Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Esther.

What I learned from a year on Substack — www.platformer.news

When we spoke to Casey Newton on the podcast last year, he'd recently left The Verge and taken the list for his newsletter The Interface to launch his own solo newsletter on Substack.

A year on, Newton is unquestionably one of the success stories of the solo newsletter boom. He has almost 50,000 subscribers to the free list, and enough subscribers to the paid newsletter to be bringing in a healthy salary.

But it hasn't all been plain sailing. In a recent edition, he reflects on some of the lessons he's learned from publishing on the platform, from dealing with churn to what content brings in subscriptions (surprisingly, not interviews with Mark Zuckerberg!)

Google’s R&D division experiments with newsletters powered by Google Drive — techcrunch.com

The company’s internal R&D division, Area 120, has a new project called Museletter, which allows anyone to publish a Google Drive file as a blog or newsletter to their Museletter public profile or to an email list. The effort would essentially turn Google's document-creation tools into a CMS, which would put them in competition with platforms like Substack, Ghost and others.

Guardian joins News UK and Telegraph in making declining print circulation secret — www.pressgazette.co.uk

The Guardian has decided to make its print circulation figures private and put more focus on metrics that reflect its “diversity of journalism, readership and business strategy”. The publisher insists it still has a "long-standing commitment to print", despite circulation more than halving over the past decade.

As Facebook tries to knock the journalism off its platform, its users are doing the same — www.niemanlab.org

A new study out from the Pew Research Center suggests it isn’t just Facebook that’s seeking a trial separation from the news — it’s also Facebook’s users. The share of Facebook users who say they regularly get news on the site has declined 7 points since 2020, from 54% to about 47% in 2021.

This week's podcast:

Social Spider MD David Floyd on finding a better way to fund local news — voices.media

On this week’s episode of Media Voices we hear from David Floyd, MD of Social Spider, a community interest company that publishes five community newspapers in London. He tells us about finding a new model for local news – one that’s maybe commercially viable enough – and about why local news matters.

NDC Mediagroep's Ard Boer and United Robots' Cecilia Campbell on how robot journalism is powering the modern newsroom — voices.media

In this episode Cecilia Campbell of United Robots helps myth-bust some of the common fallacies about what robot journalism can – and can’t – do. To help illustrate what is possible we’re also joined by Ard Boer, Product Manager for Sport at NDC Mediagroep, who tells us how their sports team is making the most of robot journalism.