You added Substack to your media list. Now what?

Ashley Waters is VP of media relations at PAN.

Most comms teams have accepted the premise by now: The reporters who left institutional newsrooms took their beats and their audiences with them, and a media list built only from traditional outlets is missing a meaningful share of where decision-makers read. PR Daily made that case in June in Kate Dmytrenko’s piece on rebuilding a tier 1 media map.

What hasn’t caught up is everything that happens after you add those writers to the list.

We fielded research to gauge what this shift looks like. More than a third (39%) of people regularly read at least one Substack publication, rising to 55% among Gen Z and 49% among millennials. Technology is the second-largest content category on the platform at 18%, behind news and politics at 21%. And 18% say their usage has grown over the past year.

So how do we reach the audience that these newsletters are reaching?

This is where I’d gently complicate the conventional wisdom. The fundamentals of a good pitch don’t change when the recipient runs their own publication. You still have to get to know their work and their audience and bring something specific. However, several of the mechanics do change, and it’s important to understand if you want to have success pitching these.

Subscriber count is the wrong first question

Independent publications rarely issue media kits, and subscriber numbers are usually private. That gap can make PR teams overvalue the few newsletters that publish the numbers or dismiss the ones that don’t.

But neither of those options make sense. A newsletter with 2,000 fintech CFOs who comment, retweet and reply to the writer is worth more to the right client than a general business publication with 10 times the list but inactive subscribers.

When subscriber data isn’t available, several signals can help fill in the picture, including Substack’s leaderboard rankings and category badges, traffic estimates from SparkToro or SimilarWeb, the writer’s LinkedIn following and engagement on recent issues.

Willingness to pay is worth understanding too. Our research found that 42% of people would pay for a newsletter subscription and 28% would pay more than $5 a month. The 58% who wouldn’t are largely the free-tier audience, which are present, but not necessarily as engaged. Publications with real paid bases have concentrated their most responsive readers behind the paywall, which is exactly why a smaller subscriber count can understate a newsletter’s influence.

The platform’s messaging system is not a pitching tool

This is potentially the costliest mistake.

Substack’s in-platform messaging lets writers flag messages as spam, and enough flags can restrict your account access. So, if you send one mass note through the platform, you could end your ability to reach anyone on it.

Confirm through LinkedIn or email that a writer takes pitches before sending anything through Substack itself. Better still, reply to a newsletter edition. A response shows you actually read a recent issue and is a more credible opening than a cold message.

Qwoted has also become a real sourcing channel here, which surprises people. Several of the independent writers we work with source through it regularly, the same way trade reporters do.

AI detection raised the cost of a lazy pitch

Substack launched AI detection tools in August that estimate how much of a publication’s content is human-written and subscribers are able to see this. This tells you what these writers are cultivating and we should expect they’d be looking for the same in return.

Many of them left institutional newsrooms specifically for closer relationships with their readers. A pitch that reads as templated signals exactly the wrong thing about how carefully you’ve read their work. That has always been true. What’s changed is that the tolerance is now close to zero, and the writers who care most about it are often the ones with the most concentrated professional audiences.

Specificity is the whole game: reference a recent issue by topic, offer data or executive access the writer can’t easily source elsewhere and pitch angles that map to what they actually cover. Most independent writers want trend analysis and implications, not product launches or funding rounds.

What it looks like when it works

Three examples from our own programs, each with a different entry point.

For a startup technology client, we paired an angle on clarity in leadership with proprietary consumer data and brought it to Tony Case at workwire, a newsletter he launched after covering the beat at WorkLife and Adweek. It became a CEO interview and the lead story in that edition. The data was what allowed him to build an edition around it.

For a payments client, we answered a Qwoted request from Brendan Ragan at The Fintercept, a fintech newsletter with roughly 2,000 subscribers whose entire model is built around C-suite perspective. That produced coverage and an ongoing relationship with the founder, which has been worth considerably more than the single placement.

For a customer experience client, we identified Mark Levy’s DCX as a relationship worth building, connected with him on LinkedIn, shared specific thoughts on his work and stayed in touch for months before there was anything to pitch. When a major announcement came, the relationship was already in place.

Report it accordingly

The last piece is measurement. Results here show up as executive engagement, inbound inquiries, social discussion, newsletter shares and citations by mainstream outlets. It’s not about impressions or circulation. There’s a major multiplier effect as well, as independent writers may speak at industry events, participate in podcast, and maintain a significant LinkedIn presence. A relationship can create opportunities beyond the newsletter itself.

From an AI perspective, newsletter posts are crawlable and indexable, and not surprisingly, ungated placements are more accessible to AI systems than paywalled coverage.

So yes, the target media list continues to evolve, and it’s important your mechanics for reaching these publications change too.