![]() One of my jokes is, I don’t want to work in a newsroom any more. I don’t think it rolls all the way back to becoming a publication. And from there, we could figure out bundles, we could figure out special collaborations, we could work on a podcast together. ![]() I can imagine a relationship where I’m bringing in a star reporter on the TikTok beat or the Amazon beat…to build out that ecosystem a little more. But they seem really obvious and interesting to me. We haven’t seen any journalist collaborations like that. It’s one of the main ways they grow their audiences. Something that I have been thinking about a lot is YouTube, where influencers collaborate all the time. I do think that there is going to be a lot of collaboration. It turns your basic podcast logic on its head, but might make the membership feel more valuable, and hopefully more attractive. So one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is almost looking at it from the opposite standpoint of, instead of how can I grow my podcast as absolutely big as possible, how can I offer a really cool podcast that will feel valuable only to the people who are subscribing to me? It taught me just how difficult it is to scale a podcast. I had done one run of 12 podcasts at The Verge and enjoyed the experience, but it was also really hard. I think the idea of podcasts accessible only to members is really interesting. My honest goal is to convert about 10% of that free list, and then see what else that enables me to do. I’m now a little shy of the first thousand subscribers, and I’ve also hit 30,000 free subscribers, which is fantastic. That was a really emotional moment for me and made me feel like my suspicion that people really wanted an alternative to the technology coverage that they were reading every day was right. But honestly, mostly it just felt very scary…but then by the time I’d woken up the next day, so many people had subscribed, that I knew I was going to be good into next year just using the revenue that readers had already contributed. The day that I announced I was leaving The Verge, it should have felt like a really exciting day. There’s no telling how valuable people find it until they actually fill out a form and contribute. I’ve been giving this thing away for three years for free. You put yourself out there, and you really do feel naked. So I thought, can I, in my own way, create kind of a ‘paper of record’ for platforms? And what would that look like? It feels like whenever I go online, it’s all anyone is talking about. ![]() One of the reasons I wanted to change the name of it was I wanted to signal that while Facebook will continue to be one of the pillars of my coverage for a really long time, what I’m really interested in is just the idea of platforms as the defining force in our life. ![]() My old newsletter, The Interface, it was sort of a pun on the idea of a thing that existed between Facebook and the world. Unlike my previous newsletter, there will be a home on the web where people can discuss the subjects that I cover. What I’m still thinking through is, what else can I give people who have become paid subscribers? There are lots of things that I want to do, starting with community threads. And so I asked them, “If I were doing this on my own, would you still subscribe?” And enough people said yes, that I thought it would be worth a shot. When I talked to people at the companies I covered, it seemed like it was valuable to them, too. I had come to believe in the value of the thing I was making. See the full transcript here, or highlights below: ![]()
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