Every Good Newsletter Needs an Exit Plan. Here Are Four Paths to Consider.

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Even if you launched a newsletter with permanent intentions, things change. Maybe you’ve grown the newsletter to the point where others are interested in buying it. Maybe you get a new job or experience a shift in circumstances (a move, a new baby, hobbies) that downgrades a newsletter on your priority list. Or maybe the newsletter has run its course and you’re no longer interested in writing it.

Since independent newsletters are often more personal publications, they require a different exit strategy than traditional publications, which generally keep going after someone transitions out. You’ll have to decide what happens next for your newsletter. You’ve got a few options, but which one you choose will depend on what your goals were in the first place and whether they’ve been fulfilled.

I know what it’s like to make this kind of choice about a newsletter. In late 2021, I started a weekly hyperlocal newsletter covering kids, schools, and COVID-19 aimed at people who live in my neighborhood. At the time, I was covering the pandemic full-time as a freelance reporter, so I was already reading the studies and press releases and listening to the advisory meetings whose import I broke down every Friday. In essence, it wasn’t very much extra work to write my newsletter.

But when I got burnt out on the COVID beat and pivoted, that equation flipped. Suddenly I needed to do a whole bunch of extra work to write the newsletter, and it was clear that continuing it didn’t make sense for me. I sent a note to my subscribers and moved on to new projects.

Shutting down a newsletter isn’t the only exit strategy, though. If you’re ready to part ways with your newsletter, there are three other options on the table: 

• You can sell the newsletter.
• You can keep it going on the side, perhaps sending less frequently or with less content.
• You can hand it over to someone else to run.

Here’s why each of these might be the right option for you.

Sell the newsletter

“Don’t shut down your newsletter,” said Alexis Grant, the founder and CEO of They Got Acquired, a site that covers the sale of small digital brands. Newsletters can be valuable content to companies even if they’re not earning any revenue, she explained, and founders should consider a sale. 

Sales can happen when a buyer approaches a seller, when a seller reaches out directly to a buyer, through a listing on a marketplace like Empire Flippers or Flippa, or by working with an advisor or broker, Grant said. Mega-newsletters like The Hustle and Morning Brew garnered huge offers, but multi-million dollar exits aren’t a likely outcome for most newsletter creators. Even a smaller newsletter — as long as it has an engaged audience or some revenue streams — could be valuable to a third party.

They Got Acquired was started after Grant sold her content business The Write Life in 2021. She wanted to move on to new projects, and found that most of the resources out there on selling business were more appropriate for firms with huge revenues, not a small creative business. Her new company exists to fill that resource gap.

Considering your exit strategy at the outset of your business could also help you make choices that make it easier to step away in the long run. 

“The tough thing for a creator is often how tied to your personal brand, the business can be,” Grant says. “It’s complicated because I think when you’re growing a newsletter, it’s good to include your personal brand, but you want it to be able to get to a point where it can eventually run without you.”

Newsletter creators who want to continue to work on their projects could attempt to get aqui-hired, like how The Atlantic absorbed Galaxy Brain, created and helmed by Charlie Warzel. This happens even for more niche products. When Meta shuttered their newsletter platform, Bulletin, ​​Rick Hutzell — a newspaper editor covering Annapolis, Maryland — took both his newsletter audience and his weekly column and brought it to The Baltimore Banner, a non-profit newsroom covering news and politics in Maryland.

No matter what kind of sale you’re pursuing, Grant suggests not waiting until you’re desperate to consider a sale: “Sell a beat before you burn out, if that’s possible.”

Keep the newsletter going as a side project

Putting a newsletter on indefinite hiatus is an attractive option for people who switch jobs, as Vanity Fair writer and author Delia Cai did in the summer of 2021. Cai first launched her newsletter, Deez Links, while still in school at the University of Missouri, and originally used it as a promotional tool and outlet for her writing and reporting, which wasn’t part of her post-grad roles at The Atlantic and BuzzFeed. As the newsletter grew over the course of five years, from a side project into a must-read for more than 10,000 readers in the media, it helped open doors for Cai. In 2021, she took a new job — as a senior correspondent for Vanity Fair.

In that sense, Deez Links had served its purpose when Cai moved into her new role at Vanity Fair. That meant that the newsletter had to change — from something going out a few times per month to an email that goes out a handful of times per year.

“It’s less a blog now than a promotion vehicle for my Vanity Fair posts,” Cai told Inbox Collective, “though I try to include a few regular recommendations in the style of vintage Deez Links.” 

The list size and profile of Deez Links make it valuable on its own, especially with Cai publishing her first novel, “Central Places,” in January. A list of people interested in your work is incredibly valuable for authors, and Deez Links has a new purpose for Cai: book marketing. (The first newsletter to go out to Deez Links readers in 2023 was, naturally, an announcement about the book.)

“In the future, when I’m not juggling a novel and a full-time writing job, I think I’d love to devote more time to the newsletter again,” she said. “But right now, it’s time to do some self-promotional wheedling!”

Hand the newsletter over to someone new 

Passing the torch on a newsletter can also be an option. Samantha Sunne has been running Tools for Reporters, a bi-weekly free newsletter started by Inbox Collective founder Dan Oshinsky, since 2015. Sunne said that she’d noticed Oshinsky seemed to be less invested in the newsletter, so she reached out and asked if she could take it over. “I think he just kind of gave me MailChimp access and was like, ‘Yeah, go for it.’” she says. 

When Oshinsky first launched Tools for Reporters in 2012, he had a clear purpose for it: He wanted to use it as a way to build his network and hopefully get his next job. But once he had that job, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with the newsletter. 

“I was working full-time at BuzzFeed and sending literally 30 to 40 newsletters a week there, so the last thing I wanted to do was send even more newsletters as a side project,” he said. “That’s why I was so thrilled when Samantha reached out to take over TFR — we were already friends from our days at Mizzou, and I knew she’d be a great steward for the newsletter.”

Sunne has kept the newsletter free, which suits her professional values. 

“I like pushing journalism forward,” she says, “but I’m a big fan of doing it in ways that are really accessible for people.” Sunne reviews tools and strategies that are useful for average journalists, and keeps a spreadsheet with about 350 entries of tools that she’s either reviewed or considering. Most of her time is spent testing out the tools themselves and maintaining her database; the newsletter editions themselves tend to be quite short.

She’s continued to grow the audience — leaving open the possibility to monetize the newsletter and turn it into a driver of revenue down the road.

Shut the newsletter down

If Deez Links and Tools for Reporters were a partial means to an end for Cai and Oshinsky, the experience of Todayland shows how a side-hustle can become unsustainable when life changes. Peter Koehler and Keeley Tillotson ran a fitness newsletter called Todayland for four years, until the couple had their first child. 

Both had full-time jobs at other companies, and the arrival of a new baby claimed the time that would have gone to their side hustle, which wasn’t in a mature enough state to support the family financially. They’ve made the archive available online for free (as the newsletter was) and moved on to other creative projects.

Small and mid-sized organizations may also need to make similar decisions. Media nonprofit Poynter recently announced that they were shutting down their newsletter, The Cohort, which was aimed at women in media and had a rotating cast of hosts annually. The newsletter was started in 2017 by Katie Hawkins-Garr, then a Poynter faculty member and a co-founder of the organization’s leadership academy for women in media. The newsletter grew out of a desire to reach the people who were interested but couldn’t come to the leadership academy, said Mel Grau, a senior product specialist at Poynter and an internal champion of the newsletter. 

Hosts tended to get burned out during a year of running the newsletter, Grau said, since often it was a mix of personal experience and reporting. After organizational changes left fewer resources to devote to the newsletter, the team reflected on the next steps. 

“It was a situation of ‘Are we able to really fulfill our mission on this?’ And I felt like the answer was ‘No,’ ” Grau said. She pointed out that continuing would have created an “opportunity cost” of not doing something the community might have needed more. 

“I don’t want to keep trying to do the thing we were trying to do six, seven years ago. I want to do the thing that people [need] next year.” she said.

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