Hey there! We’re doing a special edition of the Publisher Weekly newsletter this week — it’s a little different.
As most of you know, this newsletter is run by the team at
Ghost.
More than 18 months ago when we came up with the idea to curate the most important stories about new business models for publishing each week, we also started doing our own research into this space as we set out to build a product specifically to serve it.
It feels to us like creating sustainable models for the future of independent publishing has never been more important than it is today. It also feels like people are finally beginning to wake up to the dark side of advertising, the problems of funding journalism in 2019, and the potential for memberships and subscriptions as an alternative. Longtime subscribers will have seen all of these subjects covered in some detail.
While there are a few plugins out there to help create membership sites and a handful of small paid newsletter products — so far there hasn’t been any full-featured independent platform for a membership based publication.
And, of course, that’s exactly what we’ve been working on.