Welcome to The Publisher Newsletter, by Media Voices: your weekly newsletter profiling the people and products powering publishing.

Editor’s note: This session was recorded in June, and the piece written up and scheduled before Reach announced 600 jobs were at risk in a reshuffle earlier this week. Our thoughts are with all those affected.

Why Reach turned to Substack for newsletter expansion and experimentation

Over the past two years, Reach plc has launched 13 paid newsletters and 21 free newsletters on Substack. At the Publisher Newsletter Summit, Reach’s Jenna Thompson discussed the reasons behind the new launches, and what they’ve learned about audience and community building.

Substack has gained a reputation as one of the leading email and audience growth platforms for independent writers and indie publications. But larger publications have been dipping their toes into Substack too, enticed by growth features, monetisation and simplified user experience.

Reach plc, the UK’s largest regional news publisher, is one of these. Over the past 18 months, the publisher has been experimenting with off-platform newsletters, primarily on Substack and LinkedIn. 

At the Publisher Newsletter Summit, Jenna Thompson, Audience & Content Director (Secure Audience) at Reach plc gave a talk on why they turned to Substack for newsletter expansion and experimentation. You can listen to the full session below, or by searching for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your podcast app of choice.

Reach plc has a large network of regional, national and international brands, and a similarly vast portfolio of newsletters associated to those brands; around 450, according to Thompson. 

The publisher’s Substack experiment has come in two phases: paid and free. “We started experimenting in that space about 3 years ago with a series of paid-for newsletters…about specific topics written by individuals - experts and journalists - and they offer something that you can’t get anywhere else,” said Thompson. “We’ve had a lot of success in that space, and we’ve had some things that have been less successful in that space.”

The second phase began earlier in 2025, with the launch of a new series of free newsletters on Substack. These are “curated digests of content” around particular topics and locations, from city-specific editions to football clubs, books and science.

As of August, this phase of the project has seen Reach launch 21 new Substacks. Six are focused on cities, seven are football club-focused, and the rest explore specialist topics.

Why Substack?

Despite Substack’s recent controversies, they have spent a great deal of energy improving newsletter discoverability, and building a social media-like platform full of people with high reading intent. 

The community and discoverability elements were important to Reach when evaluating platforms to test. “There are a lot of features and functionality in Substack which allows you to really build a community around a topic or journalist,” Thompson told the Publisher Newsletter Summit.

“[It’s] about reaching people who might not have a relationship with us already. Last month we reached 35 million people in the UK and that number is growing, but it also means there’s a lot of people out there who don’t have a relationship with us as well. So it’s about going into different spaces trying to connect with new audiences.”

Thompson said that Substack’s Recommendations network, where newsletter writers recommend other newsletters to sign up to, had also been really useful. It puts these new newsletters in a space where people can discover them even if they haven’t had a relationship with Reach in the past.

Community building tools like commenting and notes are also appealing. Thompson gave the example of The Valiant newsletter, one of many Reach titles shortlisted at the Publisher Newsletter Awards this year. It covers Port Vale Football Club, and is written by reporter Mike Baggaley.

“What he has really successfully done with that newsletter is build a really engaged community of Port Vale fans who are not just readers of his content that he is producing through that newsletter on Substack, it really feels like a shared endeavour,” Thompson said, explaining that Baggaley spends time looking at the Substack comments and thinking about how to engage with those readers. He also uses the feedback to build future editions, which keeps people feeling involved and invested.

The social network-like developments have been an unexpected boost to community development, and Reach has encouraged its writers to spend time and build relationships there. “We know from Substack that a lot of people receive the newsletters in their inboxes, but people also spend time on the Substack app as well, where there are those [discoverability] features,” Thompson outlined. “So it’s really important for us, and for our writers to get involved in those other functions that you can access on Substack to both promote the newsletter further, but also to engage with the audiences that they’re building there as well.”

Paid and free success

Substack’s build-in payment tools - although not without their own frustrations - have allowed the publisher to experiment with what readers will pay for. Thompson explained that their biggest paid newsletter successes have come down to three things: “exclusive content that you can’t access anywhere else, a personality or voice or expertise that’s behind that content…and where we know there’s a community out there who are passionate about a particular topic.”

The exclusivity doesn’t necessarily have to be scoops or stories, but insight. Thompson shared the example of Inside Old Trafford, a Manchester United-focused newsletter written by Samuel Luckhurst. “It’s not his reporting on the match, which you can find on the Manchester Evening News,” she noted. “It’s his insight into what’s going on behind the scenes at Man United right now, which is a rich scene to tap into. It’s giving them something completely different. It’s the expertise and passion that’s coming from that author.”

In contrast, the newer, free launches this year are focusing on reaching and building relationships with new audiences. Notably, these editions and digests link out to other site’s content as well as related Reach stories. “It’s a very reader-centric approach,” Thompson said. “They are bringing together the best of stories about a particular topic, pulled together by either an expert in that space or someone who has a passion in that space.”

There is value in the traffic back to Reach sites, but there is a wider goal in building brands and therefore offering the best information about a particular topic, regardless of its source. Thompson said that these newsletters may be covering topics which readers might not associate with a Reach brand, but it’s a way of connecting them with Reach journalists and showcasing content from across the brands.

At the point Thompson spoke in June, the free Substack experiment was still in the early phases, with two launches taking place on the day of the Summit itself. But she said results from some of the earlier launches were positive. “The engagement that we’ve seen on these newsletters so far, although it’s very early days, is really, really promising,” she shared.

There are always challenges to be aware of with launching products like these on third-party platforms. One of their paid Substacks launched in 2023 written by Will Hayward ended when he decided to go it alone ten months later. It’s notable that none of the free launches are named after a journalist, even if an individual is leading it.

However, part of experimenting is learning what works and what doesn’t. Even if Substack isn’t the right choice for a publisher to go all-in on, there are benefits to the audience, revenue and community-building tools that they offer for certain types of newsletter.

Thanks to Passendo and Syno who sponsored the Publisher Newsletter Summit. Listen to the newsletter personality panel at The Publisher Summits on your podcast app of choice. 

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