Exclusive: The Washington Post launches creator-led newsletter on Beehiiv
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
The Washington Post is launching a new creator-led newsletter on Beehiiv as part of its newly announced WP Creator initiative.
Why it matters: The Post is the latest legacy media outlet to turn to Beehiiv as a way to expand reach and regain relevance by meeting readers in their inbox.
State of play: The Post joins a slew of other major publishers that are already on Beehiiv, including Time, Newsweek, TechCrunch, the Texas Tribune, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Magazine and The Ringer.
- Beehiiv also hosts independent journalists like Oliver Darcy, Joanna Stern and Dave Jorgenson as well as creators like Colin and Samir, DeuxMoi and Josh Richards.
- Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Financial Times and the New Yorker are experimenting on Substack.
Driving the news: The Post's new creator-led newsletter, Verified, will be authored by former political reporter Dylan Wells and will chronicle the multibillion-dollar creator economy and its disruption across industries.
The big picture: These creator-led offerings are meant to help legacy media outlets compete in the new personality-led media landscape, as Axios' Kerry Flynn points out.
- As AI slop begins to infiltrate media feeds, audiences seek individual connection with the sources that bring them news and information.
- This phenomenon, paired with the launch of platforms like Beehiiv and Substack have led to more journalists going independent.
By the numbers: More than 135,000 individual creators and publications send newsletters using the platform.
- Time has 15 newsletters on the platform and saw open rates rise by 63.8% since joining, according to Beehiiv.
What they're saying: Website traffic and monthly page views are antiquated metrics, especially in a world where distribution is unreliable, Beehiiv co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk tells Axios.
- More publishers are "transitioning from anonymous page views to owned subscribers, where you know what they like and what they consume, and then when you have content to push to them, you can push to them reliably, and you own that distribution," Denk says.
- "This is a media model that's being built around owning that relationship, and then determining what are the business models that you can build around that," he adds.
- "So if newsletter is the core, can you build community? Can you build podcasts? Can you build video? Can you do events and merch? None of that is possible if you can't actually reliably get in front of your audience."
What to watch: Beehiiv is allowing its publishers to determine whether they'd like their content scraped by bots (and thus sourced in large language model outputs).
- "We give our users a lot of control. Some publishers don't want their content crawled and indexed, [while] others want to be crawled by everyone possible, because it's top of funnel," says Denk.
What's next: The platform is expected to roll out audio and video add-ons in the months ahead.
More on Axios:
