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.”