amid skepticism around what kind of action the company would take after publishing their Diversity and Inclusion report.
The company also announced that they would be reversing pay cuts, imposed earlier this year, for their staff—including for executives Anna Wintour and Roger Lynch.
And Kerry Flynn at CNN has been documenting the ongoing battle between the New Yorker and the New Yorker Union. The New Yorker Union has been seeking a “just cause” addition to their contract but has not come to an agreement with New Yorker management. Key speakers from the upcoming New Yorker Festival, like Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren, have elected not to go forward with their programmed spots at the festival in solidarity with the union.
Last Thursday, The Daily Beast reported that Essence, “one of America’s oldest and best-known major publications dedicated to Black women readers” furloughed some of its staff due to revenue losses related to COVID-19. Essence said that the furloughs would only last six months. While many major publications went through furloughs and layoffs earlier in the year, many outlets are still facing hardships.
Apparently, the Huffington Post is on the sales block according to a New York Post report. I first saw the news via The Atlantic’s newsletter The Idea. Verizon, which owns the Huffington Post, has shopped the property to multiple media conglomerates, including Vox-New York Media, Bustle Media Group, and Penske Media.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that Norman Pearlstine, the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, is stepping down from his position. This news comes after the Los Angeles Times ran a damning piece chronicling a summer of turmoil and missteps at the paper.
In vertical expansion news, last week Reuters announced that it would be launching a new vertical looking at the future of the workplace called “The Great Reboot.” Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic plenty of publications have been running coverage of the changing nature of work and the workplace, but this is the first I’ve seen anyone truly doubling down on that coverage area. It makes sense: as companies across various sectors figure out just how they’ll handle the nature of work and operating a workplace going forward, there will be plenty to cover; and as workers around the country try to determine their own futures, there should be plenty of audience interest.
Finally, we conclude with a report published by The Knight Foundation that breaks down just how overwhelmed Americans feel by the pace and sheer amount of news today. The report states that Americans “are frequently unable to sort out the facts and discern what is important, most commonly as a result of the nature of online news. They adapt in a variety of ways — from picking a few news sources to focus on, to abandoning the effort and disengaging from the news entirely.” One of the main causes cited is “having news and non-news items mixed together on social media and online sites.” The report is an enlightening look at something we are all probably acutely feeling—and have been even before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What I’m Engaged With
In last week’s newsletter, I covered the big news that Casey Newton was taking his The Interface newsletter from The Verge to Substack under the new title Platformer. Newton’s move was just the latest in the “journalists and writers taking their destinies into their own hands” narrative that has emerged this year, as well as the latest story in The Rise of Substack.
With that peg in mind, it seems as good a time as any to take a moment to unpack what all of this newsletter talk actually means. Luckily, the latest issue of Dan Oshinsky’s newsletter, Not a Newsletter, arrived in my inbox on Monday morning with plenty of relevant articles and developments I’d missed over the past month or two. If you haven’t heard of or don’t subscribe to Oshinsky’s newsletter, you should start now. It’s essential reading for anyone who’s job requires thinking about email or newsletter strategy.
Oshinsky weighs in on the recent attention around newsletters with some salient points, including the following:
Too many times, the journalism world has made the mistake of relying on a single stream of revenue for success. We shouldn’t make that mistake again with newsletters. There is so much potential for newsletters, but all of us need to be thinking about how we can continue to diversify our revenue as we build our audiences. This won’t be easy to do — but I do think it’s something that can be done! As always, I’m optimistic about the future of email, even if I do think the backlash (“Email is dead!”, “Paid newsletters are over!”, etc.) is coming soon.
I am fully expecting the newsletter backlash to happen soon. But I am still optimistic about the future of newsletters in the long-term. And a piece that Oshinsky shared from Wired UK’s Oliver Franklin-Wallis, as well as Oshinsky’s own bullishness, articulates why.
Newsletters do have so much potential! And newsletters do represent a way to break out of the social media news cycle/content-delivery system that has overwhelmed us (see The Knight Foundation report above) for so long. There are issues for sure: when should a newsletter creator get an editor? Is it really a reliable way for many people to support themselves? How many subscriptions are too much?
To cover the first question, it may become essential for newsletters of a certain audience size and influence to have some kind of quality control. If a newsletter creator has influence and dangerous ideas, it could lead to the major issues we are now seeing on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, where “content creators” left unchecked can cause great harm. But in the immediate future is an unedited newsletter a major threat? I don’t know. I don’t think as much as what is happening across social media.
The answer to the second question is easier: newsletters, specifically paid newsletters aren’t for everybody. If you are a writer or a journalist with a following or even a niche focus that is attractive to readers paying for a subscription or even finding another revenue source (like classifieds or advertising) from a similar niche partner, a newsletter could be lucrative. Most of us don’t necessarily have that option, but for journalists or writers who are jaded with the potential earnings available to them in traditional paths in their industries it makes a lot of sense.
I want to pause on that point for a second. One of the reasons I love newsletters so much is because they remind me of the internet back in the first decade of the 2000s, when there were plenty of weird blogs out there (like my old one!). People experimented and took risks and just tried to put words on the internet. And a lot of those people ended up getting hired by major publications as they caught up with the voice and kind of content that could thrive on the internet. They joined the world of traditional media organizations and gained larger followings, but were always subject to the same whims, bureaucracy, and precarious employment that anyone in that industry was subject to.
Now, laid off journalists, or ones who are taking destiny into their own hands, are turning to newsletters and bringing back that blog-ecosystem of the early internet. Except now those writers are more polished, and the norms of internet writing are better established. Writers who have worked in major media organizations have seen the downfall of existing business models up close and have learned from those mistakes and are trying to forge a sustainable business model. As Anne Helen Petersen says in Franklin-Wallis’s piece:
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. But all of this feels very cyclical to me. The economy tanks, writers get laid off from their publications, writers go freelance, writers find success with scrappy publications, mainstream publications hire those writers, scrappy publications die, mainstream publications get big, then the economy tanks again. So I'm trying to find something akin to stability, which is certainly a shared sentiment amongst the other journalists I know.
So maybe this is all cyclical. But the fact that there are more opportunities now to leverage value on your own—especially if you have an audience—makes me hopeful.
In terms of how many subscriptions might be too much, Franklin-Wallis also covers this in his piece. A group of newsletter writers at Substack put together a bundle of newsletters into a publication called Everything. This allows more people to afford multiple subscriptions at an affordable rate. Major media organizations have tried to create bundles, but with limited success so far. But perhaps that kind of model is better suited to groups of individual newsletters or direct “voices” rather than multiple, well-established publications.
I’ve gone on long enough now and could probably go on longer. But I highly recommend reading both Franklin-Wallis’s piece and subscribing to Dan Oshinksy’s Not a Newsletter. Oshinsky is also just as high on newsletter courses as I am, and he talks about them in detail while also providing a few great examples. Just another example of the potential of newsletters.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Having and Being Had (2020) by Eula Biss
I’ve been on a non-fiction reading kick lately. I started off the year reading Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner, which covered her time in and disillusionment with the start-up industry and culture of Silicon Valley. That book was very novelistic in delivery and hit very close to home with my own experiences over the past five years—it opened my eyes to and reinforced my understanding of behaviors and workplace types that I’d seen and somewhat normalized.
Recently, I finished both Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had and Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even: Home Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. In very different ways, these two books look at how we’ve bought into a culture of work and a system of capitalism in some cases, depending on your age, unconsciously or out of necessity. And how, perhaps, we can opt-out of or potentially change how we choose to engage with each. Now, I’m starting on Kurt Andersen’s Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, which goes deep into the history of how we got to this moment in American society—where so much of what we do involves looking backward—and how the conservative forces in power laid the seeds for our current moment and worked towards it over decades.
All of these books seem to circle around a similar thing that I’ve been feeling: that the world I know is broken and has been for some time, and that I exist and in many ways, have thrived, in a system that is unfair but yet I still don’t feel successful or necessarily happy. I’m better off than most Americans and that doesn’t feel right; and the further I get “ahead” the more I subjugate others, simply by existing in our system, who are less fortunate.
Out of these four books, so far, Eula Biss’s has been the most affecting. It’s written in a simple, straightforward style and each chapter consists of several poetic scenes, all about a paragraph long. Biss spends most of her time trying to define what capitalism means—to her, to others, to the world today—and what it means to work, to labor, and to serve.
That might sound vague, but think about how and when you use the words “work” or “labor” or “serve” or “service.” And then think about what you mean when you say those words or what you are trying to say about yourself and what you are doing when you use those words. I had never thought about that set of words concretely before—the ways I use them, the ways I interchange them at different times to suggest different things—but I do now.
The Action I’ve Taken
Since the beginning of June, I conclude each newsletter with a brief list of actions I’ve taken each week to help end police violence and to support an America that is free of racism. This isn’t meant to virtue signal or pat myself on the back—it’s merely meant to show my commitment to change. I won’t share any donation figures here but can provide them upon request.
We are getting to election day and so right now I am all about supporting senate races in states that can turn blue. I’ve donated toRaphael Warnock, Sara Gideon, Mark Kelly, Theresa Greenfield, Jon Ossoff, Jaime Harrison, and Amy McGrath.
Donated to Rich Finneran’s campaign for Missouri Attorney General.