This week I celebrated my 31st birthday! It feels really exciting to be in a year where I’m looking forward to so many things (getting married and a big move eep!) and so much of the time & investment I’ve been doing on the career and business front is finally paying off too. Grateful to be doing work that I love and thanks so much for all of you here being apart of this journey — we’re just at 2100+ readers and feels like still early days! 🫶🏻

In today’s issue, I wanted to recap an awesome event I went to last week with beehiiv and Google on the future of publishing. It feels like the perfect encapsulation of all I’ve been writing and thinking about for the past couple of years. Very excited to continue many of these conversations next week at the New Media Summit in Austin - which by the way if you’re going or will be in town around the same time, let me know! I’d love to meet.

Also at the end, I gathered some of my fave links, listens and reads from the past few weeks. 💫

I recently went to a super awesome event between beehiiv and Google all around the future of media and publishing. And I feel like it's a really exciting time — this convergence we're seeing between the creator economy, independent journalists building their own publications, and traditional media rethinking how they do business.

Given my background as a journalist and now someone who's been in the business of building media brands, personal brands, and covering the creator economy — I feel like all of my worlds are colliding. And I'm genuinely so excited about the moment we're in and the potential for more people to start these businesses that they really love.

So I wanted to recap some of my takeaways and learnings from the event, but also share how I'm applying this in my work. Fair warning: I took pages and pages of notes, so let's get into it.

If you’re here, you probably know I cover the creator economy. I love to talk about how people are building businesses online. And my specific focus is content businesses: people building newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc. They might be building on a social media platform like LinkedIn or TikTok or Instagram, but that's not their end destination necessarily. Their goal is to create something larger, whether that's a personal brand or a bigger media brand.

beehiiv is one of my clients that I write for — I cover case studies and write articles for their blog, basically telling these stories of how people started newsletters that were acquired, that led to them leaving their full-time jobs, and just really telling the story of how people built super cool, unique businesses and how you can do the same thing. That kind of feels like my mission in a way.

And I've been really excited about some of the pivots beehiiv has been making in the past six months or so to take on what they're calling "the content economy." Which is essentially the same thing I've been talking about — how people are building businesses out of just creating content. It's so much larger than just influencers getting brand deals. It really is this full ecosystem.

The first presentation was with Tyler Denk, co-founder and CEO of beehiiv. And I think one of the most interesting points he made — and if you've been in the media industry you understand this, but if you're outside this world you might not — is the relationship between creating good content and how you actually get paid for it, and how much that has changed over the past decade.

The big trend we've seen in the past five years with ChatGPT is that Google search results have taken a massive hit. Which means advertising revenue has taken a hit from that side too.

So the larger argument Tyler is making — and I agree with — is that whether you're a creator, a media brand, or a company somewhere in between, you have to: (a) create quality content, and (b) build actual relationships with your audience. It's no longer good enough to rely on people just discovering you or social media giving you enough traffic to sustain your business. You really need to own the relationship. Meaning there's not a third party between you and how people pay you.

Tyler laid out a few big trends:

Distribution is the bottleneck. Paid acquisition is getting more expensive. SEO is getting harder because of AI search. Social media is no longer reliable if it's all algorithm-based and not follower-based. All of this means your method of distribution is actually the most valuable thing. If you can figure that out, you're good. If you're relying on methods you can't control, you'll be struggling.

People follow stories, not features. beehiiv has done this really well — they've created this narrative between the employees, the feature drops, all of it. This company clearly has a mission and it's not just "we make email software." No one gets up excited to post about that on social media. We love a good story. We love characters to root for. And any way you can build narrative into whatever you're doing is going to help you stand out in this endless sea of content.

The marginal cost of content is now zero. Anyone can be posting online. We're empowering more people to start sharing — it's not just the 1% of people posting anymore. But that again pushes this need to be exceptional to really stand out.

And something I think is really cool — beehiiv dog-foods a lot of their own products. Tyler has actually built his newsletter, Big Desk Energy, alongside building beehiiv. It's literally a real case study in how the growth mechanisms and revenue mechanisms work.

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The next panel was all about the future of news. We had two people from CBS News — a foreign correspondent and the former president — alongside Lauren Saks who had left the Washington Post to build Local News International, an independent brand on beehiiv. It was this really interesting dynamic of the new guard and old guard studying what they can learn from each other.

This is where my background as a journalist really kicks in. I haven't been in traditional news for more than four years, but I was at the Wall Street Journal for about three. And one of the things I felt at the time — and I know a lot of people in traditional media felt this — was this lag. Not just in innovation (that sounds super techy), but just this feeling of: we're doing things based on what works, but the world is changing and we're not keeping up.

Media as a whole is very resistant to change. And I get that because you can't constantly chase every shiny object as a large institution. But we were for the most part serving a paid readership that depended on a print product that was basically not profitable anymore because it was so expensive to distribute across the US and the world. At the same time, the age of the audience was getting older and older, and we're sitting around asking how are we reaching new and younger audiences. WSJ and Dow Jones are still some of the best in the business at thinking about this, but even so — it felt like, are we doing enough?

So all of this is why I’m really excited to see some new journalists go out and try to build their own things.

The Nerve — former employees of the Observer who left to launch their own publication. Within six months, they're profitable. Through year one, they've got a plan. Super successful.

Local News International — centered around Dave Jorgenson, who started the Washington Post's TikTok channel and really became the face of the Washington Post for so many people. They're going with this creator model and expanding into YouTube, a newsletter, etc. Really interesting to follow.

One of the things I walked away from the event thinking about is how these two groups (creaotors and media) speak to each other. The business of media is really hard, and if you come from a journalism or editorial background, no one has taught you — unless you've explicitly gone out of your way to understand it — how media businesses are run. The economics of running ads. Running a paid membership. Thinking about revenue.

You were taught to create and tell great stories and not really understand the business. And I appreciate where that comes from — it's the editorial integrity of not being persuaded by what sales is doing. But you can't tell the story of media without telling the story of advertising. Media would not exist without a way for it to get paid.

Since I've left journalism, I’ve gone all in on studying this. I remember even understanding the cost of advertising and impressions and being like — oh, no one ever taught me how valuable it is to have 100,000 eyeballs on something. Or to understand your audience demographics.

And here's the thing: take Joanna Stern, who just left WSJ to start her own independent thing. She's pulling millions of views across her podcast and YouTube channel. I have no idea what her salary was — probably decent — but the value of the audience she's commanding? She can instantly build a seven-figure business, eight-figure business. Because her audience is tech leaders, very influential people, and advertisers know that.

If more people could understand that value and how much people are willing to spend, why wouldn't you want to try building something of your own? Not everyone should. But given that media is so unstable and you could lose your job tomorrow, you should at least know the economics behind "what if I wanted to start this?" At bare minimum, what do I need to replace my $100K salary?

It all goes back to building a presence online that people can relate to. People aren't necessarily wanting to follow institutions or brands anymore. It can get you so far, but viewers might not trust it, or they'd rather go to someone with personality. They're following these personalities.

So if you are someone building as a creator — know that you have tons of value that you could be building into something bigger than just your social profiles.

And the future of media is super, super niche. It used to be the traditional journalist beats: real estate, finance, travel. But if you were to say "I'm going to start a travel YouTube channel" — we don't need any more of those. But something super niche? That's where the opportunity is.

This is also what we found in the State of Newsletters report — niche, engaged audience publications are thriving. People are really looking for curated niche content around the things they love. They're looking to meet people from that space.

I would love to hear from you — what questions do you have about traditional media and how they can build more like creators, revenue models, creator businesses, getting started on beehiiv? Let me know and I'd love to cover these in a future edition.