🔴 The firewall between journalists and business

ft. Lindsey Stanberry, experienced writer, editor, and creator of The Purse, a personal finance newsletter

Author

Francis Zierer
January 10, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes

Your guide to the newsletter world — new stories every Friday. Brought to you by beehiiv.

Today’s guest is Lindsey Stanberry, creator of The Purse, a newsletter about personal finance geared primarily towards women in their thirties through fifties. You may know Lindsey for her work as the founding editor of Refinery29’s popular Money Diaries series.

In this issue:

  • 💼 One significant disservice traditional newsrooms do to journalists

  • 🪞 How to turn a personal blog into a scalable publication

  • 📚️ What makes a good content franchise

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Lindsey or watch it on YouTube.

A detriment to journalists

In 2013, Lindsey Stanberry was hired as a content editor at Refinery29. Nearly six years later, having built the popular Money Diaries series, she left with the title Work & Money Director.

“I could see firsthand how Money Diaries was a hugely successful financial project for Refinery29. Knowing that my team was essentially covered financially, we had a lot more freedom. We didn't worry when layoffs came around because I could say, we brought in all this money for you guys.”

Refinery29 was an environment without the traditional firewall between journalists and their business-minded counterparts. She and her team were acutely aware of the value of their work. When she left to work at CNBC, it was an “old school” environment, where “the idea that I would even suggest we talk to the sales teams and understand what our advertisers are interested in was just shocking.”

There are two problems with this separation, per Lindsey:

“One, for journalists, they don't understand what keeps the lights on. So then there is this snobbery about, like, we couldn't possibly do this. But bills have to be paid. Your salaries have to be paid.

Two, then it prevents them from being entrepreneurial within organizations. And I think journalists have a lot of really good ideas, and they're exposed to so many different ideas through their work, there's no reason why they shouldn't be entrepreneurial and go after these bigger ideas, but they need money to do it.”

The creator economy and the gig economy might be branded together as the precarity economy. Both see participants working as entrepreneurs, without many traditional labor protections, and with tech platforms providing the infrastructure for the distribution, monetization, and point-of-sale for their labor. Instacart and Instagram; Uber and TikTok; Upwork and YouTube.

I asked Lindsey how she defines herself now that she’s gone independent.

“It's a murky stew of … writer, creator, entrepreneur, influencer. I haven't quite figured out how you put a name on it.”

That “murky stew” sounds awfully familiar to the “primordial soup” last week’s interviewee, Daisy Alioto, mentioned: this state of uncertainty everyone from indie creators to major media companies like Condé Nast is operating in at the moment.

This week, GQ published two stories with first-time bylines for independent newsletter writers best known for their tweets. Meanwhile, just one month ago, Eater laid off numerous staffers and shuttered city-focused verticals in favor of a leaner regional model. Included in the layoffs was seasoned food critic Robert Sietsema; the company no longer employs anyone with that job description.

A few days later, Eater NY published a listicle, “The Best Cake Slices in NYC, According to Food Baby”, authored by Mike Chau, the creator behind popular Instagram account @foodbabyny.

Eater has written about Chau multiple times, but this is the first time he’s written for them. His Instagram accounts have a combined 448k followers and feature a stream of well-engaged Reels. Robert Sietsema’s account has 10.8k, and he’s never made an Instagram Reel. I wonder if there’s some back-office calculus here: full-time journalists are expensive and may not have their own audience to boost distribution; are the margins better on Chau’s listicle?

Turning a personal blog into a proper publication

“Writing about yourself, some people do it very well, every week, forever, but that's not what I wanted to do with this.”

When Lindsey left Fortune a year and a half ago, it was with the intent of starting The Purse. The first half year’s post read like a typical personal blog; it wasn’t until last January that she consciously reshaped it into a publication less about her specific point of view than broader trends and case studies about women and money.

On the way there, she participated in CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators program — she’s the second Spotlight interviewee to have been through the program after Ambreen Ali of Central Desi. The program, Lindsey joked, is for “recovering journalists” trying to figure out what to do next — it’s a place for journalists to tear down, in their minds, that traditional wall between journalism and business.

Lindsey laid out her plans to take The Purse to the next level in a post published exactly one year before the one you’re reading now. Over the last year, she’s established three new content franchises, brought in a partner (with a more business-oriented background to complement Lindsey’s editorial background), launched an ambassador program, and started throwing events. She’s also grown from just under 900 subscribers to over 12,000.

Lindsey’s main priority in this second full year is growth, not for growth’s sake, but she says “it’s become very clear in the last six months” that they have to “grow a lot to make real money.” The goal for 2025 is 50,000 subscribers.

Two’s (a) company

I asked Lindsey if she missed anything about working for a company.

“I missed my team, and I missed having somebody to collaborate with, complain to, and bounce ideas off of and dream with, and that's been such a game changer.”

That “game changer” is Erica Velazquez Alpern, whose consulting company Lindsey worked with when she was at Refinery29. Lindsey published a reflective piece last summer covering her challenges monetizing and dealing with the loneliness inherent to her solo project. The two had a coffee planned around that time and Lindsey asked Erica if she’d be interested in working together. She now manages The Purse’s growth strategy, social strategy, and budding events program.

When she published that piece, Lindsey also formalized the paid subscription model she’d been trialing for the preceding few months, adding an additional Home Economics edition and a monthly giveaway to the benefits (previously just access to the older editions she’d begun paywalling).

Neither woman is taking a salary from the business yet; paid subscription revenue is enough to cover still-low business costs: boosting social posts, experimenting with advertising, funding giveaways, and lunch on co-working days.

What’s content worth?

The future of The Purse as a revenue-generating business from which Lindsey and Erica can draw a salary seems to rely on a mix of paid subscriptions, advertising, and events. Lindsey’s roots as a writer are in advertising-supported publications; she says she has “really struggled” with the idea of paid subscriptions and still feels “weird” about the idea. A monthly subscription costs $8 and a yearly $80.

I pay for at least one newsletter, podcast, or independent publication at any given time without making the most of their paid content. Usually, this is because I love their free content and I want to support the creators directly. As Lindsey put it, “content flattens and content is free.” These payments are my attempts to contour and value specific works.

“So much good journalism was free for so long and was subsidized by ads and social media. How are we retraining people? I do think there's a little bit of guilt that comes along with asking people to pay — are you gonna be a good person who supports me? It's terrible.

I don't know where we go from here. I don't know how we fix the problem. I think there are a lot of smart people, hopefully me included, trying to figure that out."

As I write this, news has just broken that Vox Media, Eater’s parent company, has laid off a reported 12 further staffers. Should journalists have to learn to be entrepreneurs? In a perfect world, no, but it’s increasingly becoming a survival skillset.

Read and subscribe to The Purse.

🎙️ In the full interview, we got into:

  • 📈 Growing a newsletter audience, mostly through organic channels

  • 💵 The Purse’s finances, what changed when Erica came on as business partner

  • ⛳️ Lindsey will die on this hill (can you guess what it is?)

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

Build beloved, reliable content franchises

“Content franchise” is just another word for a dialed-in series that may be one of many a publication puts out; a consistent, repeatable format.

“I just love franchises. They relieve a lot of the pressure of having to come up with stories again and again and again.

I don't think that they have to be super fancy or crazy. The more simple, the better.

Editors and journalists really like to do Q&A's with people, but I don't always think that those do the best. I think they think [Q&As] will be easy, but I'm not sure there's always good reader engagement.

When you're thinking about franchises, it's better to think about articles that are easily repeatable. It’s awesome if you can bring in some sort of user-generated content. I'm a big fan of that, though it isn't always easy.”

Currently, The Purse is sent just once a week, with three different content franchises and a broader essay series distributed each month.

  • Home Economics is a highly detailed breakdown of an anonymous woman’s financial life

  • Division of Labor is a one-day, time-stamped log of a day in a couple’s life (usually parents)

  • In Her Purse is a standardized Q&A ending with a labeled photo of everything in the subject’s purse

The key to a good content franchise is consistency without predictability; the format creates a clear expectation, but you find a different way to fill it every time.

Lindsey has mastered this with user-generated content — all three series rely on it, with carefully designed questions to ensure notably different responses each time.

“You just have to sit down like an editor and a strategist, figure out what your goals are for the franchise, and what content types you want to go back to again and again.

It never hurts to look at what was successful and figure out how can you, not repeat it, but pick a piece out of it, a thing that worked, and draw on that.”

Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

This week: Emily Sundberg, creator of popular business newsletter Feed Me, joins us to talk about scaling Feed Me without losing what makes it special, Daisy's crisis of faith in language, community notes over fact-checkers as arbiters of truth, cowardly texting, stop trying to copy other people's puzzles, and more.

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