Newsletters are all the rage. For every sports writer let go from a vulture-capital tilted company, readers will find scores of their favorite scribes announcing a new home at Substack or Patreon or wherever else fine newsletters are sold (or published free).
It’s great… for the already established name in the industry. Big names, with loyal followings, can leverage their readership to earn direct payment. Cut out the middleman. There’s also an issue with this, but we’ll get to that in a second.
For the youngster fresh out of college, without sincere options elsewhere, newsletters might result in a futile practice of working for free, building poor writing habits and expecting nothing in return other than a few likes. If they go behind a paywall, especially early, it’s unlikely an outlet will ever hear of him or her, making it increasingly difficult to apply upward at good networks with solid pay.
Aside: A sad reality is many outlets still, through magic, believe a great brand is the same as a great talent. It’s not. That’s an entirely different subject. Let’s digress for now..
That structure is less than ideal. To begin one’s journalism (or blogging) career without anyone experienced to help mentor is numbing the process, reducing the growth of someone’s talents to the whims of nothing tangible.
Pyramid Scheme Networks — from the previous generation of writers taken advantage of — were promised exposure without (much) pay. They, too, weren’t given sincere feedback; though there were a few outliers. There’s always exceptions to the rule. Just don’t allow those claim their exception is anything other than that.
Nevertheless, many of those (then) young writers ran into the same issue, even if the type of content will be dramatically different.
For that generation, mine, many were offered a “step in the door” if they cooked up thoughtless 250 word blog posts, aggregating someone else’s hard work. If we did that well enough, we were given promotions on sticks or given chances to shine with original content of our own.
Again, there are exceptions. From my personal experience, and it should be noted everyone’s is different, the percentage of guys I “knew” in the industry when I started, who were forced to embrace burnout culture and traffic-over-everything, then left the profession, is high. There are leftovers, mainstays, and folk who rose to the top. Still, here and there, I can’t help but wonder just how many writers’ potentials were never sniffed because of this system.
It was network over talent and traffic over everything. Usually in the name of some VC dipshit who expected consistent growth regardless of context, ceilings or content quality.
A serious fuck you to all networks that prayed on kids via the team-site model. The people who worked (and still do) there are largely great, but asking a 22-year-old to man the helm, to mentor other twenty-somethings, so all that ad-revenue can be funneled upward to the “main blog” where the already established writers were, is some serious fuckwashery.
At least my generation didn’t have to go it alone. We were able to build friendships, professional networks, and lift each other up when possible. My best mentors were my friends, as many of us weren’t getting critical feedback from any of our “editors” at our various places of employment.
The newsletter model, for those who aren’t being let go from a legacy outlet, is dangerous for other reasons. Potential Writer-Y would be an unqualified Army of One, writing to a void, only receiving positive feedback on possibly awful content because of the echo chamber it will most certainly create.
Time to play pretend.
Pretend you’re a young writer looking to break in the industry, but no papers or websites are hiring (and it’s a good chance this is true):
No one is subscribing to a newsletter unless they already like your writing (or tweeting). If the only people reading your work are already fans, the only thing you’ll find are compliments — fueling a likely underserved belief your technical skill is inherently equated to the positive comments you receive from your posts.
It goes beyond even that, though. A personal preference area between the good and bad of cutting out the middlemen, and this goes for the well-established writers as well.
Some people truly enjoy doing their own thing. The following doesn’t apply to them, as we don’t want to blanket-statement an entire industry as complex as Internet Scribblers as one sentient brain.
Many of us simply don’t want the responsibility of “building our own thing” and the like. To be a brand, or create a brand, and/or generate a following by the “numerous easy steps” every newsletter platform swears is tried and true, making the least seasoned writers believe all they have to do is get X-amount of subscribers in order to post newsletters full-time.
It’s not easy. Not to mention the only resources you’ll have, unlike when backed by an actual outlet, is whatever you have in your bank account. Money matters in this industry. Don’t let any asshole out there try to imply that the only thing you need to write a good long-form feature is talent and a good work ethic. You also need money! Money to spend time to research, fly to meet subjects, and more money to do certain paperwork requests. Money. Money. Money.
Most individually crafted newsletters start for free. It’s an attempt to build a subscriber base. The Void, my personal newsletter (so not this one), is free. It’s free because I knew my postings were going to be so sporadic, and without a writing talent transcendent enough to carry a loyal audience, it would go nowhere quick.
Through sheer random luck, I bungled my way to roughly 300 subscribers without focusing on any one specific subject — a big no-no when starting a newsletter. Most platforms will admit a writer MUST cover ONE subject in which they are an AUTHORITY.
Anywho, most people likely subscribed to that newsletter assuming it would be college basketball related. They were wrong, and warned from the jump, but it explains why I, a longtime CBB writer, gained as many subscribers as I did despite not having a large Twitter following, any brand to speak of, or elite writing talent like a Kelly Dwyer.
The number, 300 for me, doesn’t mean guaranteed reads. I’ve spoken with numerous friends who are also writing newsletters. We’ve come to a bit of an unscientific conclusion, even if all our subscriber sizes are different (some are in the high thousands). The CTR (click-through-rate) usually hovers around 20-35 percent. Basically, less than half your subscribers will bother to open the emails they get sent on a regular basis.
I’m bad at math, but with my kids doing schoolwork at home, and those pesky children forcing me to learn fancy common core math, 45 percent is less than half that front facing number. Also, something about a bunch of boxes, a rocket ship and dividing that number by the square root of a banana’s ass, if it were to theoretically have one.
I’m not too sure. Fancy-math is hard.
It’s time to play pretend again!
Now pretend you’re any level of writer in terms of a following. You start a newsletter for free, then get x-number of followers. For the sake of round numbers, let’s say it’s 5,000.
Holy shit! Hooray! Great job. That’s a lot. Charge five bucks a month for those 5,000 subscribers and you’re set, right?
Wrong, pal.
Let’s pretend your currently free newsletter has an abnormally high CTR of 50 percent, making your true audience 2,500. Of those 2,500 people, how many of them have the money to invest five dollars a month into YET ANOTHER newsletter? Hell, they might adore you and your work, but between streaming services, the billion other newsletters charging “only” $5 a month, and an entire pandemic happening, it’s getting harder and harder for anyone to support anything that isn’t a need.
At some point, the “paywall newsletter” market will oversaturate. It has no other option but to do just that. If 20 college basketball writers start 20 different college basketball newsletters, likely sharing a similar readership base, those readers are going to be divided up and thinned to the point of diminishing returns.
It’ll be like god damn Highlander, but instead of collecting heads for power, college hoops writers will be asking for subscriber lists from friends when their newsletters go defunct.
I don’t know if that’s a good analogy. I’ve never watched any of the Highlander films, but I once saw a guy holding a victim’s head, then a bunch of cool colors got shot into his chest. THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE! (IDK if this is from that movie)
The money part isn’t even the most concerning aspect to me. It’s the construct’s structure. It doesn’t allow for young writers to ever be mentored by veterans — an absolute must if a writer actually wants to get better at his/her craft.
If a large number of established writers go the newsletter route, whether they make it or not, it leaves a hole in the industry.
It’s an out-of-date trope, but it applies: For generations, a writer would begin working their local newspaper’s phones, compiling box-scores from high school games, eventually working their way to covering events. Along the way, they’d get feedback from veterans on staff who came up in a similar fashion. Some writers would move on to bigger and better things, but there were always veterans around to mentor the new up-and-coming journalists.
Feedback, the critical kind, is so important to this industry. Gaslighting each other is nice, and helps the ego and fills the desire for validation, but if everyone is spending all day telling you how pretty you are, how in the hell will you ever know there’s a piece of corn in your teeth?
That can’t exist in a newsletter format. Not unless a bunch of already established names go way out of their way, stopping the branding and writing they need to do to survive, to create a system in which they pay it forward (and not just to people within their immediate bubble).
There’s no solution in sight. It would take altruistic billionaires to start or buy media outlets, investing in talent in a way unheard of before, to right this ship to make an immediate impact. That’s not going to happen. Altruistic billionaires LOLOLOLOL.
Until then, or ever, or never, we’re reaching an age — through the newsletter model — when it’s going to become a battle of people trying to stay afloat, forced to put themselves and their families over the industry as a whole itself. It’s not their fault.
Nonetheless, we’re about to hit the I’m Just Here To Eat Era.
It’s going to cost the younger generations of aspiring journalists almost everything.
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Joseph used to write a bunch of things for places like Forbes, FRS and others. Now he’s ‘the man’ in management. A big old loser. A washed, leathery face, too. Here’s his own newsletter. For transparency: The above post was originally published on The Void. The Mother Site is understaffed a tad this morning, so old leathery face here needs to go help out his friends in active production!