There is a particular satisfaction in watching an industry correct itself. For years, media outlets chased scale—vast, undifferentiated audiences who would linger just long enough to be served an advertisement for mattress toppers or meal kits. The metrics were intoxicating while they lasted. Page views, unique visitors, time on site. We built cathedrals to engagement and filled them with listicles. And then, quietly, the congregations wandered off.
The Unraveling of the Attention Economy
Sometime around 2016, the arithmetic started to look grim. Facebook changed its algorithm, and traffic to publishers dried up like a creek in August. Google’s AMP framework made everything fast and also, somehow, invisible. Ad rates continued their descent toward the center of the earth. And the people who made things—writers, reporters, essayists—found themselves performing for an algorithm that did not care whether they lived or died.
The attention economy, it turned out, had a attention span problem. Readers were not reading. They were scrolling, skimming, bouncing. The average time spent on an article was measured in seconds, which is not enough time to make a point, let alone change a mind. Publishers responded by making shorter things, then shorter things still, until we arrived at the natural endpoint: tweets. Two hundred and eighty characters of capitalization and outrage, signifying nothing much at all.
It was, to use a word that has been drained of all meaning by corporate press releases, unsustainable.
Enter the Newsletter
And yet. In the middle of all this contraction, something odd began to happen. People started paying for words again. Not many words, and not many people, but enough to matter. Newsletters—those ancient artifacts of the early internet, the stuff of Listserv and dial-up connections—began to reappear. At first, it was a trickle. Then a flood.
The numbers tell part of the story. Substack, the platform that has become shorthand for this whole movement, reported that its top writers were earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year directly from readers. But the real story is not about the outliers. It is about the middle—the thousands of writers earning enough to justify the work, to keep reporting and thinking and writing without asking permission from an editor who answers to a publisher who answers to an advertiser who answers to no one in particular.
What Makes Newsletters Different
The obvious answer is that newsletters arrive in your inbox, which is a different psychological space than a social media feed. Your inbox is yours. You chose to receive these words. You can read them or ignore them, but they will not be displaced by someone’s vacation photos or a promoted post about cryptocurrency. There is a contract, implicit but real, between writer and reader.
Direct Relationships
For decades, media companies insisted that they had a relationship with their audience. They did not. They had a relationship with some audience, aggregated and anonymous. The newspaper on your doorstep was the same newspaper on your neighbor’s doorstep. The homepage was the same homepage for everyone. The metrics were averaged. The comments, when they existed, were a free-for-all.
A newsletter is different. When someone subscribes to your newsletter, they are saying: I want to hear from you, specifically. Not from your publication. Not from your brand. From you. This is a radical act in an economy built on interchangeable content and fungible attention.
Economic Honesty
The advertising model requires scale. Scale requires breadth. Breadth requires compromises—on voice, on subject, on depth. A newsletter can be small and still work. A writer with five thousand subscribers paying five dollars a month is making twenty-five thousand dollars a month. That is a living. Not a fortune, but a living. And it is derived entirely from the value of the writing itself, without the intermediation of an ad sales team.
This is not utopian. It is simply honest. The writer writes. The reader reads. The money flows between them. No one is pretending that the audience exists primarily to be sold to another party.
Editorial Freedom
There is a particular freedom in writing without a headline test. No one is asking you to split-test your subject lines or optimize your paragraphs for engagement. You can write long or short, serio-comic or deadpan. You can follow a thread for three thousand words or three sentences. The form accommodates the writer rather than the other way around.
This is not to say that all newsletters are good. They are not. Many are mediocre, some are terrible, and a few are actively harmful. But the best of them—the ones that justify the whole enterprise—possess a quality that has been largely absent from mainstream media: voice. Not the manufactured voice of a brand, but the actual voice of a person thinking out loud.
The Counterarguments
There are objections, and some of them are sound. Newsletters are insular by nature. They preach to the converted. They do not reach the unconverted. The New York Times reaches people who do not already agree with it—or at least, it has the chance to. A newsletter about progressive politics will only ever reach people who subscribed to a newsletter about progressive politics. This is a real limitation.
There is also the matter of quality control. Newsrooms, whatever their flaws, have editors. They have fact-checkers. They have layers of review that catch errors, dampen excess, and occasionally save writers from themselves. A newsletter is only as good as the person writing it, and that person is often tired, often rushed, and often wrong.
And then there is the fragmentation problem. When everyone has a newsletter, the public square empties out. We retreat into our inboxes, reading only what we have chosen to read, and the possibility of accidental encounter—the piece you did not expect, the argument you did not want to hear—diminishes.
These are serious concerns. But they are also, I think, overstated. The public square was never as public as we liked to believe. And the serendipity of the homepage was always more theoretical than actual. You did not stumble upon good writing by accident; you stumbled upon whatever the algorithm chose to surface. That is not the same thing.
Why This Moment Matters
What makes newsletters significant is not that they are new. They are not. What makes them significant is that they represent a correction—a swing of the pendulum back toward a model that values depth over breadth, loyalty over reach, and voice over neutrality.
For a long time, media operated under the assumption that the internet demanded a new kind of writing: faster, shorter, more shareable. This assumption was wrong. The internet demanded different writing, and we conflated different with worse. Newsletters are proof that the demand was always for writing that respects the reader’s intelligence and time—not writing that treats the reader as a unit of consumption.
The writer Ben Smith, writing in The New York Times, noted that the newsletter boom was partly a reaction to the failures of traditional media organizations. But it was also, more fundamentally, a reaction to the failure of the attention economy itself. We built a system optimized for distraction, and then we were surprised when people felt distracted.
The Future, Such as It Is
I am not naive about where this goes next. The newsletter market will become saturated. Platforms will consolidate. Some of the best writers will be lured back into traditional media organizations with large paychecks and the promise of editorial support. The economics will tighten. The churn will increase. And the whole thing will feel, for a while, like a bubble that has finally burst.
But the underlying shift will remain. Readers have discovered that they are willing to pay for writing they trust. Writers have discovered that they can make a living without an intermediary. The relationship between the two has been made direct, personal, and—in the best sense—small. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the most encouraging thing to happen in media in a very long time.
The question is not whether newsletters will replace traditional media. They will not. The question is whether they can exist alongside it, offering an alternative model that keeps the pressure on established outlets to do better. And the answer, I think, is yes. The inbox is not the only place where good writing happens. But it is, for the moment, the place where the most interesting writing is happening.
FAQ
Are newsletters really replacing traditional media?
No, and they should not be expected to. Newsletters are a complement to traditional media, not a replacement. They fill gaps—particularly in opinion, analysis, and niche reporting—that mainstream outlets have left open. But they lack the infrastructure for investigative journalism on the scale that a major newspaper or magazine can sustain.
How do newsletters make money if they are free?
Many do not. Free newsletters often operate as marketing vehicles for paid products, consulting services, or other revenue streams. Others rely on advertising or sponsorships, though this is more common for newsletters with very large audiences. The most straightforward model is the paid subscription, where readers pay directly for access to the writing.
Is starting a newsletter still worth it in 2024?
That depends on what you mean by “worth it.” If you mean: will it make you wealthy? Probably not. The market is crowded, and the days of easy subscriber growth are largely behind us. But if you mean: will it give you a direct channel to readers, editorial control over your work, and the possibility of earning a living from writing? Then yes, it is still worth it—provided you have something to say and the discipline to say it regularly.
