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New blog post series: It’s all newsletters

Published March 21, 2025

I spent seven years tucked away in the corporate world, where my everyday news source was LinkedIn. Now, I’m revisiting the trusted news sources from my journalist years, circa 2012-2017. What I’ve found is a transformed media landscape, where newsletters rule.

Here are a few of my observations:

  1. Quartz – Ten years ago, Quartz had a global view of the world, pioneered the one-stop newsletter and explored many layers of the business world. Today, it is US-centric, covers a small part of the day’s headlines with no other reader-relevant content, and it’s mainly hard news.
  2. LinkedIn – Has gone all in on newsletters even as its main feed obscures the updates I want to see.
  3. New Yorker – They certainly know who their user base is these days: hungry freelance journalists hoping to one day see their names in the pages of the New Yorker.
  4. Bloomberg – Bloomberg is a content giant these days, paywalling their stories with finesse. Many tech and business writers I used to follow have graduated to this title. So many newsletters.
  5. WIRED – Has started to lean very much on product reviews.
  6. ZDNet – Is nearly 100% product reviews but no longer a business tech publication.
  7. X – The proliferation of other social media networks shows that micro-blogging is an essential element of how we communicate, but X still dominates. Not really a newsletter, but contains a bunch of news in a single snapshot view.
  8. Feedly – Feedly has found a revenue model that has paywalled its best feature. Not really a newsletter, but contains a bunch of news in a single snapshot view.
  9. Instapaper – Has added AI to a new set of monetized offerings.
  10. NYTimes – It’s newsletter proves that it is much more useful to read its front-page headlines
  11. WaPo – The editorial stance has evolved so much for the better, despite detractors, and it provides by far the best newsletter available today, hands-down.
  12. Instagram – Some hard-hitting titles are finding me here, focused on culture topics. The standout is The Juggernaut. Not really a newsletter, but its user experience is so well thought out, hitting the same notes as a standard newsletter.

From time to time, I’ll look into each of these in a series of blog posts where I take an anthropological look at the media.

Categories:media series