A beehiiv production.
Today’s guest, Seamus Hughes, will make around $100k from his newsletter this year, none of which is likely to end up in his own pockets. His newsletter is not a non-profit, but operates with a similar sense of social responsibility to such organizations.
In this episode:
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
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Mining the federal courts system for stories
Open the front page of almost any major American newspaper, and there's a decent chance one of the stories is written by a Court Watch subscriber.
Just over 10,000 people read Court Watch — Seamus Hughes’s weekly newsletter covering stories discovered in federal court records — including many who shape the American legal system. Last year, it was cited by 200 news organizations, Seamus tells us. Federal judges read it; so do prosecutors in every US attorney's office, public defenders across the country, Big Law partners, and his personal favorites: a few librarians in Kansas who often email to flag his typos.
“We have a weird knack for finding the ‘unfindable’ in the byzantine federal court records system.”
Seamus never set out to be a journalist. He's a terrorism scholar for the University of Nebraska Omaha by day, a job that's made him an expert in the United States' arcane court records system.
As the result of countless hours mining through PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), the sprawling federal database that houses filings across 94 district courts, Seamus started tweeting tips based on records he'd found that were notable but less relevant to his work. Journalists in his audience urged him to cover these stories, and he began working with The Daily Beast.
Soon enough, he was hired by The New York Times, where he's been on Pulitzer-winning teams twice.
Court Watch came to be because Seamus kept coming across stories he felt worth covering even when his editors didn't. His work, in this way, is a public service.
He once reported on Dolly Parton suing a Tennessee restaurant for playing one of her songs without paying royalties. Seamus, surprised she’d be that litigious, emailed her reps to ask about it; the suit was dropped within a day. The same thing happened after he covered Whataburger going after a small, family-owned restaurant in North Carolina, and again after he flagged a park ranger charged in an obscure jurisdictional fight out West — a request for comment to the Justice Department, and the charges vanished.
"If I somehow have the only skills in the world that can figure out where things are filed in different districts and I'm not using that for public good, what the hell am I doing in life?"
The cost of staying non-partisan
Court Watch will generate around $100k this year, and Seamus most likely won’t pocket a dime.
Roughly $20k goes to PACER, where he finds and downloads the documents his work depends on.
Another $20k goes to freelancers.
Then come the legal fees. Seamus routinely hires lawyers to file motions to unseal records he thinks should be public. A single motion can run him thousands, sometimes a $10k hit across a batch of cases, on filings that may never become stories. He does it on principle, and because it puts courts on notice that someone is watching.
At the time of writing, Court Watch has over 670 paying subscribers, four of whom Seamus recently gained from breaking a major story about a previously dormant federal court that got its first case in thirty years. (That same story brought Court Watch about 200 new free subscribers, and their reporting was then picked up and cited by Politico, AP, Axios, and Newsweek.)
Seamus describes his operation as a for-profit that runs like a non-profit; for him, it’s a civic obligation. He could easily generate more revenue if he injected his work with partisanship. The political newsletters with the “angriest,” most direct takes tend to win the most subscribers and money.
He won’t go partisan, though; outrage isn't his temperament. There's also a genuine market read here — as much of news and political commentary races toward louder takes, "just-the-facts" journalism becomes the scarce commodity, and that scarcity is Seamus’ leverage. It’s a smaller audience, to be sure, but it’s a defensible one, and that’s the bet his business rests on.
Seamus’ plans for the future of Court Watch rely on paid subscriber conversion. Currently, his paid subscriber retention runs north of 90%, with open rates sitting between 60–65%, and click-throughs around 7%. The newsletter’s paid subscribers and revenue have each roughly doubled every year for three-and-a-half years.
The team, the pipeline, and the legal infrastructure
For a newsletter this influential, there’s a simple org chart: Seamus, his reporting fellow, Peter Beck, and a rotating set of freelancers.
Peter came aboard after cold-emailing Seamus as a college senior with no journalism experience. Seamus disproves of the unpaid intern model, so he offered Peter a paid fellowship instead. Two years later, the pair rarely need meetings — they work almost entirely through comments in a shared Google Doc. Seamus now ranks him alongside the best reporters he's worked with.
For freelance work, Seamus pays $500 per piece (up from $300) for original, court-records-based reporting of 500 to 1,000 words, and he's partial to hiring recently laid-off reporters.
So far, Court Watch has published about a dozen freelance pieces this year, with another batch in the pipeline, though a flood of AI-generated pitches has made it harder to tell which submissions are real reporting and which are just a court record run through a chatbot.
Since his name and reputation are attached to everything Court Watch publishes, Seamus increasingly leans on reporters he already knows or who come personally recommended.
The pitches that stand out uncover stories hiding inside the filings. One Florida reporter — a former Tampa Bay Times staffer — noticed a single litigant had filed 350 ADA lawsuits against local businesses. There are legitimate reasons to file an accessibility suit, and Seamus is careful on this point, but filing 350 is a different pattern, and it’s exactly the type of story that would fall through the cracks at a major newspaper. After Court Watch published the story, Seamus tells us, the litigant hasn't filed another suit.
The most important piece of Seamus’ infrastructure, given the legal-system context of his work, is legal protection. He’s part of beehiiv's Media Collective, an invite-only program that provides liability insurance and legal support. (Reminder: Creator Spotlight is owned and operated by beehiiv.)
He cold-emailed beehiiv's CEO, Tyler Denk, to get in, and the collective’s defamation coverage has expanded what Court Watch is willing and able to publish.
Independent journalists can be silenced by the cost of defending even a meritless lawsuit; with legal backing, Seamus can pursue stories about litigious public figures who might otherwise be too financially risky to cover. Once he joined beehiiv, Seamus tells us, Court Watch became “an adult news organization” — with the legal infrastructure, retention, and revenue trajectory to match.
He’s motivated by the grind, the readers who find Court Watch through a friend’s recommendation and end up subscribing. As long as there are federal courthouses in news deserts, Seamus knows the work will find its audience.
Subscribe to Court Watch.
Connect with Seamus on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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A few notes on building a self-sustaining, mission-driven newsletter
Seamus’ model runs on nurturing a smaller, deeply engaged audience rather than serving a broader, lukewarm group. Court Watch now has over 10k subscribers, and its growth comes largely from word of mouth. Seamus is good at converting these readers to paying subscribers, and even better at retaining those paying subscribers once converted.
His playbook is replicable for any niche, civic-minded media.
Make one hard ask a year. Seamus’ annual pitch is a state-of-the-newsletter post recapping everything Court Watch did that year, followed by one email a day for five days. It reliably nets ~100 new paid subscribers each time.
Turn your paywall into a patronage ask. Instead of locking his best work away, Seamus invites readers to unlock it for each other, and offers to make his most expensive piece free for his entire subscriber list if 10 new readers convert to paid that week.
A paywall asks, "Will you pay for access?” and a patronage ask asks, "Will you keep this alive for the next person?" For mission-driven work, the second question often converts far better, because your readers already believe your work should exist; they want to participate in your pro-social mission. If your audience values what you do, price the mission.
Target a specific, high-value niche. Court Watch’s readership includes federal judges, prosecutors in every US attorney's office, and reporters at every major paper — an audience so concentrated that advertisers or institutions would pay a premium to reach it. Seamus won’t broaden his coverage to reach a bigger number; the moment you write for everyone, you stop being essential to anyone. Define the exact reader your work is indispensable to, and protect that focus. This is not a ground-breaking strategy, but it’s the foundation of any good paid newsletter strategy.
