OLD Media Moves

What a tech reporter felt when he went out on his own

October 22, 2020

Posted by Chris Roush

Casey Newton

The Media Voices Podcast interviewed tech journalist Casey Newton, who recently left the Verge to publish his newsletter independently.

Just a couple of weeks into launching Platformer, Newton has grown the free list to 30,000 subscribers, and has almost 1,000 of those now paying him at least $10 a month. He’s aiming to convert around 10% of his newsletter list.

Here is an excerpt:

Casey Newton: I’ve been giving this thing away for three years for free. There’s no telling how valuable people find it until they actually fill out a form and contribute. And so it’s been so tremendously heartening.

The day that I announced that I was leaving The Verge, it should have felt like a really exciting day. But honestly, mostly, it just felt very scary. It sort of had that bad dream feel of like, ‘Oh, wait, did I really do this? Are they really actually cutting off my email address, like, can I go backward?!’

But then by the time that I’d woken up, the next day, so many people had subscribed that I knew I was going to be good into next year. Just using the revenue that readers had already contributed, I was going to be able to make it into 2021 just fine.

Read more here.

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