Newsletter Content Strategy Is Changing

One of my favorite newsletters is Platformer by Casey Newton. It combines original reporting, solid news analysis and link aggregation. But he recently announced he's changing that approach to address something that has been bugging me about the current journalist-as-newsletter creator model in the time of AI.

For better or worse, AI is making the traditional aggregation and analysis approach of so many successful newsletters obsolete. Here's how Casey puts it:

And so today we’re going to begin an experiment to see what that version of Platformer would look like. Free subscribers can still look forward to one column per week. Paid subscribers will get an additional column on Thursdays that we’re thinking of as a reporter’s notebook: what I’m hearing, what we’re working on, a Hard Fork preview, and a mailbag. Some of these may read like traditional columns; others may feel more formally daring.

Paid subscribers will also get additional stories and analyses from us as we write them. This is the biggest change we’re making: instead of promising to show up on a set schedule, we’re promising to show up when we find out something interesting — or want to help you make sense of the day’s big story on our beat.

In practice, I suspect that there will be many weeks where paid subscribers still hear from us three times a week. But for all of the reasons above, we need to change Platformer so that our schedule serves the journalism. For too long now, it has been the other way around.

This content strategy shift is important to note. So many newsletters have built audiences on aggregation and news analysis, and it remains to be seen whether they will begin to lose readership as more people find information through chatbots (this is happening anyway). More original reporting from anyone is great. But interviewing and synthesizing information is difficult to do as a solo journalist. Not everyone will be able to make this transition.