Do you HAVE to pick between vertical video and newsletters?

If you look through this summer's Top 50 Creator Journalists list, you'll see that 12 journalists publish video as their primary product, while 40 primarily publish newsletters.

This bifurcated publishing pattern makes sense for a few reasons. First, vertical video is the dominant surface on most social media platforms while email is the most durable and widely used digital product of the last 50 years.

Further, plenty of creator journalists have worked at institutions publishing through legacy products like newspapers, magazines, websites and linear broadcast feeds. Typing inverted-pyramid style stories or scripting and editing an A-block-style segment were how they were trained. The leaps are not so wide to newsletters and Reels/Shorts/TikToks. Evolving the form to fit the product/audience expectations of 2025 makes plenty of sense.

Over the summer, I wrote about the 'Poly-Platform' path forward for creator journalists. The first two paths were (1) video-first storytellers looking to expand monetization primarily through advertising scale across social platforms and (2) newsletter-centric world-builders who build engagement with smaller, loyal audiences paying them directly.

There's a gap between the two approaches. Of the 40 creators who publish their journalism primarily by newsletter, only six also regularly publish social video. Of the 12 primary video creators, only three regularly publish newsletters – like Tangle News and Mo News.

There was a third type of creator in that 'Poly-platform' framing — those who can convey their journalism consistently across platforms with platform-specific approaches. It's a much smaller cohort. Political journalists like Chris Cillizza have experience blogging for The Washington Post AND broadcasting for CNN — that specific duality of skills is rare.

So it was all the more interesting when former Washington Post TikTok Guy Dave Jorgenson launched his Local News International (LNI) and made a point to publish twice-weekly newsletters upon launch in addition to his daily videos. Launching independent, with a slimmed-down operation, it was a notable decision to start with a new product he hadn't previously used.

LNI co-founder Micah Gelman told me the newsletter was actually a “no-brainer” because it allows them to include “sources, background and commentary for videos.” After spending several years inside The Post newsroom exclusively sourcing from Post journalism, the team felt great freedom to aggregate (and credit!) from all sorts of sources they admire.

It also allowed LNI to go deeper. A recent edition in the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder examined the culture of young men in this country — a topic Dave is personally passionate about and believes he is uniquely positioned to cover, as he told Nieman Lab. The piece drove “hundreds of conversions,” a signal moment for a product that is only a few months old.

In discussing the financial motivation for the newsletter, which publishes on beehiiv (as does Project C) Micah acknowledges that "the sustainable part of membership opportunity is not as robust on TikTok or YouTube as you would want it to be." To say it more bluntly — direct consumer revenue is not meaningful on video platforms and so the LNI team made the calculated decision that they thought they could mine for subscriber dollars through the newsletter.

Is it working? Micah declined to share financials but did share that engagement on the newsletter is above industry benchmarks — 61% open rate and 10% click-through rate.

Last week, Caitlin Dewey, the writer and proprietor of Links I would GChat You If We Were Friends, appeared in her first Substack Live.

Substack Lives are basically like YouTube broadcasts — two talking heads in a video talk while other users can sign into the chat to watch and offer up comments/hearts.

Caitlin expressed surprise that people tuned in on a Thursday afternoon. At its peak there were about 60 people watching. In our conversation, Caitlin expressed surprise that even that many users would be interested in a daytime video chat. But that’s kinda the point. The kind of people who open a Substack push alert on a weekday afternoon are the exact kind of people who are willing to pay to support independent newsletters, like hers. I say that as a longtime subscriber and someone who saw the push alert for the live session as I was leaving synagogue during the second day of Rosh Hashanah and pulled it up to listen as I drove home.

Caitlin said she had been thinking about it for a while and when the invitation to collab came in, she figured why not. “If I'm on Substack why not use these tools? They make it easy by automatically creating these video clips I can share afterwards.”

Indeed, why not!

Substack started as an email service provider platform for sending newsletters. But in the years since, they have emphasized building out their product, in the form of an app, to feature live video and community text chats. These are social features for users that can contribute as a “growth engine” for any creators using Substack.

Successful creators on Substack are doing EXACTLY that. As Emily Sundberg, the founder of FeedMe, said in a Substack Note yesterday, she sees her email newsletter as the primary product:

But she’s also making a lot of effort to service the 5% of hardcore Substack users within the app who have already signaled their willingness to pay a premium. Emily posts several Notes a day and is regularly prompting towards and interacting with a vibrant community chat — a feature for paying subscribers only; a defacto paywall within the Substack app.

Most Substack Lives serve the opposite function: discovery. As Digiday reported in March: "Dan Harris, who operates a meditation-focused newsletter on Substack with over 185,000 subscribers, said that he saw a spike in both paid and free subscriptions after co-hosting livestreams with creators Sharon McMahon and Van Jones."

Of course, Substack Live is a particular video feature that only works for newsletter writers on that platform. Dave Jorgenson is publishing on Beehiiv and is working with a team at LNI that includes Chris Vasquez, a freelancer writing one of the newsletters.

These examples do no apply to all creators.

The gap between being video-first storytellers and newsletter-centric world-builders is borne of independent journalist creators balancing ambition and the realities of starting a new business. But every effort that tries is laying down a plank to bridge for the next creator to learn from and add towards.

Justin Bank, a regular contributor, is a principal at Better Media Studios, which focuses on developing better media products within the Creator Economy.

This piece was edited by Liz Kelly Nelson.