*My goodness it's pitiful. It's like a return to the baroque days of the coffeeshops before newspapers were invented.
Journalists with Patreon subscribers who also wait tables
(...)
Inboxes are swelling with newsy email newsletters these days, and a lot of the industry dialogue centers on major national brands. (The New York Times in California, Wall Street Journal tweaks, Axios engagement, etc.) While places like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker have all recently created roles specifically for developing their newsletter portfolios and purposes, the trend has taken off locally too — with a twist.
As revenue-starved local newsrooms shed journalists, some of them are using newsletters as a tool to build out their own one-person-show reporting operation — sometimes making money, but often using it to establish a brand presence while piecing together money from freelancing for national outlets, copywriting for corporations, or waiting tables on the side. There’s are any number of local, news-curating, email-driven startups as well (Whereby.Us, 6AM, Inside), but this model diverges by centering on the reporting work itself and turning to readers instead of advertisers for support in a bare bones reporter–reader relationship.
Newsletter companies like Substack and Revue have opened the tech-stack doors to building your own publishing system without relying on social media algorithms, and maybe even pulling in some personal subscription revenue. But they’re not perfect. Half of the journalists I interviewed for this piece use Substack, citing its ease with launch and payments; those not using it said they were either wary of how high the cut of revenue was (10 percent) or unaware that it existed (and had built their own Mailchimp/Stripe/Patreon integrations).
None of the six have been able to make a full-time living off of their local newsletter. But they’ve been able to cobble together an important service for their communities....
