Are We Past Peak Newsletter?

Meta, which owns Facebook, is killing Bulletin, its newsletter product. Substack, a much-ballyhooed newsletter start-up, has cut back on advances to writers. The Atlantic is retooling its newsletter deals with writers.

After a rush of excitement around the potential for paid email newsletters to transform the media industry, there are indicators that the bubble may be popping.

“Text on the internet is arguably the most competitive medium in all of human history,” said Ben Thompson, who writes Stratechery, an influential media and tech publication. “If you’re going to ask people to pay for a newsletter, it has to be something they’re not getting anywhere else.”

Email newsletters have been a part of the publishing tool kit for decades, powering media start-ups like Politico, Semafor, The Ringer, Axios, Punchbowl News and Puck. Amid the noise of social media, journalists use newsletters to forge direct connections with readers, persuade them to pay for news and deliver them advertising.

In recent years, the humble email became a star in its own right. During the pandemic, media companies sought to cash in on a surge of excitement around the format from both readers and writers. But the fast-changing priorities of tech giants and the unforgiving economics of digital media have led to a reckoning at the inbox, as executives take a harder look at deals they struck with writers.

“Everybody had time to both create and consume,” said Jacob Cohen Donnelly, the publisher of the Morning Brew business news outlet and the author of the newsletter A Media Operator. “As the world has started to open, people don’t have as much time.”