How Eric Newcomer scaled his startups newsletter into a $2 million business
The former Bloomberg reporter is hyper focused on serving an affluent and influential audience.
In 2013, Eric Newcomer had to conduct one of the most difficult phone calls of his adult life. He had recently received a job offer from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and even though the role would have been a major step up in his burgeoning journalism career, he had to tell the newspaper he wouldn’t be taking the position.
Not long before that phone call, a Wall Street Journal tech reporter named Jessica Lessin had quit her job with the ambition of launching a bootstrapped publication focused on the tech industry. Both she and Newcomer had attended Harvard University — though she graduated several years before him — and they were put in touch via their alumni connections. Newcomer didn’t have any experience in reporting on the tech world, but Lessin was on the lookout for a “hungry young reporter,” as he put it, and she invited him to join as the first employee of this new venture.
By that point, he had already received the Philadelphia Inquirer offer and was understandably torn. Lessin’s venture was a big gamble and could easily fail, but at the same time he wasn’t blind to the turmoil inflicted on local newspapers, which by that point were already experiencing extensive contraction and retrenchment.
Ultimately, he decided to take the job with Lessin. “It just seemed like the most exciting option,” he told me. Both his grandfathers had owned small businesses, and he figures that a strain of entrepreneurship runs in his family. Not only would he be working for a startup, but he’d be covering an industry that was regularly spinning up new companies with multi-billion-dollar valuations. The opportunity just seemed much bigger.
So in mid-2013 Newcomer moved to California and started writing for the outlet that Lessin eventually named The Information. While he’ll never know what would have happened if he’d taken the Inquirer job, it’s clear he made the right choice. After nearly eight years of tech reporting for traditional publications, he struck off on his own in 2020 to launch Newcomer, an eponymous newsletter that covers the startup and venture capital world.
Today, his company is on track to generate $2 million in annual revenue, with the largest chunk of that money coming from a bi-annual conference called the Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Not only has he brought on someone to lead his business operations, but he’s also slowly expanding his reporting and production staff so he can cover the startup scene even more extensively.
In a recent interview, Newcomer walked me through his decision to leave traditional media, how he built his subscription business, and why live events presented an even bigger revenue opportunity for him.
Let’s jump into my findings.
Learning the startups beat
Newcomer caught the journalism bug at an early age. In elementary school, he rotated in as an anchor for the morning newscast, and he later became the editor of his high school newspaper. At Harvard, he wrote for the Crimson and interned at places like the Macon Telegraph, the Sun Sentinel, and the Tampa Bay Times. After graduating in 2012, he landed a summer fellowship at The New York Times, where he covered local news.
He always assumed he’d end up reporting on politics, hence why he landed his first full-time job at the Washington Examiner, which at the time was a free newspaper handed out to commuters as they descended into the Washington, DC metro. That business became pretty much obsolete, however, once WMATA extended cell phone data signals underground. The Examiner ended up laying off much of its staff — including Newcomer — and pivoted to operating as the right-leaning, digital-only outlet it still is today. That layoff kicked off the series of events that led to Newcomer getting his job at The Information.
This role was radically different from anything he’d done before. Not only did he have to learn a new beat, but The Information was also founded on a then-novel idea that an audience would pay for a high-priced news product that served them information they couldn’t get anywhere else. At the time, most publications were completely free and ad-supported, but from the very beginning The Information locked all of its content behind a hard paywall that cost $400 to bypass.
In a 2021 interview, Lessin told me that this business model forced her and her staff to focus solely on delivering high-impact, exclusive journalism. “Big stories will pull in a lot of subscribers, and in addition to pulling them in directly, we'd see very elevated subscriber growth in the weeks following big stories as well,” she said. “Sometimes it's the actual piece, but sometimes that piece has this sort of halo effect, if you will, and people are finding us through different channels after that.” This focus on quality over quantity meant that, at least in the beginning, The Information was only publishing a handful of articles a day while free tech sites like TechCrunch and VentureBeat were pumping out dozens.
Newcomer struggled to meet these standards in his early months. “It was a hard first job as a reporter — like ‘go write these great novel feature stories.’ So it was definitely a trial by fire.” The staff was tiny then, so he had to cover a very broad range of topics within tech. But he learned a lot, and he credits Lessin with opening his eyes to the idea that journalism could be extremely lucrative if it remained hyper focused on serving an affluent audience. “Jessica was so savvy about identifying the subscription business model early on when there were so many haters. Everybody else in media is so cynical and pessimistic.”
The Information’s lean staffing required Newcomer to be extremely versatile in his coverage, but in 2014 he saw a job opening at Bloomberg for a startup beat reporter and applied for it. By narrowing his focus, he was able to develop deep relationships within Silicon Valley, and this allowed him to report on the kind of explosive stories that turns one into a name brand journalist. In 2018, for instance, he and Brad Stone told the definitive account of how Travis Kalanick got pushed out of Uber, and he regularly broke news of major deals and acquisitions within the startup space.
Newcomer spent nearly six years at Bloomberg and still considers it to be one of the best media businesses ever created. After all, the news organization basically serves as a moat for the Bloomberg Terminal, a $23,000 annual subscription that’s essential to any business that intersects with the financial world. “It's just amazing,” he said. “It's a tax on the entire financial system predicated on media and information.”
But near the end of his tenure he began to bristle at the company’s stodgy requirements on news reporting. At the time, he was a great admirer of Ben Smith’s media column at The New York Times, which blended reported scoops with “voicey” analysis and opinion. “And I thought Bloomberg had such a boring writing style where it was super worried about inserting opinion.” Newcomer wrote a tech newsletter for the outlet and was regularly receiving notes back from editors telling him that he needed to tone down his opinion and lean more towards “analysis,” which Newcomer interpreted as “just safe opinions that you can get away with in the Bloomberg world.” He hated that he couldn’t just insert his personality into his own writing.
Also, after years of writing about startups, Newcomer had caught the entrepreneurial bug. By 2020, we were well into the Substack era, and he’d grown fascinated with the idea that you could forge a direct relationship with an audience and use inexpensive tools to monetize that relationship. While he didn’t have a huge audience on social media — he estimates he had around 19,000 Twitter followers while still at Bloomberg — he was confident his sources could feed him the kind of big stories that attract a readership. So in late 2020 he quit his job and launched his newsletter on Substack.