Media Briefing: Why publishers are flocking to Substack

This week’s Media Briefing looks at why publishers have flocked to Substack this year. While the platform was once seen as a refuge for independent writers, major publishers have launched newsletters on Substack to reach new audiences and build communities, as traffic from search and social keeps slipping.

• Substack becomes the new publisher playground
The New York Times and Chicago Tribune sue Perplexity, Business Insider tests using AI to write stories, and more.

Substack becomes the new publisher playground

Substack newsletters have suddenly become hot with publishers this year. 

Allure, Daily Mail, The Economist, The Financial Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine and Reach have all launched Substack newsletters. Strategies vary depending on the publisher, but it’s clear that Substack now represents a new way to reach audiences they’re struggling to find elsewhere – and to build tighter communities that can eventually convert into subscribers. 

All publishers that have launched Substack newsletters have made most of them free to access – even the paywalled publishers. For most, it is still an experiment – a low-risk way to test new voices, formats and audiences without overhauling their core businesses. 

The Economist launched its data journalism newsletter Off The Charts on Substack in September. President Luke Bradley-Jones told Digiday in October that the launch is an experiment that will test niche offerings that can build new audiences without cannibalizing the main bundle. 

By choosing topics that are strong but not central to its core readership, it can attract fresh, engaged communities on Substack, strengthen its brand and expand its reach without risking subscribers downgrading from the main service, he added.

The Economist’s free Substack subscribers can get the main newsletter every week. But those who pay $9 per month or $90 per year for an Off The Chart’s Substack subscription offering get access to the full archive, as well as bonus content and the commenting feature.

“In an era when AI is reshaping how people discover and consume information, our priority is to keep The Economist’s journalism distinctive and world-class, to build direct relationships with our readers and to protect the discoverability of our brand and content so we can continue to grow,” Nada Arnot, evp of marketing at The Economist, said in an email.

Dan Oshinsky, who advises publishers and brands on email strategy through his consultancy Inbox Collective, said he thinks publishers are hoping to catch the same wave of audience interest individual creators have had – and are following where their own peers are going.

“There’s a lot of copycatting in this space,” he said. “As publishers see declines in traffic from search and social, they start looking around and asking, where are our new readers going to come from? And they’re seeing some of these independent writers on Substack have success, and they want to dive into that deep end as well with them,” he added.

Oshinsky said he’s been inundated lately with clients asking if they should launch a Substack. His checklist for them: Will the newsletter publish original content? Will you work with other writers on the platform to grow their following? Will you participate in Substack features like commenting? Will you include other Substack features like a paid subscription, video or podcast?

If the answer is “yes” to more than a few of those, it’s a well-thought-through strategy that involves the necessary resources to grow an audience on the platform, Oshinsky said. But if it’s seen as just another platform to throw some content onto, it won’t “magically grow and reach hundreds of thousands of readers,” he added. 

The New Yorker calls its newsletter – which publishes one story for free a week – a “Substack experiment,” a company spokesperson told Digiday. Meanwhile, The FT said its Substack newsletter FT Alphaville, from its popular markets and finance blog with the same name, was particularly aimed at reaching younger readers. (A Substack spokesperson couldn’t confirm if users on the platform were younger than those publishers may reach elsewhere). 

Other companies like Reach have gone all-in with 25 newsletters now available on the platform. Both Reach and The Economist have paid Substack subscriptions to try to make money on the platform. Substack presently has more than 5 million paid subscriptions to writers and creators, up from 4 million in November 2024, according to a company spokesperson.

Reach’s audience and content director Jenna Thompson said it has “tens of thousands” of both free and paying subscribers on Substack. Unlike its larger newsletter portfolio – which includes 400 newsletters tied to specific publications – the strategy on Substack isn’t to try to get people back onsite. Instead, it’s about building communities on the platform and engaging with them there, Thompson said. It’s similar to what publishers have been doing on Reddit this year, and the newsletter strategy on LinkedIn for the past few years.

Thompson declined to share how much revenue Reach was making from its Substack subscriptions. The paid Substacks usually feature exclusive and in-depth coverage and analysis, while the free ones are focused on curating stories around a specific topic or writer, such as its books newsletter “Bookish Drop.”

“That books newsletter doesn’t really fit perfectly with any of our brands, because we’re primarily national and regional news brands. But it’s a topic of which there is obviously a huge audience out there, who are super keen on reading about reading, talking about reading. There’s a lot of those people on Substack. So that felt like the perfect fit for that [newsletter],” Thompson said.

There are three must-haves a Reach Substack newsletter must include before it launches, noted Thompson: exclusive content or exclusive curation of content, a strong personality behind the newsletter and a community of people on Substack who are interested in the newsletter’s particular topic.

Reach’s Substack newsletters have “good” engagement and open rates, and have benefited from Substack’s recommendations system, which has writers share newsletters they think their followers would also be interested in, according to Thompson, who declined to share specific rate figures. One writer behind a Reach Substack focused on a U.K. football club will gather questions from readers to ask sources to help shape stories, and then respond to their comments directly to share those answers, Thomspon said.

“That builds a really strong connection between that audience and [the writer], and, by extension, our brands as well,” Thompson said.

Substack has a dedicated team focused on identifying and supporting writers and creators, including legacy publishers, as they consider joining the platform, a company spokesperson said. However, they noted that the majority of new Substacks from publishers has been organic.

This year was when the experiments began; next year will show whether Substack is a short-term hedge or a long-term part of publishers’ playbooks. 

What we’ve heard

“You have this new world where clicks as a KPI…is just not enough. You need to think super holistically about what metrics you’re tracking.”

— Ed Hyatt, director of newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal

Numbers to know

36%: The percentage of U.S. adults who say they follow the news all or most of the time, down from 51% in 2016, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

5%: The average increase in subscription prices at 14 major publishers year over year, according to Digiday+ Research’s third annual Subscription Index report.

810 million: The number of ChatGPT’s monthly active users in November, up 180% year over year.

$1,078: The price of a Los Angeles Times merch t-shirt, part of a collaboration with luxury streetwear brand Palm Angels.

What we’ve covered

WTF is AI citation tracking?

• Citation tracking, or monitoring where, how and why a brand’s site is mentioned as a source in an AI-generated response to a user’s prompt in tools like ChatGPT, is increasingly important for publishers to understand.
• It’s more complex than traditional SEO, which involves monitoring your site’s ranking position on search engine pages for specific and exact words or phrases. Citation tracking measures how AI systems generate answers and which sources they choose to link.

Learn more about citation tracking here.

Meta enters AI content licensing fray

• Meta has secured seven, multi-year AI content licensing deals with publishers, including CNN, Fox News, People Inc., USA Today Co., to incorporate their content into its large language model (LLM), Llama.
• Meta has trailed other AI companies’ push into licensing deals. Now, that’s all changed, and it is a testament to just how competitive the LLM environment has become as AI companies race to own the most popular consumer LLM.

Read more about the deals here.

European publishers say the Digital Omnibus ‘cookie fix’ leaves them worse off

• The European Union’s attempt at a legislative spring clean for Europe’s digital rulebook dangled a few carrots of hope by signaling it might finally simplify Europe’s tangled maze of data privacy rules.
• But for publishers, the outcome amounts to little more than ineffective window dressing. Several have described the Omnibus as nothing deeper than a “cosmetic” attempt to fix the complex rules around how to gain consumer consent for digital tracking needed to sustain digital businesses.

Read more here.

Subscription strategies from Bloomberg, The New York Times, Vox and others in 2025

• As publishers grapple with the erosion of traditional income streams and traffic-driven revenue from search and social media referrals, many are experimenting with their subscription strategies.
• Publishers are tweaking pricing, plans and subscriber benefits, to retain and boost subscriptions — a longtime revenue stronghold. 

Dig into the Digiday+ Research annual Subscription Index 2025 here.

From lawsuits to lobbying: How publishers are fighting AI

• A U.K. coalition comprised of the Independent Publishers Alliance, Foxglove and Movement for the Open Web kicked off a lobbying effort with the Department of Justice, in the hope that the U.S. regulator will hear their evidence for how Google’s AI Overviews has been harmful to independent publishers’ traffic and revenue. 
• It’s yet to be seen how the DOJ will respond. But it’s just the latest reminder that publishers aren’t letting up in their pushback against AI. 

Read more here.

What we’re reading

The New York Times sues Perplexity for copyright infringement

The New York Times filed a lawsuit last week against Perplexity, claiming the AI company violated copyright laws. Just a day earlier, the Chicago Tribune also sued Perplexity, alleging the same.

Business Insider is using AI to write “quick news stories”

Business Insider is launching a month-long, AI pilot program called Business Insider AI News Desk to use a custom GPT to “help publish quick news stories,” editor in chief Jamie Heller wrote in a staff memo published by Talking Biz News. The stories will be edited by a BI editor, she added. 

Forbes fires dozens of freelancers

Forbes has ended contracts with dozens of its contributing writers as it reviews its contributor network to ensure its “financially sound” and aligns with readers’ interests, the New York Post reported. 

Washington Post launches opinion aggregator

The Washington Post launched Ripple, an initiative aimed at expanding its opinion columns by opening it up to published articles from other newspapers, Substack writers and others.

Expect large newsrooms to expand their AI agent experiments in 2026

Big newsrooms will continue to build AI agents next year to help with research, copywriting, and surfacing relevant coverage from their archives to speed up editorial workflows, Ernest Kung, senior AI product manager on the workflow solutions team at the Associated Press, wrote in his prediction for next year, published by Nieman Lab.