Why Substack Is the New Frontier for Financial PR

JP Letourneau

For all of PR history, you usually tried to get your clients into The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News or The Financial Times. You did this because your clients at investment banks, hedge funds or insurance giants were operating under the assumption that their clients or investors were reading those newspapers as soon as they woke up.

In some cases, they still are—Jamie Dimon, Jerome Powell and others read the papers cover to cover each morning—but a significant shift has once again transformed our fractured media environment: Substack.

The writer-first digital publishing company just secured $100 million in funding and wooed The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, fresh off his buzzy press tour for Abundance—the book he co-wrote with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein—over to its platform.

After the 2024 presidential election, we heard from PR luminaries like Richard Edelman that “news influencers” should be included in media plans, while another noted that “[PR] firms weren’t always quick to catch on to what’s percolating in Substack newsletters or on podcasts.”

Here’s the strategic question for financial comms professionals: Is your audience more likely to read a one-off story—amid a wide sea of stories—in the WSJ, or are they more likely to read the newsletter author whom they directly pay to receive their writing?

The Great Migration

Substack started in 2017 but picked up steam in the midst of the pandemic as ways of working shifted and the company picked up notable writers like Vox’s Matt Yglesias, who has authored his popular Slow Boring newsletter for the past four-plus years. The platform sports more than five million paid subscriptions, with more than 50 newsletters earning $500,000+ annually, according to a report in the Press Gazette.

If you haven’t been paying attention, you might have missed some of the financial journo superstars who now call Substack home:

• Sam Ro, formerly of Axios and Yahoo! Finance, now runs TKer.
• Matthew Klein, formerly of The Financial Times and Barron’s, now runs The Overshoot.
• Josh Barro, formerly of Business Insider, now runs Very Serious.
• Lindsey Stanberry, a former personal finance editor at CNBC, now writes a financial wellness newsletter called The Purse.
• Alexandra Scaggs, formerly of The Financial Times, now writes The Hedge.
• Alex Konrad, the erstwhile Forbes venture capital scoop machine, recently launched Upstarts.

The list goes on, particularly in other topics and sectors like politics and tech.

What’s more interesting, perhaps, is how many markets and economics thought leaders have amassed large followings on the platform and view it as a vector to reach their audience.

• Paul Krugman (New York Times, Princeton University Economist): 403,000.
• Adam Tooze (Columbia University Economic Historian): 158,000.
• Kyla Scanlon, who came onto the scene with her viral TikToks on the state of the economy and is now a New York Times best-selling author: 112,000.
• Rx or Pari Passu is a newsletter published anonymously by a former distressed debt banker turned PE investor that covers private equity, distress and restructuring: 18,500.
• Petition, also run anonymously by corporate lawyers, covers bankruptcy: somewhere in the double-digit thousands.

There’s a confluence of factors that pushed these writers to Substack: the uncertainty of an ever-changing ecosystem, an entrepreneurial drive to build something, unshackled from corporate media and a desire by the thought leaders to continue to the “go direct” model offered by Twitter rather than being intermediated by a news outlet—but ultimately I think it’s a recognition that “the discourse” has moved away from legacy media and traditional social media spaces.

What I think Edelman was grasping at, but the anonymously quoted PR executive nailed on the head, is that the public conversation among people who matter—particularly in finance and markets—increasingly seems to have shifted from the mainstream and FinTwit to the newsletters of Substack.

And financial comms. pros who aren’t on Substack are missing the beat. However, before you dive headfirst into pitching your client to a newsletter on this rising platform, you should know what Substack is and what it isn’t.

A new take machine

With the exception of newsletter-based news outlets like The Free Press, Drop Site News, The Bulwark, Substack is primarily a vector for delivering takes.

These writers are directly competing against the Opinion sections of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal pages and bourgeois magazines The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Businessweek or any outlet in the business of publishing what in the 2010s we would call “think pieces.”

You may have even noticed that some legacy outlets have bulked up this area of their business. At New York Times Opinion, Ezra Klein’s—and to a lesser extent Ross Douthat’s—platforms offer a more polished version of the content you’d find in Substack newsletters, complete with video podcasts (talk shows?) that have now become popular on Substack.

In mainstream financial media, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway have expanded their Odd Lots brand with a new daily newsletter that features Substack-esque essays (delivered via email newsletter) on what they’re finding interesting within the markets' news of the day. Meanwhile, their colleague Matt Levine has enhanced his Money Stuff newsletter with a companion podcast that he co-hosts with Bloomberg TV’s Katie Greifeld.

Substack’s rise has helped birth a new sort of journalist. Edelman’s “news influencer” seems too sterile, though he succeeded in spotting the trend. I prefer the term “Super Journalist,” which Axios co-Founders Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei coined in a recent edition of their Finish Line newsletter:

“These are journalists with true domain expertise, top-notch sourcing and historical depth to tell people things they don’t know. They’re not your average journalist doing a dutiful job chronicling unfolding events. Those, we believe, will be displaced by an AI agent summarizing things to match—with precision—the tastes of each individual user. No, these are the journalists with a deep passion for a topic—be it politics, AI or a specific city—and deep sourcing, knowledge and credibility. They establish an authentic human connection, based on trust built over years.”

These writers infuse their content with a depth of analysis and opinion that enables them to start, shape and extend “the discourse” on the topics that they cover. Or put more simply, they set the agenda for readers—many of whom are also journalists—which means that other reporters are often interested in or actively covering the topics that these writers breathe into existence.

I charge comms. professionals with two critical imperatives:

1) Substack should be replacing or supplementing your Twitter digest to better understand what your target reporter and broader audience is reading.

2) You might need to start pitching your clients’ stories to Substackers.

Beware, though: the depth and breadth of these writers’ domain knowledge raises the bar for PR professionals hoping to pitch them and the spokespeople hoping to engage with them.

Formula: pay attention and pitch smart

Comms pros have long gotten away with the “spray and pray” method of earned media: aim your pitch at enough top-tier publications during a breaking news event and your client is bound to be happy with the results. Substack challenges that model in two ways.

First, the shift toward specialized newsletter writers—or Super Journalists—has changed the game for PR. Because of how fragmented the landscape has become, it takes quite a bit of PR elbow grease (reading) and industry knowledge (critical thinking) to identify which platforms are the right fit for your clients and their ideas.

As a PR professional, you’re responsible for understanding how and why a Substack is relevant for your client or spokesperson, which puts the onus on you to expand beyond the bounds of traditional outlets. Even more pressure: the journalists you are pitching your clients to at outlets like Bloomberg or The Financial Times are often reading and sourcing ideas from the Substacks they subscribe to.

The second challenge is one of difficulty: because Substack writers are often domain specialists in their own right, the bar to becoming a useful source for them is extremely high. Your clients need to be talented and prepared to arrive at a conversation with a novel point of view—a take—on what they’re seeing. It’s not enough to offer a clinical explanation on how the Trump Administration’s tariffs might create challenges for M&A; you have to offer something new in the marketplace of ideas.

Key takeaways for financial PR pros

The shift of news influencers to a series of disconnected—but well-read—newsletters represents a fundamental change in how financial industry conversations happen. For marketing and communications leaders, this means rethinking media outreach plans and news consumption habits to include these influential, specialized voices alongside traditional outlets.

Success requires understanding that these authors demand higher-quality insights and more strategic thinking than traditional media pitches. The investment in research and relationship-building pays off through access to highly engaged, paying audiences who trust these sources.

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JP Letourneau is a Vice President in The Bliss Group’s Financial Services practice. This byline is a preview of his colleagues’ forthcoming whitepaper on the channel challenge that financial comms professionals face in today’s fractured media ecosystem.