🔴 Integrity is a great business model

Today’s guest is Matt Brown, a college sports journalist and creator of the Extra Points newsletter. His work gives us an excellent model for how independent, creator-style journalism businesses can work. All the more, he gives us an excellent model of building a successful business as a creator while maintaining a high level of integrity and sticking to your values.

In this issue:

— Francis Zierer, Editor

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

Last spring, a now-deleted Reddit account published a now-deleted post to r/NCAAFBseries titled “Matt Browns newsletter if you dont want to pay.”

There are 67 comments. Only one of them is positive towards the original poster (OP).

The rest of the comments are angry and chiding. Matt chimed in, too, and soon enough, the post was gone. Some folks in the replies agreed with user agk927’s hatred of paywalls but still acknowledged that it was wrong to disrespect Matt’s labor. Some offered to Venmo Matt a few bucks.

Forwarding a paywalled email to a friend is one thing; publishing it to a massive Reddit community is a middle finger to the creator. I bring this up because I was moved by the way Matt’s readers came to his defense in the replies, and I think there are two reasons for that.

One, it’s a creator economy cultural norm: people follow people. Were the post this person shared originally from, say, The New York Times, there still would’ve been people chiding the OP for paywall-flouting, but I doubt as many.

Two, Matt, in particular, has a high degree of integrity in how he operates and is transparent about how his business works; values-driven journalism breeds those same values in its audience.

Matt is an opinionated, highly social person, which means that besides sending out his newsletter at least four times per week, he’s also a prolific social media poster. Besides various sports-related subreddits, Matt is most active on a few newsletter-focused subreddits, especially r/beehiiv (he started his newsletter on Substack before moving it to Ghost and then beehiiv) and r/newsletters.

Last year, he replied the below to a post titled “I can’t yet afford to have a paid beehiiv newsletter. In the meantime, what can I do to optimize it to the max?”

His advice, when the question he’s answering befits it, is often more in-the-weeds and tactical, but this is his top-line stance: make good stuff. As he put it, he resents when people get into newsletters or independent publishing and “look at the creation of the text, the words, the product itself, as the inefficiency that needs to be solved.”

When he started writing Extra Points, Matt was working at Vox Media’s sports brand SB Nation as an associate director managing coverage of nearly 100 sports franchises. In April 2020, he was laid off. His savings, severance package, and a grant from Substack gave him a buffer to give full-time newslettering a try.

To be clear, he already had a sizable Twitter following and a reputation as a college sports expert — he’d published a book on the topic — all of which enabled him to quickly establish a paid subscriber base.

His savings and severance carried him for a full year — by the end of that first year, the newsletter had brought in between $35k to $40k in earned revenue.

In that first year, Matt learned precisely what he was and was not good at regarding running a media business. Specifically, he is a “competent” reporter and writer, and he has a “greater interest” than some of his fellow reporters in the business side of running a publication, because he had to do it all at Vox, but it was not where his time was best spent.

I asked him if he misses being part of a larger organization. He does! Parts of it, at least.

At the end of 2021, D1 Ticker acquired Extra Points. Two years later, Matt and a partner (Dennis Alshuler) bought it back. D1 Ticker is a clippings-style, curated email newsletter. Matt was the only reporter in the organization, and he needed support that they weren’t set up to give.

There was no animosity, just a mutual acceptance that both businesses would be better served separately. The folks at D1 worked with Matt to find a new investor, allowing him to buy it back for “pennies on the dollar.”

Just over a year after the re-acquisition, Extra Points has four full-time employees and works with a handful of contractors. The first new hire was a salesperson, Stephen Torini, in November. Sam Weber came on as a VP of Marketing this January. Matt expects to hire a second writer later this year.

A few quick numbers:

The New York Times has received plenty of industry press for its games program driving subscriptions; Extra Points also has a game for paid subscribers: Athletic Director Simulator 4000.

What is this game, and why did Matt make it? Partially because he thought it would be fun, but primarily "to make a fun way to help students understand the key issues in college sports.” It’s an edutainment product for D1 sports students.

Besides the game, paid subscribers get at least four newsletters per week, full access to the archives, and a digital copy of “What If?: A closer look at college football's great questions,” Matt’s 2017 book.

Extra Points also generates revenue through advertising and a new product launched in September 2024, an easy-to-navigate information library containing hundreds of documents Matt has paid to acquire over the years.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), passed by the United States Congress in 1966, allows citizens to request documents from federal agencies. It’s an important tool for journalists. It also costs money to submit a FOIA request.

Matt, like other independent journalists, frequently cites FOIA costs as a reason to subscribe to his newsletter. Information is not free. It is always the result of someone’s labor, of someone recording something. This is how Matt makes his living; this is why people pay for his newsletter; this is why his readers were up in arms at that Reddit post flouting his paywall.

What happened: Matt, by accident, “ended up being the leading reporter on the development of the EA Sports College Football 25 video game.” Some of the information he reported on was acquired through FOIA requests on his dime. He was invited to play the game early and spent around $800 on a trip to do so.

Information is never truly free; it may end up in a free and open exchange on the internet, but its original production came at some cost. Creators compete with each other for audience attention, but all benefit by educating those audiences.

Connect with Matt on X or Bluesky.
Read and subscribe to Extra Points.

🎙 This was an excellent conversation. It was impossible to fit every topic we touched on in this newsletter — here’s some of what we touch on in the podcast:

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

A large, general audience is just one way of monetizing a media company; for most businesses, it’s not the best strategy. Even for a business like that, the who of the audience is more important than the size.

Matt describes three distinct types of Extra Points readers:

Students represent the smallest pool and “nerds” the largest across the approximately 29,000 total subscribers. Students may have the least money to spend, but remain an attractive segment for potential advertisers. But I bring this up not to talk about in-the-weeds monetization — I bring this up to make a point about editorial decision-making.

Don’t overcomplicate it. Define 2–4 personas within your audience to drive editorial decision-making against. This is something worth doing at the start of and throughout a publication’s lifetime. Don’t try to be everything for everyone; be something specific for each of these personae.

Matt’s business relies on him being able to render a variety of topics — remember, four issues of the newsletter every week — appealing to all three segments of this audience. In fact, he tries to make every story appeal to two out of three of those audience segments.

Good writing expands the audiences’ understanding of the topics at hand. Part of Matt’s skillset is making usually complicated matters understandable in plain language.

In your content calendar (you have one, right?), look back to make sure you’re never under-serving a certain segment. If you are, maybe that’s not a segment you should be trying to serve in the first place.

Our weekly recommended reading and listening.