The New York Financial Writers’ Association’s latest webinar features a panel discussion on the rise of Substack, a new medium that enables journalists to send subscription-based digital newsletters directly to their readers by email. Panelists Casey Newton and Eric Newcomer discuss the impact of Substack on traditional media outlets, why they decided to leave full-time positions in major U.S. newsrooms to write their own newsletters and how it’s been going with New York Times Opinion economic writer Peter Coy.
Panelists:
Casey Newton is the founder and editor of [Platformer], a publication about the intersection of tech and democracy. Prior to founding Platformer in October 2020, Newton was the longtime Silicon Valley editor of /The Verge/. While at /The Verge/, his stories on the lives of American content moderators for Facebook and Google sparked a national conversation about working conditions for this essential but often neglected part of the workforce, and he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for reporting. The weekly free edition of Platformer now reaches almost 50,000 people. In April he announced Sidechannel, a community he runs with seven other independent journalists, and interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about their Discord server.
Eric Newcomer is the author of the startup and venture capital newsletter Newcomer. The newsletter has more than 11,000 readers and more than 1,300 paying subscribers. Newcomer spent nearly six years at Bloomberg where he covered the ins-and-outs of the startup world for much of that time, breaking news on IPOs, fundraising rounds and M&A. Prior to that, he was the first employee at The Information.
Peter Coy (@petercoy), a member of the NYFWA’s board of governors and a New York Times Opinion economic writer, moderates the event.
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