(2019-01-09) Judd Legum Wants To Fix News With A Newsletter

Judd Legum Wants to Fix News With a Newsletter. One of the few things people agree on in 2018 is that the news industry is broken.

To Judd Legum, editor in chief and founder of left-leaning political news website ThinkProgress, the two biggest problems are ads (WebAds) and social media.

“People need to make more intentional choices and to regain power over what news they read,” says Legum. “There’s something fundamentally broken about news delivery as a process.

Today, Legum is joining a small but growing group of journalists and readers who think one way to fix this is through a good old-fashioned email newsletter. And he is going all in. After 13 years at the helm of ThinkProgress–a site that garners around 10 million unique visitors a month–he’s leaving the 40-person newsroom he runs to launch a paid political newsletter called “Popular Information”, which he will write himself. Starting July 23, Legum will publish “Popular Information” four days a week. He says it will be a mix of deep reporting and analysis, focused on national issues with a progressive lens.

the Monday edition will be free, and the other three days accessible only to paying members.

To make “Popular Information” as accessible as possible, Legum plans to keep the subscription cost low. Though he hasn’t decided exactly how much yet, it’ll be less than $10 a month.

why doesn’t Legum just launch “Popular Information” as part of ThinkProgress?

I don’t have time to do this and my current job. I need to be able to focus my attention on this so I can do it right,”

The model Legum plans to follow most closely comes from tech analyst Ben Thompson, whose daily newsletter Stratechery costs $10 a month or $100 a year, and is required reading for many people interested in tech.

The biggest political newsletters right now come from news organizations like Axios and Politico. Legum notes that Axios’ morning and evening newsletters are sponsored by Wall Street–Goldman Sachs, Bank of America. Politico’s Pro subscription, which includes much more than newsletters, is so expensive that even with only 20,000 subscribers it accounted for half the company’s revenue in 2017; at the time, a five-person subscription started at $8,000 a year.

Legum has Substack, a startup founded last year by Hamish McKenzie, a former journalist, and Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, both formerly of messaging app Kik.

Earlier this week, Best and McKenzie told Nieman Lab that across its hundreds of existing newsletters it has hit 11,000 paid subscribers, who are paying an average of just under $80 a year.

So far Substack’s biggest hits are written by well-known writers such as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and Slate’s Daniel Ortberg.