By Flora Hardy, Senior Account Manager

I love newsletters. I may be late to the party but I’ve finally discovered that investing in more thoughtful content from the people I want to hear from is a far better use of my screen time. They’ve even led me away from Instagram.

I couldn’t keep up with the 24-hour news cycle without The Knowledge, for example. Set up by the creator of The Week, Jon Connell, the five-minute read rounds up key news stories into one digestible, and often very amusing, email a day.

And then there are the Substackers. I look forward to weekly rants and recommendations from Pandora Sykes and Katherine Ormerod, as well as more sporadic but hilarious commentary from iconic editor Tina Brown. And there are so many more I could subscribe to if the purse strings allowed.

Substack’s boom back in 2020 saw many lifestyle journalists join the platform as an act of independence from traditional news organisations, and the more recent abandonment of X is only attracting more in search of a personal audience. So, while newsletters seem to be the preferable format these days, how sustainable is this pivot to indie journalism?

The paywall, although rightly justified, is surely becoming a major issue. While I’m happy to spend a fiver a month on a couple of newsletters rather than the copy of Vogue I might have indulged in five years ago (how much does Vogue cost now?!), who can really afford to subscribe to multiple Substacks?

Perhaps the next step for more successful Substackers is to launch their own websites, like The Free Press. Set up by an ex-New York Times columnist in a bid to create her own newspaper in newsletter form, The Free Press now has nearly 300,000 free subscribers, of which 10% choose to pay the annual subscription. Tina Brown recently said she’d consider the same path for her Substack, Fresh Hell.

What does this shake-up of lifestyle journalism mean for PR? As more journalists go it alone to build closer connections with their readers, does PR have a role in newsletter culture? And, despite impressive reach figures, will it be valued as much as traditional media by our clients? For now, it’s a great tool to build deeper relationships with journalists, stay on top of trends and better understand the audiences we’re trying to engage with.