🔴 11,000 subscribers for one student's journalism

Today’s guest built two multi-thousand-subscriber newsletters before graduating college.

Great aggregation newsletters like Tomo Chien’s Morning, Trojan look easy, and to an extent, they are: collect source material, filter it down, summarize. That part is replicable. Taste is the differentiator.

In this issue:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

P.S. TOMORROW, Wednesday, December 10, at 12:00pm ET, we’re hosting our first live session: Building a $10K/Month Newsletter in 90 Days.

Our editor, Francis Zierer, will host while Nathan May, a newsletter growth and monetization expert we had on the podcast back in July, presents.

You’re invited, join us!

Even if you can’t stay for the whole thing, we’ll send you Nathan’s Organic Growth Library (top 10+ growth tactics from creators who’ve built to 10,000+ newsletter subscribers without paid ads).

🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on all of them.

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By Natalia Pérez-González

Tomo Chien’s alarm goes off at 6:30 AM PT. It’s a typical morning.

The night before, he would’ve spent about an hour and a half skimming as many as 70 headlines looking for just five to feature in his newsletter. His subscribers — about 11,000 of them — are expecting the final product in their inboxes at 8:00 AM.

By the time he wakes up, he’s narrowed down which articles he’ll be featuring, but he still has to write 50-word summaries for each and send the draft to his proofreader, Anna by 7:30 AM.

Last Friday, December 5, 2025, was the final issue of the fall semester. It landed just under the wire, at 7:59 AM; the next one won’t hit until January.

Tomo is a college journalist. He’s a full-time student in his final year at the University of Southern California, runs a daily aggregation newsletter, Morning, Trojan, and works as a reporter at the San Francisco Standard (they tried to get him to drop out and work full-time; his parents wouldn’t have it).

Morning, Trojan isn’t even the first multi-thousand subscriber media product Tomo has built. He's been doing some version of this since he was 16.

Back then, Tomo was a junior at a Bay Area high school working on the school newspaper. The staff numbered about 40 and he wasn’t impressed by most of his colleagues’ efforts: "I was a high schooler who was taking all this too seriously."

It was the pandemic, and the latest school board decisions suddenly felt more consequential to his community than anything happening in Congress, but nobody was covering them.

Tomo and a friend co-founded the Midpeninsula Post — a publication innovative for pulling together the most engaged student journalists from multiple local high schools to serve an audience of peers across their corner of the San Francisco Bay Area. By the time he graduated, it had 3,000 monthly readers. He handed it off to his co-founder, a year younger. It's still running today, five years on.

At USC, he encountered a similar problem (lack of engagement with student media) on a larger scale. Existing campus publications The Daily Trojan and Annenberg Media had, respectively, 30,000 and 20,000 Instagram followers. But Tomo, who worked at both, noticed that their distribution systems weren’t effective — students weren't clicking through to actually read the articles.

He took the opportunity to fill the gap and built the product he wanted: five stories, summarized in 50 words each, delivered to your inbox at 8:00 AM. No social media presence, just a newsletter.

For two years, Morning, Trojan was pure aggregation filtered through Tomo’s editorial voice — a little snark in the framing, maybe a playful subject line. The audience plateaued around 1,000 subscribers. Then, last fall, Tomo started breaking news. His list grew by a factor of 10 in one year.

USC had begun a wave of layoffs — over 1,000 employees have been cut since. This was insider business reporting that the L.A. Times couldn't prioritize for a campus beat, so when Morning, Trojan started covering it, the subscriber base transformed.

Tomo’s original stories are exclusively available on the Morning, Trojan website, behind a subscription gate.

Today, Tomo estimates 50-60% of his audience — maybe as high as 70% — are USC employees, not students. Earlier this summer, in July, he crossed 5,000 subscribers. By the time of our interview in late October, he’d already crossed 10,000. The original scoops drive 90-95% of new sign-ups; the daily aggregation product keeps them engaged.

As the list has grown, it now includes potential sources for Tomo’s reporting. They read the newsletter every morning and often reach out with tips.

Tomo graduates this spring and plans to shut Morning, Trojan down rather than hand it off as he did with the Midpeninsula Post. He tried scaling the model once before — a nonprofit called College Brief that launched similar newsletters at Berkeley and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo — but quality control proved impossible. "It was hard to find college students who are willing to wake up every morning and pump out a consistent product."

He's at peace with letting a good thing end while it's still good. And he’ll be walking right into a full-time role at the San Francisco Standard.

Connect with Tomo on LinkedIn.
Learn more about Morning, Trojan.

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Tomo compares the appeal Morning, Trojan makes to its audience to the appeal Costco makes to its customers:

That's the logic of aggregation. Readers come to you for the curation; where the stories originally came from matters less than the fact that you found and digested them.

Aggregation one of the most reliable formats in the newsletter space — beehiiv itself grew out of the success of Morning Brew and we've covered smaller operators like Casey Lewis and Suraj Kapoor who've built substantial audiences this way.

Morning, Trojan offers a particularly clean, simple formula to replicate.

Every Morning, Trojan email opens the same way:

"Good morning, it's [day of the week]. These are the five USC, Los Angeles, and California stories you need to know for today." Then it’s followed by the five stories, each with roughly 50 words of context. Every now and then he has an ad at the end.

Total word count: 250-300.

The consistency and length are crucial. Readers know precisely what they're getting and how long it’ll take them to get through.

The word-count constraint also forces concentrated value: each summary should be detailed enough to understand the story, but brief enough to encourage click-throughs if you want more.

Repetition builds muscle memory, so the decisions you once agonized over will become second-nature. After three years, brevity has become second nature to Tomo. The format becomes a container that makes the work systemic and sustainable.

Tomo dedicates 30-45 minutes of prep the night before, scanning for stories worth featuring. Then, he wakes up at 6:30 AM. and writes. The finished product goes to Anna, his proofreader, sometime between 7:30 to 7:45 AM. It ships every day at 8 AM.

The sourcing varies by day. Tomo skims 50-70 headlines, looking for five worth including. Some mornings are easy — four big USC stories drop, and the newsletter basically writes itself. Other days, there's nothing, and he's hunting through Reddit and Instagram photo albums trying to find something linkable. "Some days it's like five hours of searching."

Some days, one of the stories is a Morning, Trojan original, only available behind a subscription sign-up gate on the website (these are the stories that grew the audience by a factor of 10 over the last year).

Curation looks effortless for the reader, but the effort is in the searching, sourcing, and staying plugged in. You're not writing 1,200 words of original analysis. You're reading everything so your audience doesn't have to. The curation is the value.

Originally, Morning, Trojan, would run about 25% longer than it does now; Tomo has cut the newsletter's length over time.

And brevity isn't always easier — often, it's harder.

Each summary walks a deliberate line: detailed enough to understand the story on its own, brief enough to encourage click-throughs if you want more. You're curating, not replacing.