Building a Personal Publishing Empire: The Journey of Independent Newsletters

This chapter explores the journey of creating a successful newsletter and the challenges of operating an independent media outlet. The speaker shares personal experiences, emphasizing the sacrifices made and the evolving relationship with the audience amid platform constraints.

Transcript

chevron_right

Play full episode

chevron_right

Transcript

Episode notes

How the former Davos communications chief navigates the tension between algorithmic demands and journalistic integrity in his quest to make sense of a world that resists coherence

In this episode of Follow the Rabbit, we explore the changing landscape of cultural impact with Adrian Monck, whose newsletter "Seven Things" has become an intriguing case study in post-institutional thought leadership. After working in television journalism, academia, and finally as the World Economic Forum's communications architect for 13 years, Monck now creates a weekly geopolitical digest that reaches over 160,000 readers—all while earning "nothing" and negotiating holidays with himself.

Our discussion delves into the tensions that define today's media ecosystem: the algorithmic punishment for including links (which doubled Monck's engagement when removed), the paradoxical freedom of writing without institutional constraints, and the challenge of maintaining critical perspective in a world that resists coherent narratives. As Monck puts it with remarkable candor, the underlying message of his 40 years in journalism is "incoherence"—the world simply does not make sense in the tidy ways we often assume.

What emerges is a sophisticated investigation into how media consumption and creation are fundamentally altering. We are watching the alteration of authority and trust, similar to how we have seen the emergence of third places and the re-contextualization of health as a luxury in earlier seasons. Monck is a unique hybrid: someone whose insider knowledge lends credibility, but whose independence allows for refreshing candor about anything from tech millionaires' "craven" emails to the shifting economics of written media (which he claims is "going the way of poetry").

Monck's experience demonstrates how we are all negotiating the tension between algorithmic pressures and human judgment. His weekly newsletter, which is a deliberate blend of geopolitics, economics, technology, and cultural observations, symbolizes a type of resistance to attention fragmentation by providing seven carefully picked insights rather than an unending scroll.

Chapters:

00:01 - Introduction to Adrian Monck and his background

03:10 - Starting a "publishing empire" with Seven Things newsletter

05:52 - Adrian's writing process and weekly discipline

07:35 - Finding unique angles that big media organizations miss

11:15 - The unpredictability of audience engagement

12:43 - Platform challenges and LinkedIn's algorithm

14:22 - Experimenting with different platforms (Substack, Threads, Bluesky)

17:26 - The shift toward video content and its dangers

20:17 - Maintaining editorial restraint in the attention economy

24:56 - Approaching criticism with nuance and experience

27:49 - The incoherence of the world from 40 years in journalism