How Did Your Career in Journalism End?

Dan Frommer runs a popular newsletter called The New Consumer, which discusses topics on technology and consumer brands. Beginning his career at Forbes, Dan has a long history in the technology field. 

His extensive experience includes Editor in Chief at Recode, Vox Media’s tech and business news publication, and technology editor at Quartz. He also spent years building up Business Insider as its second employee. 

In this episode, Dan discusses how email is the most effective way to reach influential people, explaining how he leverages his newsletter, The New Consumer, in a way that will capture the attention of CEOs, board members, and investors.

Dan shares newsletter insights, including:

• Important questions to ask yourself about newsletter tools.
• Avoiding the optimization trap.
• How he creates a quality experience for his readers.

Links and Resources

• Forbes
• Recode
• Vox
• Quartz
• Business Insider
• Stratechery
• Hodinkee
• Benedict Evans

Dan Frommer Links

• Dan’s Newsletter: The New Consumer
• Dan’s Website: FromeDome
• Dan’s Other Website: Points Party
• Twitter: @fromedome

Episode Transcript:

Nathan: [00:00:00]
In this episode I talk to Dan Frommer. He runs a popular newsletter called The New Consumer. He’s had a long career in tech, tech journalism, he started at Forbes and then he was at Quartz and Recode and was basically employee number two at Business Insider, and worked to build that whole business for a long time.

And he’s always had this one-man-band sort of style, which really resonates with me. That’s basically where you learn to, design code, you know, put together plugins, build out your site, as well as writing and publishing and being a journalist and all this other stuff. So he’s done something really impressive and going from the editor in chief of Recode, which is a publication owned by Vox, which is quite large and popular, to running The New Consumer, which he’s had for two years now.

It’s more than paying his bills. He’s earning a full-time living from it and he gets to control his own destiny. I love it. We dive into all kinds of interesting topics. We talked about why he has only an annual subscription, rather than going for just monthly, like most people do with paid newsletter, his tech stack, what he thinks about free versus paid subscribers and so much more. Let’s dive in.

Dan, Welcome to the show.

Dan: [00:05:00]
Thanks for having me.

Nathan: [00:05:02]
So I want to go back a little bit, as we talked about in the intro, you’ve got all kinds of history and journalism and everything else. Now you’re running your own newsletter, so when you got into journalism, where did you think that that career would end?

What was the pinnacle? You know, like, as we go through the, the years, like. Was it ending with editor and chief of, of Recode? Like how far ahead did you, did you think? And,sand what did success look like when you were just starting out?

Dan: [00:05:31]
Yeah. I’m from Chicago originally. I, you know, my background is both in, creating websites, web design. I started doing web design and, and building websites when I was in middle school, in the nineties, and then I went to journalism school at Medill at Northwestern. So my background and my interests have always kind of been at the intersection of.

Journalism like real ethical. proper journalism, but also creating new things on the internet. So new media brands and building websites, building audiences, and I’ve always kind of, I guess, optimize my career for both of those things. so that’s, that’s one way to say, like, I never really sat back and was like, Oh man, I really need to work at the New York times or the wall street journal or something like that.
 snothing against those places. It’d be cool to perhaps, you know, contribute there one day or something like that. But there wasn’t some bucket list where I was like, I must work for. A big network or a big newspaper or something like that. I, you know, I actually started my career interning at,sthe public radio station in Chicago WBZ.

And I really did a lot of,syou know, I trained to be a broadcaster. I was really interested in broadcasting, but,swhen I moved to New York to start my professional career, it was clear that. All the jobs were in what was called digital or interactive journalism. And also that’s where my skills were really helpful.
 sit, it actually was useful that I knew how to edit pictures and build webpages and. you know, and do video work because most, most of my peers were not trained to and, and thought that that wasn’t really part of their job. So,snot only was able to do that, but I really enjoyed it and I still do now.

So, you know, thinking, thinking back now, 15 years ago, there was never a point where I was like, Oh man, I really need to get a big title at a big magazine or at the New York times or something like that. I didn’t probably know. Right then, you know, my first job was, was at Forbes, which was kind of, but the, the forbes.com.

So it was like the interactive,ssubsidiary of Forbes magazine. So I got to see that kind of big brand. Big media world, but,salso be kind of on a scrappier side of things. And, and from there it just kind of became like, you know what, what’s something interesting that I could work on. that, that took advantage of both my interest in storytelling and journalism, but also,sadvantage of the, of the tools of technology.

Nathan: [00:08:07]
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I have a similar background of, you know, starting in high school of figuring out HTML and grabbing books in the library and trying to, trying to piece it all together. And that served me a lot. Do you think that,slike journalists today or anyone getting into. Writing or building an audience.

Do you think that pursuing those skills of video and code and, and maybe some simple design is worthwhile and worth the effort, you know, in addition to figuring out and learning how to be a good writer.

Dan: [00:08:36]
It’s certainly helped me a lot. You know, I hate to prescribe something to someone because you can do great stuff without any of it. but it really helped me a lot. I, you know, I, I really love being a one man band, which is, it is a term that was used a lot in like broadcast media, where you would have to, you know, hold the big camera over your shoulder and shoot and edit and do that kind of stuff.

[00:09:00]sI never had one of those jobs. Those were some of my peers starting off in, you know, small town, local,sbroadcast,steams where you had to do that because there were no resources. I, I love being kind of a one man band on the internet though. Creating my own website, doing my own writing and reporting,syou know, editing my own work, producing it, publishing it, promoting it, all those things.