Adam Wren of Traffic profiles Jessica Lessin, the founder of tech news site The Information, which has passed 10,000 subscribers paying $399 a year for its content.
Wren writes, “And that was just one of Lessin’s several bullish announcements, from doubling The Information’s reporting staff by the end of 2018 to adding video to expanding the site’s coverage areas to banking and energy. ‘I do believe we can charge more, because we’ve been constantly adding value,’ Lessin told me in an interview this August. (The Information’s $10,000 a year product, providing additional actionable intel for serious tech investors, including unreported briefings and monthly phone calls with reporters, is evidence of that belief in action.)
“Lessin’s formula is actually the oldest one in business: Create something people want and sell it to them. In journalism, The Information shares DNA with Bloomberg, legal and financial newsletters, trade magazines, and digital native publications such as Politico. It’s ironic that the publication Silicon Valley relies on has succeeded by ignoring the conventional Valley wisdom on how to do business online: It’s paid rather than free; emailed rather than available on social platforms; niche instead of mainstream. It aspires to be useful without being omnipresent. Lessin doesn’t want every story about Uber, for example — just the best and most insightful one. ‘The Information proved that you don’t need to be comprehensive to be valuable,’ Lessin says.”
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