How Jared Newman built Cord Cutter Weekly, a TV streaming newsletter with 32,000 subscribers

A spinoff newsletter that gives tech advice has also grown to 1,200 paying members.

When Jared Newman launched his Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter back in 2016, the streaming TV market was much smaller than it is today, with most TV networks either not having their own streaming app or requiring a cable subscription to access it. But as it turned out, he timed his launch perfectly, as it was only a matter of years before virtually every Hollywood studio pivoted to streaming. Today, his newsletter has over 32,000 subscribers, and a spinoff newsletter that gives tech advice has also grown to 1,200 paying members.

In our interview, we discussed his motivation for launching the newsletter, why his editor let him promote it at the end of his columns, and whether he ever wants to leave his freelance career entirely to just focus on growing his two newsletters.

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Transcript

Hey, Jared, thanks for joining us. 

Thanks for having me, Simon. 

So I have you here to talk about these two amazing newsletters that you launched and run. But before we start talking about that, I just want to hear about how you got into journalism in the first place. You've been a tech journalist going all the way back to 2008 or so?

Yeah. So I guess it depends how far back you want to go. But I guess I say that I caught the journalism bug in college. I went to NYU for journalism school, spent a little bit of time doing local newspapers and then moved out to L.A. in 2008. I don't live there now, but that's when I kind of started freelancing and focusing on technology and that kind of thing. So yeah, I've been doing this for a while and started my first newsletter in 2016.

So you've been, other than maybe those stints at the local newspapers, you've been self-employed pretty much your entire career?

Yep. You know, just racking up freelance clients and kind of building things. I have been writing fairly steadily over the years for a couple sites in particular. I do a lot of writing for TechHive and PCWorld, which are sister sites. I do all my writing about streaming and cord cutting over at TechHive with a weekly column. And I do generally a story a week or two for Fast Company as well. Those tend to be more reported, maybe businessy, maybe some more general consumer tech stuff.

And I know that you've always been in tech, but were you doing any kind of more specific beats? We're going to obviously start talking about Cord Cutter Weekly soon, but were you regularly covering the streaming sector like Netflix and Hulu at the time or anything like that?

Yeah, I mean, it was an area of interest to me since I started freelancing, because it was 2008. I was living in LA. I had very little income coming in. And so that was my impetus for not having cable TV anymore. It was just sort of like a necessity.

And so all that stuff became fascinating to me because it was like, well, how can I watch this and that if I don't have cable? And obviously it's become much different than it was back then, but it was something that was kind of dear to my heart even back in 2008.

And in 2014, TechHive asked me about doing a dedicated weekly column on that topic. So that's when things really started to gather steam.

Yeah. In 2014, to remind people, you know, there was Netflix and Hulu as standalone streaming apps. A lot of the other streaming apps required you to have a cable subscription still in order to use them. They were just like an added convenience, right? They weren't necessarily like standalone apps you could subscribe to.

Yeah, it was very much like if you didn't have cable and you didn't want to pirate things, like you just didn't watch things. And, you know, we didn't start seeing these packages that replicate the cable bundle like Sling TV and YouTube TV and all those. That didn't start until like 2015, 2016. And now we see that as commonplace. But yeah, it was a wild west back then for sure.

And was it you that pitched the column or was it the editor that pitched it to you?

I'm trying to think. I think it was kind of a little of both. I know that they were looking for people to write dedicated columns, and that was something that pretty naturally came to me as I was already interested in it.

Was the column called Cord Cutter Weekly from the beginning?

They picked the name Cord Cutter Confidential. It's kind of funny, like I almost never really talk about that name. I just say my TechHive column. It's not heavily branded or anything like that. But that's the name that we went with and that's technically the name that we still use.

Yeah. And so what was like a typical column, like especially looking back to 2014 or whatever, what was like a typical subject that you would write about?

I mean, a lot of it was sort of covering these new things that were coming about and what they meant, you know, more broadly. So at the time Sling TV was really new, they had a very small number of channels. So some of it was just bread and butter, like, okay, here's all the channels that you get because Sling, for whatever reason, didn't think to put that information on its website. And some of it was kind of like critiquing the DVR and how that worked. 

My very first column was sort of like, well, here's why your TV bill is so expensive. And a lot of times people think it's because of your cable company. And what it really is oftentimes is the TV networks that bundle everything together and ask for more money and more and more money. And so if you're Spectrum or Comcast, you kind of have to raise prices to cover that cost. So everybody shares some of the blame. And so sometimes I try to break that down for people as well. So they have just a better understanding of what's behind their bill increases.

And this was kind of like a general consumer type column, like your everyday consumer who might be  dabbling into cutting their cable cord and having to navigate this kind of weird constellation of disparate apps and stuff like that.