Paid newsletters and writing as product

Nick Hagar
3 min readSep 3, 2021
Laptop with Gmail open
Via

The Times recently announced a slew of newsletters limited to paid subscribers. They’re converting existing newsletters to paid and creating new offerings explicitly for this push.

This effort drives home the heart of newsletters’ success — they’re a pure distillation of writing into a digital product. Micropayments are too clunky. Wide-ranging subscriptions rely on heavy usage, while most news…

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Nick Hagar

PhD student @ Northwestern University. I worked in digital media, now I study it.