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Casey Newton looks back on a year with Substack
When we spoke to Casey Newton on the podcast last year, he’d recently left The Verge and taken the list for his newsletter The Interface to launch his own solo newsletter on Substack.
A year on, Newton is unquestionably one of the success stories of the solo newsletter boom. He has almost 50,000 subscribers to the free list, and enough subscribers to the paid newsletter to be bringing in a healthy salary.
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. In a recent edition, he reflects on some of the lessons he’s learned from publishing on the platform, from dealing with churn to what content brings in subscriptions (surprisingly, not interviews with Mark Zuckerberg!)
Google’s R&D division experiments with newsletters powered by Google Drive
The company’s internal R&D division, Area 120, has a new project called Museletter, which allows anyone to publish a Google Drive file as a blog or newsletter to their Museletter public profile or to an email list. The effort would essentially turn Google’s document-creation tools into a CMS, which would put them in competition with platforms like Substack, Ghost and others.
Guardian joins News UK and Telegraph in making declining print circulation secret
The Guardian has decided to make its print circulation figures private and put more focus on metrics that reflect its “diversity of journalism, readership and business strategy”. The publisher insists it still has a “long-standing commitment to print”, despite circulation more than halving over the past decade.
As Facebook tries to knock the journalism off its platform, its users are doing the same
A new study out from the Pew Research Center suggests it isn’t just Facebook that’s seeking a trial separation from the news — it’s also Facebook’s users. The share of Facebook users who say they regularly get news on the site has declined 7 points since 2020, from 54% to about 47% in 2021.
This content originally appeared in The Media Roundup, a daily newsletter from Media Voices. Subscribe here:
