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There’s this misconception about Substack that only opinion writers can thrive on its platform. According to this line of thinking, traditional journalism — the kind where reporters meet with and interview sources — is too time intensive and would prevent a writer from publishing at a high enough frequency to succeed.
Indeed, if you peruse the leaderboard for the most popular Substack accounts, you’ll find plenty that are long on analysis and short on original reporting. Articles about Substack tend to namecheck the same few pundits — Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald — who make their bread and butter by lobbing their highly partisan takes into the political discourse.
But to focus on just the most controversial writers is to miss the journalism that is sprouting up on the platform. As Substack matures as a company, it’s attracting more and more veteran journalists who are leveraging their reporting expertise and contacts to break news. Perhaps none have been more successful at this endeavor than Judd Legum.
Since launching his Substack newsletter Popular Information in 2018, Legum has not only broken dozens of major political and business stories, but his reporting has also driven real impact. Fortune 100 companies have been shamed into withdrawing their campaign spending. Media outlets with millions of social media followers saw their Facebook accounts deleted. Even Trump’s presidential campaign was forced to change its deceitful marketing as a result of Legum’s investigations.
And his readers have rewarded him for his success. Popular Information now gets sent out to over 150,000 subscribers, with at least 7,500 of them paying $50 a year to support his work. What’s particularly remarkable is that, since 2020, he hasn’t placed any content behind a paywall, which means he’s generating a six-figure income simply from the goodwill he’s generated.
I recently interviewed Legum about why he launched his newsletter, how he developed his investigative techniques, and whether he ever wants to hire a news team to increase Popular Information’s reach and impact.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Why he launched a newsletter
Legum didn’t start on Substack as an unknown entity. Back in 2005, he was working as a research director at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress when he pitched his bosses on launching a blog. ThinkProgress debuted that year with just him and two other staffers at the helm, but it quickly grew into one of the most influential blogs on the Left.
Though Legum took a break from ThinkProgress in 2007 to join Hillary Clinton’s campaign, he eventually returned to the blog in 2011 and, as editor in chief, led a team of dozens of writers and researchers. As the site’s audience grew, so did his personal brand. Whenever ThinkProgress broke major news, he would publish viral Twitter threads that summarized its reporting. He eventually amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter.
In early 2018, Legum began to think about starting something new. “I ran across an article about Substack published in The Wall Street Journal,” he told me in a phone interview. “It talked about the success of Bill Bishop,” who launched his China-focused newsletter on Substack. “I knew Bill from my own work. I had met with him to talk about China at one point. He seemed like a smart guy, and I don’t think he would be [running a Substack newsletter] unless there was a chance that it could work.”
Legum opened a dummy account on Substack just so he could get a sense of how it worked, and the platform’s founders immediately noticed. “They reached out to me and said, ‘we saw you signed up, are you interested in learning more?’” he recalled. “There were only three people working at Substack at the time, and there was no political content on there.” He was initially skeptical that he could make real money. “There was already so much free political information out there,” he said. “I thought it could work for a newsletter on China or some specialized topic, but I didn’t know if anyone would pay for a political newsletter.”
After going back and forth with Substack’s founders and speaking to others in the space, Legum eventually settled on a strategy: he would launch a free newsletter and publish it four times a week for several weeks, and then he’d announce a paid version that would move two newsletters a week behind a paywall (leaving the remaining two free).
Legum’s biggest problem heading into the venture was that he had no already-existing email list, which meant he’d have to build one from scratch. “I downloaded my contact list and basically took everyone in my inbox and said, ‘hey, I’m starting this newsletter, it’s totally free for right now, I’d love for you to check it out and let me know what you think of it.’” He also pitched the idea to Wired, and, because leaving your job to launch a newsletter was still considered a novelty at the time, the magazine published a write-up of his move.
On June 24, 2018, Legum published a placeholder post on his Substack that encouraged people to sign up. A few weeks later, he officially announced it on Twitter. “Hi Twitter: I'm launching a new political newsletter called Popular Information. It's for people who give a damn. It would be awesome if you would try it out and let me know what you think.” It was retweeted thousands of times, triggering a significant wave of signups. Legum was officially off to the races.
Paywall incoming…
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