The pandemic years saw a number of high-profile journalists leave publications to launch their own newsletters. Although lockdowns were credited as a driving factor, the availability of tools like Substack and Medium, where writers could focus on writing rather than maintaining websites or payment systems, made making the leap much easier.
It’s a trend which made publishers quite uncomfortable. In an increasingly online world, blocking employees from having their own newsletters, podcasts or other personal ‘brands’ is difficult given the grey areas involved.
The Atlantic tried a different strategy. In November 2021, editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced that they were bringing nine newsletter writers on board specifically for a new subscriber initiative, and putting their newsletters behind the main Atlantic paywall.
Since then, updates on the programme have been scant. When The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson joined the podcast this week for an interview, we took the opportunity to ask him what had happened to it.
Listen to the full interview with Nicholas Thompson here, or search ‘Media Voices’ wherever you listen to podcasts.
Responding to the Substack threat
When Thompson joined The Atlantic in early 2021, the hype around Substack was reaching a fever pitch. Writers like Casey Newton had left established publications, and in the most high-profile cases, were making serious money on their own.
“When I came in, it seemed quite apparent at that moment that one of the biggest threats to The Atlantic was Substack, and the various Substack competitors that were out there,” Thompson explained. “Many of them were approaching our writers and saying, ‘Hey, look, you can make $1 million a year if you put your newsletter on our platform.”
The publisher had to respond. They planned and built their own newsletter programme which they hoped combined the best of both worlds; freedom for writers to continue writing and developing their newsletters, but more stable income and the benefits of working at a publication, as well as a subscriber boost for The Atlantic.
“[Writers] want to work at The Atlantic because you have the brand association, because you have the great editors, because you have great social media promotion, you have incredible colleagues – all those things come together,” Thompson explained, sure of the upsides.
They recruited an impressive roster of writers, from Nicole Chung and Molly Jong-Fast to Imani Perry and Charlie Warzel. The initial line-up of nine was, many of us assumed, just the beginning for the programme. But that’s as far as it went.
“I don’t know whether we got the incentives wrong, modelled out the audience wrong or executed it slightly wrong,” Thompson told us. “But it was a moderate success, not a smashing success.”
Minimising the paid newsletter programme
According to Thompson, the writers did well from the programme. Many of them still write for The Atlantic, in full staff writer roles. The publisher has an extensive roster of individual newsletters like Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain still available to subscribe to, but no longer paywalled.
There were some interesting learnings which came out of the experiment, though. “We found that if people knew about the subscriber-only newsletter programme, they were more likely to retain their subscription, and not churn,” Thompson outlined. “By just having it, it increased the value of an Atlantic subscription.”
“Ultimately, it was something where we put a lot of thought, a decent amount of time, a small amount of money, and it ended up breaking even. And we just minimised it.”
Thompson pointed out that the threats they identified to key talent in early 2021 have also changed. “The reason we didn’t quadruple the programme…is that the risk of losing people in the newsletter world has declined,” he noted. “The economics of being an individual news writer have become more clear in that it’s fabulous for some, and very hard for others.”
“Our writers have seen that too. They’re like, ‘Oh wait, I can be paid a real salary, have real editors, publish on a certain cadence, have a guaranteed audience…for most writers that’s a much better deal than, ‘I’ve got to go off and start my own Substack, and maybe I’m not going to make anything on it.’”
This scenario wasn’t difficult to predict. We did a Media Voices special documentary in late 2020 which heard from a number of solo newsletter entrepreneurs. Although they all found their work hugely rewarding, they were open about some of the challenges of running your own business, from burnout to having to do everything yourself.
Media Voices co-host Peter Houston thinks that this says more about the Substack hype petering out than The Atlantic’s newsletter strategy. “Their move was defensive, but as the reality of life as a solo newsletter creator became clear, they didn’t need that defence,” he suggested. “The security of staff writer positions with a trusted brand will always be a draw.”
Still value in newsletters
Despite the winding down of the paid newsletter initiative, Thompson was keen to emphasise that The Atlantic still has a large roster of newsletters which are hugely valuable to them, both brand and individual. “Tom Nichols, who often writes our daily newsletter, he came in as somebody writing a subscriber-only newsletter, he’s fantastic,” he illustrated. “We have individual people like Derek Thompson, people love their content. They can read his newsletter, it’s an Atlantic newsletter. So there are lots of great newsletters. We’re launching newsletters all the time.”
Given the paid newsletter market still has some way to mature, this could have been an opportunity for The Atlantic to be pioneers in the space. The New York Times is the other prominent publisher to have made a proportion of its 100+ newsletters subscriber-only around the same time.
Senior Product Manager Paige Collins told WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference last year that the key there was asking what purpose the different newsletters served, and splitting them into ‘buckets’; free briefings to grow awareness, automated emails for bringing users back to the website, and subscriber-only newsletters to drive retention.
The central principle for subscriber-only newsletters was that “it needed to feel premium and worth paying for,” Collins said. “Many of them have full narrative pieces in the inbox, you don’t have to click to get the value.”
The Telegraph’s Maire Bonheim and David Alexander echoed a similar approach when they discussed their newsletter strategy on the Media Voices podcast earlier this month. “Some of [our 35 newsletters] might be specifically aimed at providing a short window to registrants who aren’t sure yet and are dipping their toes,” Bonheim outlined. “They do different things and we assess them using different metrics.”
Thompson had noted the value subscribers placed on the newsletter programme once they knew about it. As retention efforts become more pressing, I can’t help but wonder if minimising the newsletter programme has come at the wrong time.
Paid newsletters aren’t an easy product to align or market alongside a subscription portfolio. But as a growing number of publishers are showing, they can be a vital habit-builder and retention tool, especially in proving value.
For a full day of publisher podcast and newsletter best-practice, from what publishers are doing with paid podcasts to harnessing AI in newsletters, make sure you’ve got June 12th in your diary. Tickets are now available for the Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summit at an advance rate until the end of May.
