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🔴 Helping journalists get paid
"I'm not a journalist, I'm a monetizer," says Lex Roman of Journalists Pay Themselves
Francis Zierer
November 22, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes
Your guide to the newsletter world — new stories every Friday. Brought to you by beehiiv.
Today’s guest is Lex Roman, creator of Journalists Pay Themselves, a newsletter that helps journalists … pay themselves. Lex isn’t a journalist by trade but a monetizer. They’re very clear-eyed on the business side of making and distributing content online — full of insights applicable to both indie journalists and content creators.
In this issue:
💵 Monetizing without a large audience
📈 Subscription fatigue isn’t a problem (and $9/month is the perfect price)
📣 Helping people who distrust marketing find a way to do marketing
— Francis Zierer, Editor
P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Lex or watch it on YouTube.
A commitment to independent journalism
“My speaking coach, a former journalist, asked me why I care about journalism. Why do you, Lex, this marketer who should be, like, an evil monetization titan, care about journalism?”
Lex Roman started their newsletter, Journalists Pay Themselves, in March of this year. They are not a journalist; the bulk of their career has been in growth design.
Journalists Pay Themselves descends directly from Lex’s work as a growth designer; instead of working with traditional businesses, they’re now focused on helping independent journalists and creators grow and monetize their businesses.
Lex learned the importance and power of journalism firsthand while living in LA and working in community organizing, specifically around homelessness.
“I've developed a lot of close relationships with journalists through that work. I've come to really value their work and see that value, I think, in a unique way.
What I'm seeing online is so many people saying to journalists, your jobs don't exist. The layoffs are happening. It's a bad time in journalism.”
At the start of this year, seeing a “rapid succession of layoffs,” Lex decided to see if any journalists caught in the drift might need help launching independent publications. They began helping several indie journalists and journalist-owned publications (including New York’s Hell Gate) with their businesses.
But don’t call them a consultant.
Shifting to a creator mindset
Lex didn’t start using the term “creator” to describe themself and the type of work they were doing until 2022, about 15 years into their career. In 2019, when they left their last full-time job to begin working as an independent growth designer (and then marketer), they incorporated as Lex Roman, Inc.
“I knew I was the brand at that point. Even though I started as a consultancy, I was doing a ton of writing, speaking, and teaching. I had a personal brand around growth design beyond my client work.
Somewhere along the way in the small business realm, I started these mini brands: Growthtrackers, Low Energy Leads, Revenue Rulebreaker, Journalists Pay Themselves.”
This is the creator model, another answer to our ongoing questioning of what it means to be a creator. It means that you are a studio; you-as-brand become a platform for experimentation and monetization.
If Lex had just continued working as a consultant, they wouldn’t be a creator. And building their personal brand has made launching new projects and transitioning between them easier. Clients and followers happily come along with Lex for each new ride, trusting in some ideological consistency.
Confusing, no?
Lex’s first real creator project was LA Pays Attention, a short-lived local politics newsletter that was acquired for between $2 and $3 per subscriber. One of the first Growthtrackers members (this was a higher-ticker, membership-based community, not a lower-cost subscription product) came from that newsletter’s subscriber base. As they shifted from project to project, Lex realized, “For some people, this is where we leave each other, but for others, they're going to come along.“
One-to-many consulting
One-to-many consulting is a standard model for any education-focused creator. From niche aggregation-and-commentary products like Casey Lewis’ Gen Z insights newsletter After School to any creator selling courses — it’s all about selling access to a standardized consult.
This was an obvious path for Lex, who tells me they are “trying to get out of consulting.” For a couple of years, while running Growthtrackers, membership was their main source of income.
Moree recently, it’s paid subscriptions. Here’s a graph Lex shared of their revenue in October (read about it in more detail at Revenue Rulebreakers):
This revenue breakdown has shifted frequently as Lex has shifted their project focus. Growthtrackers was a $500/month membership that included 50 paying members during two years of operation (not at once). Lex generated between $4,000 and $7,000 per month from those memberships.
At no point in their years working as a creator has Lex had a sizable following.
Small audiences are enough
“I’m actually not the best at growing audiences, but I am REALLY GOOD at monetizing the hell out of an existing audience.”
Most people trying to build a sustainable living as some sort of creator would do well to avoid falling into the large-audience-envy trap. It’s not about the size of the audience; it’s about who is in the audience. It’s a question of building a growth business with a distant ceiling versus a lifestyle business with a realistic ceiling. Kevin Kelly’s classic “1,000 true fans” concept — 1,000 people paying $100 a year for your content or services is enough to make a decent living.
Let’s look at some of Lex’s audience sizes:
Most creators we feature in this newsletter have audiences many times this size. And some of them are bringing in less revenue than Lex. To be clear, Lex has a seasoned, proven specialist skillset; they’re not a mass-market entertainer. This is why they’re able to bring in a healthy revenue.
“When I started Journalists Pay Themselves, I had deleted my Twitter years ago. I started it over this year exclusively because I wanted to reach journalists, and that's where I knew they were. When I started Journalists Pay Themselves, I had like 50 followers on Twitter.”
Conversion is the problem and the answer
The question for most creators isn’t how big an audience you can build; it’s how many people you can get to literally buy into what you’re doing. The ideal audience size is how much revenue you’re aiming for … divided by your average per-customer purchase … divided by your conversion rate.
“To go back a little bit into my career, growth design, my profession in tech, the thing that I popularized, was not actually about going viral or acquiring random strangers on the internet. It was about how many people come to your website who are leaving.
If you have a website you're getting a bunch of people to come to, but they're leaving, then that audience doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how many people you can get to a YouTube video if they never, ever, ever come back.
How do I turn this person who's casually showing up into a loyal fan who likes and trusts me and wants to buy from me?”
Still, you’ve got to grow that audience in the first place. Lex self-identifies as “not the best” at this, but they note that it’s all a relationships business … especially when you have a small audience.
The truth is, even for viral creators, a lot of that virality is coming from their relationships with other creators who are boosting their stuff. It's a secret that no one talks about — relationships are driving a lot of growth. The whole premise of word-of-mouth is networks of relationships.
Once you understand that, you can start investing in fans and think about, okay, what do these people want? And how do I give that to them in a packaged way where they’ll buy something?
My whole business has been about cracking that puzzle and helping other people crack that puzzle.”
Connect with Lex on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Read and subscribe to Journalists Pay Themselves and Revenue Rulebreaker.
For the full story, listen to our podcast or watch it on YouTube.
🎙️ This was an excellent conversation. It was impossible to fit every topic we touched on in this newsletter — here’s some of what we touch on in the podcast:
🤔 Different types of newsletters, writers, and how they should monetize
📈 Why journalists have an advantage over growth marketers as creators
🥱 Subscription fatigue is a myth
Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.
The ideal subscription price is $9
According to Lex, the ideal price of a content-based subscription is $9. They arrived at this number by analyzing 14 different worker-owned media outlets (including 404 Media, Defector, and Hell Gate). To be clear, the businesses they’re looking at are putting out a relatively high volume of content per week.
Lex credits Matt Brown, creator of the Extra Points sports newsletter, with saying, “It’s not worth doing anything closer to the $5 tier.”
“Patreon and Substack popularized the $5 tier, but I'm with Matt that if someone's paying $5, they can pay $7. And actually, if they can pay $7, they can pay $9.
Keep it single-digit, but if you're going to put in the labor, you might as well get the $9.”
Write a personal thank-you note to every paid subscriber
Skip the automated welcome email for paid subscribers. Write it yourself.
“A journalist, Seamus Hughes, who writes Court Watch, said earlier this week, ‘One of my favorite things to do is to write a personal thank-you note to every new paying subscriber. And I find that that keeps them around longer because they know me, and they can come to me if they have questions, and it builds trust.’
When you do that, people want to come back, they want to pay you, and they want to promote you. That's where the growth engine comes from.”
Great content matters more than anything else
It’s easy to get caught up in talk of growth levers, social media tactics, content repurposing, etc. At Creator Spotlight, we believe the point is to produce quality content. You do need to do some marketing, but it mustn’t eclipse the content. Lex agrees:
“Alissa Walker, who joins our [JPT] events quite a bit, is a journalist in LA who covers the 2028 LA Olympics. Alissa's newsletter is called Torched. It's amazing. She said there's no better growth lever than a good article. And that is so true.
Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.
This week, we’re joined by Ben Leventhal, founder of Eater, Resy, and now Blackbird. We talk about the death of anonymous restaurant criticism, the future of dining, and his 20-year commitment to food-focused content.
Lex has published a number of articles we think you’ll find helpful. Here are some highlights:
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