On Saturday, I presented a session at Minnebar, which was celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The one-day event takes place inside the massive Best Buy Headquarters just south of Minneapolis. The building’s open-air atrium is massive - more mall than office space. Multiple huge cafeterias, a stage and conference big enough for more than 1,000 people, a full-sized Caribou Coffee, all of it surrounded by around 50 conference spaces, ranging for a massive theater to small tables stuck in guest bedroom-sized cubicles.

My session was entitled Building A Profitable Independent Newsletter and I think I have the track record to speak about the topic with some credibility. With more than 180,000 free subscribers, I suspect I might be the largest one-person media and television industry newsletter around. I am certainly the biggest one that is sending out five 1,800-2200 word newsletters a week.

I have also made every possible mistake along the way. So I can present a pretty clear-eyed look at the challenges involved in building a business.

So here are a few topline thoughts I’d like you to consider about your newsletter.

Particularly in the movie, media and television newsletter space, there are a lot of people writing newsletters as a way to keep busy while they wait for their next full-time journalism job. And that’s fine. But that process is not the same as the one that leads to building a viable business you can build your career around.

I’m proof that you can make a nice living doing this. My newsletter is my primary source of income. But it requires a lot of grinding and taking it as seriously as you would a job at one of the Hollywood trades or as a full-time freelancer.

Part of the act of taking it seriously is spending time on the marketing and promotional details that most journalists aren’t comfortable doing. It can seem tacky and it can feel as if it is taking time away from the journalism.

But taking the business as seriously as you do the writing doesn’t just grow your newsletter. It builds that sense inside yourself that what you are doing is building a business around your journalism. You’ll feel more invested in the totality of what you’re doing and you’ll find yourself taking the writing more seriously as well.

I read a lot of television and movie newsletters being written by journalists who have lost their full-time job. And they are writing a newsletter that is essentially an extension of what they used to do before they were laid off. Some reviews, maybe some news tidbits. A very traditional approach to the topic.

But who is the audience for this? Yes, some people will pay for a subscription because they respect the work you’ve done over your career, or read you at your old job. But it’s rare that is a big enough group to provide a livable income. At $40 a year, 1,000 paid subscribers earns you $40,000 a year before expenses. And getting to even 1,000 paid subscribers is not easy for many journalists.

So who is the audience for what you are writing? What are you doing that would resonate with readers who have no idea who you are or why they should listen to you? And what are you doing that is distinctly you?

I often joke that I don’t frequently write about the most popular shows because the world doesn’t need another hot take on The Pitt. And while I am somewhat joking, it’s also a cornerstone of what I do. If I am writing about The Pitt, I am competing with a hundred other journalists. And even if my take was the best, that doesn’t mean anything at the end of the day. And it doesn’t help grow my newsletter.

You’re not just selling a newsletter. You are selling your vision of a newsletter. And if that doesn’t come across in your work, you’ll never be able to build it into a viable business.

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The infographic above is a bit of a generalization. But it’s a helpful way to think of your free and paid subscriber base. Each of those three groups resonate with your work in different ways. And the challenge for any journalist is that you have to make sure you equally service each group.

You need a growing free subscriber base so you can have an active group of readers who might pay for your efforts. But you also have to do enough to keep the paid subscribers happy as well. It can be a delicate balancing act. However, after doing it for awhile, you’ll develop a sense of being able to tell when your newsletter is leaning too much in one direction.

During my Minnebar session, I received a number of questions about AI and whether I felt newsletters written by AI could replace us all.

I think that the newsletters that don’t provide a unique vision could definitely be impacted by AI slop newsletters.

But whether you’re writing about movies or running a B-to-B newsletter for aviation enthusiasts, the same thing that will help make that effort a success will also protect you from the worst impacts of AI.

You need to have an authenticity and personality that consistently comes across in your newsletter. Don’t be afraid to be human, to share some small tidbit about yourself. For instance, the best reviews are about more than just the program. How did they make you feel, how does this fit into the world we live in and experiences we may have had.

One of the strongest reactions I’ve had to a review came from this review of the Netflix limited series Lost Ollie. I tend to share too much of myself in some reviews and that was certainly the case in this situation. But it resonated with readers in a way that was unforgettable:

And that's the thing about loss. It strips away the artifice from your life and forces you forward. It clarifies the kind of person you can become - for better or worse. We all know people who can't get past their specific loss. A family member, a relationship, a dream. They spend the rest of their lives unable to process their grief, unwilling to find the beauty that still lives in the world. Because as horrific as a serious loss can be, it opens up the possibilities of great joy. It's difficult to fully appreciate love until you've felt what it's like to lose it. Or know the joy that comes from doing work that feels as if it was what you born to do unless you've trudged through jobs that grind down your soul.

Experiencing loss is gutting. But it's also a core component of what makes us human.

I heard from someone on the crew of the show who told me that during the cast and crew wrap party after the premiere, one of the cast read the review out loud and some people began to cry. While that is the rare exception of a reaction, it’s an example of how journalists can connect with an audience. And when you do, it can be magical.

Authenticity is everything and it’s something that AI can’t match. Because at the end of the day, artificial intelligence doesn’t have a soul - however that is defined. It’s not human, and that humanity is what readers will respond to and be willing to pay for.

This is just a brief look at what is involved in turning your newsletter into a viable business. It can be done. But it requires the same professionalism you’d give to any other work experience.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out via email to [email protected]. And if you’re not already a subscriber to Too Much TV, you really should give it a try.