How the Sunday Long Read newsletter built a thriving membership by curating longform journalism
How the Sunday Long Read newsletter built a thriving membership by curating longform journalism
Don Van Natta Jr. and Jacob Feldman grew the newsletter to over 25,000 subscribers.
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The entire genesis of the Sunday Long Read newsletter can be traced back to a single tweet Don Van Natta Jr. sent out on November 23rd, 2014. By that point Van Natta, an investigative journalist at ESPN, had been tweeting out his favorite longform articles every Sunday for over a year, and a user named Francis Underwood responded by asking him whether he would ever consider launching a newsletter that rounded up his recommendations.
This wasn’t the first time Van Natta had received such a request. “Will likely begin a free email newsletter in January 2015,” he replied. “Stay tuned.” As it so happened, a Harvard senior named Jacob Feldman saw the exchange and jumped into the conversation. “DM me if you are looking for someone to help put it together for free... Your weekly suggestions have been my journalism education.”
A little over a month after that exchange, Van Natta and Feldman launched the first issue of the Sunday Long Read, a weekly newsletter that curates the best longform journalism published to the web. From the very beginning, the newsletter attracted a loyal fanbase, and over the next several years it expanded its purview to include a membership program, a rotating list of star guest editors, a podcast, and even its own original longform journalism.
In a recent interview, Van Natta and Feldman discussed how they make their article selections each week, what paying members get for their contributions, and why star reporters like Maggie Haberman agree to guest edit for the newsletter.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Finding a fanbase of longform enthusiasts
Van Natta isn’t just an admirer of longform journalism; he’s a longtime practitioner of the genre.
After starting his career at the Miami Herald, he spent 16 years as an investigative reporter at the New York Times, a tenure that resulted in two separate Pulitzers for stories he contributed to. In 2012 he was hired away by ESPN, and since then he’s produced a number of sports-related investigations for both the website and television. “One of my first big stories was an in-depth profile of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, which I spent six months on,” he told me. “If you go back and read it, I'm pretty proud of that piece. It's prescient about a lot of things that have occurred in the NFL in the last 10 years.” Outside his day jobs, he’s also managed to publish three books, two of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Van Natta is a self-described “workaholic” who regularly puts in 80-hour work weeks, but despite his grueling schedule he’s set aside time to read longform articles from other writers. He joined Twitter in 2009, and in late 2013 he started a Sunday tradition of tweeting out the best stories he’d read that week. “I would pick the five or six pieces each week — sometimes as many as eight, sometimes as few as two or three, depending on how many I'd read and liked — and then on Sunday morning, while I was having my coffee, I would put them out in concentrated bursts, tweeting four or five in a row.” Each tweet would start out with the words “The Sunday long read,” followed by the title of the article and a link.
The response was pretty immediate. The tweet storms began racking up dozens of likes and retweets each week, including from those who had written the stories Van Natta was praising. Some of his colleagues told him they’d begun to anticipate the weekly recommendations, and it didn’t take long before fans started requesting a newsletter version. “I had zero interest in starting a newsletter,” he recalled. “At that time I was busy with my day job.” He also didn’t have the technical know-how to launch one.
Luckily for Van Natta, he’d picked up Feldman as a devoted follower of his Sunday tweet storms. At the time, Feldman was a senior at Harvard and hoping to break into journalism when he graduated. “I was working for the college paper at that point, and we had just launched a newsletter for our sports department,” he recalled. So when Van Natta tweeted that he was thinking of launching a newsletter, Feldman figured he could help him with setting up a Mailchimp account. “I didn't expect it to turn into anything more than maybe I'll get a phone call and I'll have an introduction and I'll know somebody at ESPN down the road, but it ended up obviously taking on a life of its own after that.”
Designing and launching the newsletter
That tweet led to a DM exchange, which then led to a phone call. Van Natta was immediately impressed with Feldman. “He was clearly a very smart guy who had the same sort of sensibilities about journalism that I did, and very quickly we discovered that we had the same vision for the newsletter.”
Over the next few weeks Feldman set about putting together a template they could use for each issue, and by December the two were sending private beta editions to friends and colleagues for feedback. Unmoored from the character restrictions of Twitter, they decided to format the recommendations so that, in addition to the title and link, they would include a short paragraph for each item that described the piece and/or explained why they chose it.
While they were still tinkering with the format, Van Natta reached out to Jack Shafer, the veteran journalist who’s now a media columnist at Politico. “We’d always sort of been admirers of each other's work and knew each other a little bit. I reached out to him because I wanted the newsletter to have a classic pick every week.” By “classic pick,” he meant an article published in a previous era, often before the internet even existed. Shafer had a deep memory for such stories and was especially talented at unearthing them, oftentimes from his own print collection.
Van Natta and Feldman sent out the first official issue of the Sunday Long Read on January 18, 2015. The format in those early days was fairly simple; their “favorite read” was positioned up top with a short blurb, followed by nine additional article picks. The newsletter closed out with the “classic pick of the week,” the “lede of the week,” and the “quotation of the week.” All together, it totaled to fewer than a thousand words.
The response was immediate. “We put out word only on Twitter and to friends and colleagues,” said Van Natta. “I think we had more than a thousand subscribers right off the bat.” Most of the early discovery occurred mainly on Twitter. “People were tweeting out things like, ‘this is my new favorite newsletter. This is an indispensable read.’ And these were mainly from journalists who Jacob and I respected and admired.”
As the newsletter picked up an audience, Van Natta and Feldman continued to expand its offerings. Not only did the article blurbs get longer, but the two also launched new features that included:
The Sunday Still: their favorite photograph of the week
The Sunday Pod: their favorite podcast
The Sunday Soundtrack: a handpicked song to listen to while reading that week’s picks
The Sunday Toon: one of their favorite comics
The Last Laugh: a humor piece from that week
While Van Natta and Feldman read and vetted all the articles curated in the newsletter, it didn’t take long for readers and writers to begin sending in pieces for consideration. In many cases, people simply slid into their Twitter DMs or emailed them personally. “There’s also a website form, and we're getting several tips a week through it,” said Van Natta. On an average week, they’ll receive upwards of 60 submissions. Sometimes those tips come from people who simply enjoyed an article and want it to find a wider audience, but many also come from writers and editors looking to promote their own longform work.
Launching a membership program and expanding the newsletter’s remit
For the entirety of the Sunday Long Read’s existence, Van Natta and Feldman have held full-time jobs. Both had a lot of ambition for where they wanted to take the newsletter, but they also knew they’d need to hire outside help to execute on their ideas.
This meant that the newsletter needed to start generating revenue, and they settled on a membership program as the best option. “We had heard for a while from people that were like, ‘Hey, I'd love to support this,’ or ‘what can I do to help you guys?’” recalled Feldman. “So in 2017 we were like, ‘okay, we’ve got to sit down and create a way for people to help us rather than just taking PayPal donations or whatever.’”
They signed up for the platform Memberful and began surveying their audience for what it wanted out of a membership program. “We settled on a few benefits,” said Van Natta. “They get the newsletter a day early, which a lot of them really like. I think that's their biggest perk. And then about half dozen times a year, they'll get a bonus issue that's usually around a holiday.” Within weeks of the membership program’s launch, it converted several hundred members, most of whom pay around $50 a year, and it’s continued to grow ever since. Eventually, they also opened up the newsletter to sponsorships, with most of the ads consisting of promotions of other newsletters and journalism-related institutions. This week’s sponsor, for instance, is a job listing for a journalism professor position at Brandeis University.
Now that the Sunday Long Read was generating revenue, how did Van Natta and Feldman choose to spend it? They started by launching a guest editor series whereby they pay well-known journalists to curate an issue of the newsletter. Suddenly, the Sunday Long Read had the imprimatur of top journalism talent like Maggie Haberman, Peter King, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, almost all of whom went on to share the issues they edited to their huge Twitter followings. “I think we are batting like 99%,” said Van Natta. “People always say yes. And it's a lot of work. Each one of the guest editors writes an introductory essay. Some of them have been fantastic — really, really well written, wonderful essays.” Not only has this played a large role in growing the newsletter’s following, but it also gives Van Natta and Feldman a break from editing the newsletter about 15 times per year.
Their most ambitious expansion came in 2018 with the launch of their Originals program. At that point, the Sunday Long Read began publishing between five and 10 longform articles per year. “There's pitches that come in,” said Van Natta. “We field the pitches. We commission the stories. [The journalists] go out and report them. We pay their expenses and they get the full magazine treatment of editing and fact checking. We do the whole thing.” To help with the editing process, they brought on Peter Bailey-Wells, a multi-platform editor at The Boston Globe (the entire staff at the Sunday Long Read consists of contractors, and many hold down full-time jobs elsewhere). Their submission guidelines page lists payment as $2,000 per piece, plus expenses.
Since launching the Originals program, the Sunday Long Read has produced dozens of pieces on a wide range of subjects. In July of this year, for instance, it posted a 6,800-word article about a feminist Viking festival in Europe. In 2018, it published a 3,800-word first-person essay from an octogenarian who discovered a teenage basketball prodigy in France. Feldman said they try to stick to “esoteric” topics that wouldn’t easily find a home at most other outlets.
Obviously, the Sunday Long Read has come a long way since it consisted of a series of tweets sent out while Van Natta was drinking his morning coffee. The “about” page lists over a dozen people who help out on production, and it’s published the work of over 100 guest editors and freelance journalists. Van Natta and Feldman told me that just about everyone gets paid something for their labor. “There are some weeks where we're really busy,” said Van Natta. “I’m an 80 hour-work-week kind of guy. I'm a workaholic. And it's tough sometimes to find time to devote to it in the way that we really need to, but you just try to make the time and do the best you can.”
I asked them if they ever considered quitting their day jobs and going all in. Neither seemed ready to make the plunge. “We have been having conversations about bringing somebody in who has business experience,” said Feldman. “If someone has both a passion for journalism and an interest in really helping this become a business, that is something we are open to.”
But for right now, both are content with running it as a side hustle, and they didn’t seem perturbed by the idea that it would always remain so. “One of the things that really is so gratifying,” said Van Natta, “and makes me feel great about the future of journalism, despite all of the shutdowns and layoffs and all of that, is that when somebody's work is featured in the newsletter — whether they're a veteran journalist, in their mid-career, or somebody just coming up within the industry — they're honored by that. It's their peers lifting up their work, putting it in front of a new audience, and getting them readers that they wouldn't normally get. And I think that alone is just so gratifying to us and keeps us going”