A media firm launching a collection of paywalled newsletters shouldn’t be, by itself and on its face, an odd factor to do. AI’s ongoing cannibalization of on-line search is ravaging web site visitors, and programmatic promoting doesn’t present the type of income it used to. In the event you had been working a web site like The Ringer, you would possibly resolve that it makes monetary sense to place writing from a few of your hottest staffers behind a paywall. That is precisely what has occurred: Sean Fennessey, Zach Lowe, Tom Pelissero, and Bryan Curtis have all just lately launched newsletters, solely considered one of which (Curtis’s) is free. This seemingly regular enterprise determination comes with a quirk, although, which is that the newsletters are being printed on Substack. No one at The Ringer, or Substack, will let you know why.
This odd association naturally raises just a few questions: Why not simply publish these writers’ work on The Ringer’s present web site? Does Spotify, which has owned The Ringer since 2020, someway not have the technical functionality to construct its personal paywall? If all of this priceless writing goes to dwell on a completely totally different platform, what does that imply for the way forward for The Ringer’s editorial operation? Have the executives in command of The Ringer, like seemingly everybody else, surrendered to the concept that Substack is the one place the place individuals will really learn issues anymore?
I emailed just a few questions alongside these strains to Fennessey, a founder and govt at The Ringer, and extra common inquiries to Lowe, Curtis, and Pelissero. None of them replied. I additionally reached out to Substack and Spotify, figuring that if the 2 corporations had agreed on some form of association to supply these newsletters, their respective comms departments can be desirous to trumpet their synergistic disruption of the publishing area. Neither firm replied. It took reaching out to Ringer editor-in-chief Ben Glicksman to obtain one thing resembling an official response. That got here from Mallory Morehead Pritzl, a part of the PR workforce for Spotify: “Thanks for reaching out. We’re not commenting right now.”
Every of those Substack newsletters had been introduced with some fanfare, as they marked a return to writing for a number of well-liked figures who had beforehand deserted the observe for podcasting. (The exception is Pelissero, who was most just lately working as an NFL insider for ESPN earlier than becoming a member of The Ringer in August.) Lowe hasn’t written something for the web site since being employed in March 2025; Curtis’s final article was printed on Feb. 4, 2026; and Fennessey’s final byline on the web site was in 2021. All three have kind of turn into full-time podcasters.
Today, The Ringer is primarily a video podcast firm, with a better concentrate on speak exhibits than narrative podcasts. The web site not often places out quite a lot of tales per day, regardless of using 25 employees writers. Now that writing is instantly in vogue once more, however very pointedly not on the web site, it’s value asking about the way forward for that web site.
One trigger for concern there may be that the positioning is visibly decaying, not when it comes to the standard of the written work that runs there, which stays excessive, however when it comes to fundamental upkeep. On high of its lowering output, a redesign in 2024 made The Ringer’s touchdown web page look extra just like the Spotify app than a vacation spot for articles. Typically the central piece of content material on the homepage is a podcast thumbnail, the host’s face taking over a lot of the display—as I write this, the third slot on the primary web page is a hyperlink to a three-hour, 44-minute podcast about The Strokes, that includes ex-editors, now podcasters Chris Ryan and Amanda Dobbins. Writer archives checklist movies greater on the web page than articles. Freelancers seem on the positioning much less incessantly. Quite a few employees writers have not written an article in months, or, in a pair circumstances, years. Different writers have left or been laid off. The final time The Ringer employed any individual with the only intention of getting them write for the web site is difficult to pinpoint, however I don’t assume it was this decade.
Upon launching his Substack, Fennessey did a Q&A with GQ, by which one quote caught out. “I actually like writing, and I missed it quite a bit,” he stated. “I have been podcasting for about 10 years now, and I like doing it, and do not intend to cease doing it. However I discover that it’s generally an… imprecise type of media.” Sound evaluation, right here: There are innumerable examples of a author pivoting to podcasting and discovering their typical eloquence hamstrung by the various high quality of their visitors, a bent to ramble, or the strain to go dwell as quickly as information breaks. Any sports activities fan studying this shall be aware of the feeling of listening to a podcaster fumble for the particulars of a thought, or a stat they just lately learn on Twitter, and failing to get it proper.
However such a belated realization coming from Fennessey, an individual who presumably had as a lot sway over the route of The Ringer during the last 10 years as anybody, is a bit wealthy. He first served as the web site’s EIC, then turned its head of content material, and is now listed on the masthead as “senior speak strategist,” presumably the primary time in recorded human historical past a higher-up at a media firm has been described as such. If podcasting is typically an imprecise medium, nicely, which may have been a useful reckoning to have earlier than Fennessey helped lead a push to show quite a lot of his web site’s confirmed writers and editors into talkers.
Maybe that’s anticipating an excessive amount of of the individuals in command of charting out The Ringer’s editorial technique, although. Within the few conversations I did handle to have for this text, it instantly turned obvious that inside communication is a recurring downside on the firm. Executives haven’t made clear if, when, and the way different Ringer writers ought to go about pitching their very own newsletters. (At the very least another is on the way in which, that includes common NBA protection.)
Even from the surface, the way in which the prevailing Substacks have been rolled out doesn’t give the impression that a lot thought went into coordination. Every is priced in another way: Lowe’s prices $10 monthly, Fennessey’s $5 monthly, and Pelissero’s $8 monthly. Ringer NFL draft guru Todd McShay is for some purpose publishing his e-newsletter on Beehiiv; that one prices $4 monthly. There’s no obtainable package deal deal as refuge from the ESPN Limitless-esque value of subscribing to all of them. Curtis burdened that his e-newsletter was free when asserting it on a podcast, and that he knew shoppers had been paying quite a bit for different Substacks. Per week later, Lowe’s launched, the costliest of the bunch up to now. Numerous the introductory Substack posts additionally failed to say that future posts can be paywalled, seemingly leading to some disillusioned readers who had grown used to all of The Ringer’s articles being free because it launched in 2016.
Was it not value at the least making an attempt to drive visitors or subscribers to The Ringer’s web site earlier than dispatching lifeboats to Substack? Lowe’s e-newsletter has racked up greater than 24,000 subscribers in its first week of existence—certainly a few of them would have learn him on the web site, which may have helped to light up what stays of the positioning’s different writing. It feels doable that I’ve simply now thought more durable about that query than anybody calling the pictures at The Ringer has.
