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👋 Hey!
Think about the last time someone asked you to prove something. Name the source, show the receipt, produce the work.
That is the week newsletters just had. Substack will now scan a post and tell readers how much of it came out of a machine. A deliverability veteran spent Sunday explaining why your "you signed up for this" line is worthless unless it names the actual form somebody filled in. And the UK's biggest regional publisher watched 55% of its Google traffic evaporate in six months, which is what happens when the thing vouching for you quietly stops.
This week: a newsletter designed to end, a twelve-person newsroom betting against the personality economy, and one button that keeps a fifth of the people already walking out.
Ready to show your work? Let's dive in! 👇
Meme of the Week
This Week's Hot Takes
Substack will scan your draft for AI before you hit publish. Readers can now check any post for machine-written text. Publishers can run the scan on drafts, disable it per post, and add a "How I make this" statement.
Kit lets you ask a creator for their email without handing over yours. Creator Network profiles now accept connection requests. Send a short intro; they approve or decline, and the cross-promo conversation starts with neither inbox exposed.
Your "you signed up for this" line is probably hurting you. Al Iverson argues that listing every possible opt-in path signals you do not know where the address came from. Name the real source or drop the disclaimer.
Reach lost 55% of its Google traffic in six months. The Daily Mirror publisher has 40,000 paying subscribers now and assumes those referrals never come back. Search was the landlord. Your list is the deed.
Buttondown now renders Mermaid diagrams inside your emails. Write a fenced mermaid block and your archive gets a live SVG while the email gets a cached image, because inboxes still cannot render SVG.
The HeyNews Community is open
This email talks at you once a week. The community is where you get to talk back, and to each other.
Bring the deliverability question you have been sitting on. Post the subject line that flopped and let people tell you why. Steal what is working from operators a few steps ahead of you.
It is free, and the point is simple: grow, learn, and execute together.
Growth Hack of the Week
Launch a newsletter that ends on purpose
How: Pick an event your readers already have on their calendar with a hard start and stop. A tournament, an election, a conference, a product cycle. Build a short-run newsletter around only that, publish the end date in the signup copy, and decide before issue one which permanent newsletter these readers graduate into. Spend the final two sends making that handoff explicit instead of hoping people notice.
Why: Toby Moses, The Guardian's first Head of Newsletters, told the Publisher Podcast that event-based pop-ups have a track record of incredibly high engagement, because readers opted in for exactly this thing at exactly this moment. The Guardian has run one for US soccer fans around the World Cup. The trap has been treating the end date as the end of the relationship. As Moses put it: "In an ideal world, when you start a pop-up newsletter, you have already worked out where you're taking those readers."
Expected Result: A fast, unusually engaged list you built in weeks rather than years, plus a warm transfer into a property you already publish. Track the transition rate from pop-up to permanent as its own number, because that is the metric the whole play lives or dies on.
Spotlight: RocaNews by Max Frost
What works:
The brand is built to outlive the byline. While most of the industry studies solo creators, co-founder Max Frost is deliberately not building around one face. The team is twelve people: five in video, five writers, two on editing and production, with more hiring underway. "We're trying to build an institution," he told A Media Operator, pointing to editorial accountability and multiple voices as advantages a single creator cannot copy.
Readers are the assignment desk. Roca asks its audience where to go and what to cover through Instagram Stories, emails, and Google Forms, and gets hundreds of detailed replies. Readers introduce reporters to local sources and invite the team to their towns, from rural Brazil to Kosovo. The next priority is turning that ad hoc flow into a systematic reporting network.
No single dependency anywhere. Revenue comes from subscriptions, YouTube, and advertising, and which one leads changes month to month. Frost's stated goal is not to maximize whichever platform is hottest but to grow subscriber revenue, because subscribers are the most reliable support the business has.
It refuses the cheap engagement. Roca has dialed back political coverage after seeing the comment sections it produced, and keeps investing in long-form documentaries rather than optimizing everything for short-form algorithms.
Creator quote: "You're going to make quicker money if you do hysterical, fear-mongering content. I think you can build a better business long term if you do it the right way."
Your takeaway: You don’t need twelve people to steal this. Ask your list where to point the next issue and actually go there, spread your revenue across at least two sources you control, and write in a way that would survive you handing the keyboard to someone else. A voice is a moat. A brand readers trust without knowing who typed it is a business.
Tool of the Week
Topol: drag-and-drop email templates without touching a line of HTML
Why You'll Love It: Topol builds responsive email templates from blocks you drag into place, with 400+ ready-made templates, a free image library, merge tags for personalization, and a custom HTML block for the bits you want to hand-code. Save any section as a reusable custom block and drop it into next week's issue in seconds. There is a permanently free tier, no card needed.
Best For: Operators who want an on-brand template without hiring a designer, and teams that need to collaborate on one. Builders can embed the same editor into their own product through the Topol Plugin.
A/B Test of the Week
Test: In your cancellation or downgrade flow, offer "pause" as the second step instead of walking people straight to a confirm button. Half your churning subscribers see the pause option, half see the flow you run today.
Result: Nikki Elbaz, writing in All About Email this week, hit exactly this in the wild: she went to downgrade her Suno plan and got offered a pause instead of a cancellation. Ecommerce subscription brands have run this play for years, and research from Eightx puts the recovery at 9 to 22% of subscribers who were already on their way out. Software rarely offers it at all.
Takeaway: "Not right now" and "never again" are different answers, and most cancel flows only let people give the second one. Add the pause, set a sensible default length, and measure reactivations at 30 and 90 days rather than counting the save on the day. A paused subscriber is still on your list, still opening, and still yours.
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Thanks for reading,
Eren & Cagri