Journalism

What I learned in the first five years of Platformer

And where we go from here

Casey Newton

Sep 23, 2025 — 12 min read

The industry

Five years ago today, I quit my job and launched Platformer. On the day that I published our first post, I worried that I might have been making a mistake. I loved my job at The Verge, which felt like an island of stability in a year darkened by the twin crises of the COVID pandemic and the Trump presidency. But I had become convinced that the long-term future of journalism demanded new approaches.

“Journalism — and the democracy it supports — have suffered greatly in recent years from mass layoffs and under-experimentation in business models,” I wrote. “By going independent I hope to demonstrate that independent, reader-funded reporters can survive and even thrive, breathing new life into a profession that is bleeding out in no small part due to the platforms I cover.”

Half a decade later, we now take for granted that reader-funded reporters can thrive — and that the newsletter economy has in fact breathed new life into the profession. When I quit my job to launch Platformer, the idea seemed novel enough that the New York Times covered it. Today, we take departures like these for granted. In fact, once a reporter at a mainstream outlet achieves a certain level of prominence, people now ask them why they stay.

In many ways, the crisis in journalism is more serious than ever. Tech platforms take a larger share of advertising revenue than they ever have, and the rise of artificial intelligence is crowding journalism out of search results and social feeds. Platformer has outlasted a depressing number of tech-focused publications whose links once filled these pages, including BuzzFeed News, Vice and Motherboard, Protocol, and OneZero. We are all worse off for their absence.

At the same time, my media diet feels as rich and varied as it ever has, thanks to the rise of the newsletter economy and the resurgence in amateur blogging that it has inspired. Core members of the Motherboard team launched the incredible 404 Media, and now deliver scoops at a forbidding pace. Oliver Darcy left CNN barely a year ago, started with nothing, and now his media newsletter Status is a four-person operation and similarly dominant in its field. Publishers have never known how to make profitable journalism about video games, despite their cultural dominance; longtime gaming reporter Stephen Totilo left Axios and now has a stable, profitable, scoopy publication called Game File that he can do for as long as he wants, and on his own terms.

This is the world I was dreaming of five years ago when Platformer began. And no, the success of these publications does not begin to make up for the loss of tens of thousands of journalism jobs over the past two decades. But the newsletter economy has managed to do what nothing else has over the same time period — create a popular, lucrative, replicable, stable format for journalism. And in a moment where the industry faces so many threats, from declining traffic and revenue to the assault on free speech from the Trump administration, that’s worth celebrating.

In my inaugural post, I promised that I would devote a meaningful amount of time to mentoring younger writers and offering advice and support to others who are considering this path. Almost every week for the past five years, I have done just that. And while I would never seek to take credit for their success, I’ve been so pleased to see so many friends and colleagues go independent and succeed beyond what they first imagined was possible.

And yes, the newsletter economy remains organized around stars rather than the rank-and-file journalists who are responsible for much of the original reporting that I believe is a necessary part of a functioning democracy. It is still easier to sell someone a hot take than it is a story about what happened at the city council meeting.

But whatever asterisks and caveats you want to put on it, the past five years have made it clear that a better world for journalists is absolutely possible. I know because I’m living it.

Platformer today

Five years in, Platformer has become a stable, mature business. Thousands of paid subscribers support our work, and enable our journalism to reach a weekly audience of 200,000 free subscribers. Our advertising business has also accelerated, and we’ve brought on a record number of new advertisers over the past year. Many of them renewed their campaigns, and we’re now sold out through the end of the year.

Since we started, you all have funded five jobs in journalism — mine, three different editorial employees, and a part-time assistant who helps with customer support and ad sales. I’m so, so grateful for the generosity of Platformer readers and the journalism you all have enabled. (And for what it’s worth, you’ve been so generous that Platformer is literally the only digital product that has not raised prices during the past five years.)

Thanks to you, we were able to get inside Twitter as it collapsed from the inside. We got the real story about what happened at Basecamp, and exposed the chaos caused by Ev Williams’ final pivot at Medium. More recently, you sent us to cover a wild dinner with Sam Altman, chronicle the heartbreaking silencing of trust and safety leaders, and expose Grok’s insane 12+ rating in the App Store.

When you pay for Platformer, this is the kind of work you’re supporting. Thank you to everyone who makes what we do possible. I never, ever take it for granted.

In most ways, Platformer has gone better than I expected. But writing the newsletter three times a week has its challenges, too.

On the business side, growth has slowed. I mostly blame myself for this; revenue correlates fairly closely with scoops, and I’ve gotten fewer of them this year. At the same time, in the past two years we quit both Substack and X on principle. The former used to bring us large numbers of free and paid subscribers through its network; the latter was formerly the best place to promote our work and find new customers. I’m happy to sit out the coming enshittification of Substack and the daily misery of X, but it would be dishonest to suggest that this has not come at a cost.

On the editorial side, the ongoing challenge is to evolve the newsletter’s focus with the news cycle while remaining true to our beat: the messy intersection of tech and democracy. This felt easier when the platforms themselves seemed interested in how they might make themselves safer, more trustworthy, less polarizing places. Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter, though, that project has been in decline, and it has only accelerated since Trump retook office.

I have always tried to balance criticism of platforms with efforts to highlight where they were making progress — like Twitch’s pioneering effort to investigate off-platform behavior, or Discord’s effort to rehabilitate banned users, or Meta’s experiment with letting users craft platform policy. But in this moment, when platforms are tripping over themselves to praise President Trump even as he wreaks havoc on their businesses through tariffs and immigration restrictions, the tech policy story can often seem irrelevant. (The fact that a handful of Meta executives rewrote the company’s speech policies this year without even consulting their massive policy team spoke volumes.)

The one place tech policy continues to feel relevant is in artificial intelligence. The dawning mental health crisis enabled by chatbots has drawn wide attention to the risks of vulnerable people using AI that recalls the early days of similar conversations about vulnerable people in social media. By default, we should expect that AI companies will largely address these issues the way social media companies have — which is to say reluctantly, under pressure, and via half measures. But my conversations with executives at these companies — and certain recent actions — have given me at least some hope that journalism focused on the intersection of AI and society can lead to positive change.

The road ahead

One question I have been asking myself lately is how Platformer’s format should evolve to meet this moment, and to do that journalism. Over the next few months, I’m planning a few experiments designed to make Platformer feel fresher and more relevant. I’m really eager to hear what you think about these, so let me know by replying to this email or commenting below.

One, we’re adding some editorial firepower. This month Ella Markianos joins us as our first fellow. Ella’s first piece, on why we’re having more trouble understanding the reasoning of large language models, ran in yesterday’s edition. Ella is supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, and over the next year she’ll be helping us infuse more original reporting and analysis about AI into these pages.

Two, we’re going to experiment with different forms of curation. Today Platformer is a column plus links. Over time, I worry that the value of these links has gone down; they’re a commodity feature that you can get just about anywhere else. (At least 80 percent of the links we put in each day’s edition are things I saw first on Techmeme.) At the same time, the conversation about those links has become much harder to follow. Sometimes, you just want to know what happened. More often, though, what’s more interesting is what prominent people are saying about what happened. The death of Twitter and fragmenting of the media ecosystem across a half-dozen major social platforms has made following those conversations much more difficult. Part of Platformer’s future is figuring out how to bring that to you in ways that make you smarter. Look for two experiments in this vein in coming weeks.

Three, we’re going to create an audio feed. For years now, readers have asked me to narrate each edition so you can listen to it as a podcast. (As pioneered by Ben Thompson’s great Stratechery.) I’ve resisted until now because I worried the added work would burn me out. (Candidly, I still do.) But the success of Hard Fork — one of the 100 best podcasts of all time, by the way! — has introduced our work to a lot of people who would rather listen to me than to read. I’m still in the early stages of planning this, and I expect to encounter many technical challenges along the way. But my hope is that a year from now you’ll get regular audio drops from Platformer that make your subscription feel valuable.

Four, we’re going to reboot our community efforts. The one place where I feel like Platformer has failed on basically every level is in cultivating a community. Our audience of tech executives and rank-and-file employees has never felt safe posting comments or interacting with each other in our Discord. For the most part, people who work on tech policy would rather gather in spaces where they can talk off the record. And for my part, I haven’t invested enough energy in cultivating a community among those of you who would be willing to share your thoughts. In the coming weeks, we’re going to overhaul our Discord to create dedicated forums for submitting questions to a mailbag. We’re also going to experiment with a live ask-me-anything session on Discord based on your questions.

If you have a question, you can ask it right now! Just respond to this email, or head to Discord and look for the platformer-mailbag and ask-casey-anything channels.

So that’s what I have planned for year six — if you have feelings about it, or want to suggest more ideas, I’m truly all ears.

I’ll share one last thought before I go. The hardest thing about Platformer is that delivering it three days a week means I can’t do all the reporting I want to do. Even making time to have coffee with sources feels like more of a challenge than it should. I truly believe Platformer would be better if I took occasional days off of writing to report — but I worry that you all might perceive that as shirking my duties. So if you have thoughts about that, please send them my way.

Thanks again to each and every one of you who has read and supported Platformer over the past five years. Working for you has been the best job I’ve ever had — and I’m truly excited for the changes ahead.

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