Quentin Hardy: You had a rising career in traditional journalism, but left to start your own thing. What was behind that move?

Casey Newton: It was 2020. COVID. I was living like a retiree, buying groceries twice a week and otherwise just staying inside my house. I’d wake up every day and write a newsletter for The Verge, but everything I loved about journalism had gone away. There was no more newsroom, no traveling for stories, no visiting company headquarters in New York. I was just waking up and sending emails.

And I’d always wondered what if I could make it on my own, build my own little mini independent thing.

QH: So, a little push and a little pull.

CN: 2020 felt like the right time. I had just turned 40. I had just hit 100,000 Twitter followers. My expenses were pretty cheap, and with my job at The Verge I was able to save some money, enough to have a go at this thing.

The final piece of it was, I was afraid that over the long run there was really no media company that I could guarantee would be sustainable to the point where I could be confident of spending an entire career there. I got excited about the idea of trying to create my own sustainable job. Honestly, if readers supported me that would be more sustainable than relying on some CEO to create a job for me. With a newsletter, in order to lose your job thousands of people have to fire you at the same time.

QH: Substack was just getting big, so you could ride that, too.

CN: Yeah, to the extent that Substack was interesting as a thing in its own right I might be able to capture some of that interest just by being in the vanguard. When I moved from The Verge to Substack The New York Times was working on a story about people moving to Substack, and I wound up as the lead anecdote.

QH: You left Substack recently…

CN: They decided that they didn’t want to do active content moderation. I write a newsletter that is often about content moderation. My readers said, “Hey, please leave,” so we did, moving to an open source resource called Ghost.

QH: That was probably good for your relationship with the readers.

CN: One of the nice things about doing independent media on a small scale is you have an authentic relationship with your readers. Most big publications are now reliant on the drive-by traffic from search engines or social networks, so they don’t get a sense of who their readers are, what their values are. We’ve got a pretty good sense because we hear from them, they pay all our bills. We try to keep them happy.

QH: Does this feel like you’re in a tradition of earlier newsletters and trade publications?

CN: There are ways in which Platformer resembles a trade publication. People pay for it, and lots of them are probably expensing it. Most people who pay for it have some sense of helping them in their jobs. Where it feels different is that we publish a lot of our journalism for free to a big audience, about a million people a month.

My hope is that we have the sort of stability that comes with that trade publication business model, but we have the opportunity to have an outsized impact because we’re not putting everything behind some $10,000 annual subscription. Paying subscribers cover the bills, and once a week our journalism goes out to the world for free. We can do that charging a hundred bucks a year.

QH: How many people are paying?

CN: I never give the exact number because it feels tacky, but we say in the thousands.

QH: Another big difference from a traditional trade or newsletter is you have a pretty clear personna, and you take opinionated views along with the reporting.

CN: There’s room for different kinds of journalists. And I have a lot of admiration for people that do go out and break news all day and write it straight down the middle. If I could do that as well as they do maybe I’d do that. But I’ve always been a little bit more analytical. I was first drawn to newspapers to read the criticism – rock critics, TV, film. It’s my default mode.

My Verge newsletter began because my beat was Facebook, and I was not breaking news. If you’d have asked, “who are the best Facebook reporters?” nobody would mention my name. I was reading all the other journalists covering Facebook and so much of it was so good. I told my bosses I should send a newsletter with recaps and comments, maybe it would lead me to something interesting. It turned out that I loved it. It put me in a critical mode where I could do a lot of synthesis and analysis.

Now I’m doing a kind of synthesis of reporting and criticism, and the thing that makes it work is having a point of view. It leads to me breaking news more, too.

QH: Once you got going, did a lot of other people want to be like Casey?

CN: There was a big surge of interest right when I started. I feel like I talked to a dozen plus reporters at The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bloomberg. Most chose not to do it, I think because they wondered about waking up and doing this every day, the risk. They weren’t comfortable. Weirdly and to my disappointment I have fewer of those conversations today than I did four years ago.

QH: They felt like it would just be overwhelming. Do you feel overworked?

CN: I’m not one of these people that fetishizes workaholism. I work basically 9:00 am to 5:30 or 6:00 Monday through Friday. I do not work on the weekends. I do not work at night. Of course, there are exceptions from time to time.

QH: That’s interesting. The first wave of tech bloggers, people like Michael Arrington, Kara Swisher, and Om Malik all seemed to go nonstop. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but every one of them had some kind of health problem usually associated with overwork.

CN: God, I never thought of it that way, but yeah, they all almost died. In those days, though, it was very much in the distribution model to have expectations of breaking a lot of news, going nonstop. Arrington might file at 3 AM, whenever. Platformer comes out at 5 PM, with the occasional exception.

QH: I think another thing that worries reporters is how their sources will treat them when they’re not associated with an established publication.

CN: Actually, I had virtual meetings with the head of comms at Facebook, Google, Twitter and Snap before I went independent. Everyone was very gracious, and said they’d take my calls. I remember the folks at Twitter saying “our relationship is with you, not with the Verge.” When you first go out nobody really knows how seriously you’re gonna take this. Within a couple months, I’d broken a couple stories and that made me seem legit.

QH: And then, the companies are pretty good at counting clicks and doing analysis. They figure out who’s got reach and influence.

CN: Yeah.

QH: Why do you think people subscribe?

CN: Even in today’s challenged journalism situation, there is so much news and analysis to wade through every day. You can provide real value by showing up, doing the reading, trying to connect some dots, trying to have a useful thought about it.

I also like being able to arrange back and forth interviews, and every once in a while I do get a scoop and I can write it straight down the middle. It’s always a joy because there’s nothing better in journalism than breaking news.

QH: Having a personality that people seem to relate to seems attractive for subscribers, too.

CN: People are getting something in their inbox, so you do want it to feel a little personal, coming from a human being with a coherent worldview.

QH: Is the ech niche particularly useful for this business, or can it apply to a lot of other beats reporters have?

CN: I think there’s potential for some other beats, though there’s no doubt that Tech is the wealthiest sector of the economy. There were Politics newsletters before Tech newsletters. I think it can be true in Finance, Entertainment. It’s less clear if you cover Education or local government, but I do see people trying those things.

QH: What advice would you give journalists hoping to make a go of this?

CN: Pick a niche, and make sure it’s the right size. If you do a newsletter about autonomous vehicles, do a newsletter about autonomous vehicles in Arizona; everyone who cares about AVs in Arizona is going to subscribe to your newsletter. That’s important to some influential group of people who have money. Figuring out your format is important. I’m a big fan of the one or two reported pieces a week, and then maybe you just send links to interesting things for the third edition of the week. You need to send it out two or three days a week, and try for the same days, same times.

What else? When you’re starting out, give it away for free for as long as you can. You want to be able to reach as many people as you can before you turn on the paywall. Counterintuitively, you can give away a lot of your best stuff for free and then charge for the stuff that maybe has less reporting in it, or doesn’t quite seem like you need to tell your entire mailing list. You’re much likelier to raise your revenue by reaching a huge number of people and saying “Hey, did you like this? Please subscribe” than you are sending out a really good scoop to a much smaller audience.

QH: Are you taking your own advice on narrowing your niche? You’ll talk about most tech, and pretty much all social media.

CN: When I started it was just about Facebook, in particular the backlash against Facebook, was Facebook bad for democracy. That was very narrow. In time I created the conditions for me to range a little bit more freely, taking on more.

QH: A lot of people know you now as half of “Hard Fork,” along with Kevin Roose, on The New York Times site. Do you see this as part of Platformer?

CN: I wanted to refine and deepen what I was doing. After I’d been doing Platformer for six months or so I felt like anybody in the newsletter business also needs to be in the podcast business. Newsletters are great at a lot of things but they don’t really carry emotion. I wanted to do it with a co-host and have a relationship that people would return to every week. Kevin and I kept kicking around the podcast idea. At first The Times said no, then came around, and it’s been amazing. I’m reaching different people – the ones I write about, but also a lot of random Americans, librarians in the Netherlands, all kinds of people.

I don’t know exactly the relationship between Hard Fork and Platformer’s growth, but it feels really good. Platformer is still by far the bulk of my income, but Hard Fork has been such a joy to do.

QH: The point about adding an emotional dimension is true. People say they read Platformer, but when they tell me they listen to Hard Fork, they smile.

CN: That makes me happy to hear. Platformer is very serious, and I did want to make something that was lighter and would make people laugh. The most important thing about a podcast is how it makes you feel. All of my favorite podcasts make me smile. When Kevin and I are making an episode it doesn’t feel finished until we have laughed while we are making it.

QH: Looks like you are growing your staff too. What made you want to broaden out?

CN: It was opportunistic. When I was at The Verge, Zoë Schiffer helped me put together the newsletter. She called me one day asking if we could get the band back together, and of course I was thrilled. Zoë is just a generationally talented reporter, any publication would want her.

She joined just as Twitter was starting to fall apart, and we both went at that story with everything we had. It wound up growing the business more than anything we’ve done. It was really heartening to see you can grow a business in journalism just by breaking news. Since then we’ve reported on other things.

Zoë also helps me with operational aspects of the business, and did a ton of the work figuring out the move to Ghost. We also have a part-time employee named Lindsey Choo, who’s summarizing all the links that are in Platformer. We may get bigger by one or two more people.

QH: The subscribers, the podcast, the staff… Hey, are you empire building?

CN: I don’t want to empire build. I’m not somebody who aspires to have a building downtown that says Platformer on the side of it, a newsroom of 100 people. I don’t know how you build a media business like that in 2024, but even if I could figure it out, then I would spend all my time managing people – and that’s not what I love. I love reporting and writing, gossiping and guessing what’s going to happen next. So that’s the zone that I want to be in.