Last week, both The Verge and Wired announced major newsletter strategies. Wired writes of a “traffic apocalypse”, where “platforms on which outlets like Wired used to connect with readers, listeners, and viewers are failing in real time”.1 The Verge describes “Google Zero”: the moment when the dwindling supply of visitors from Google Search completely dries up.2

Traffic to news sites from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter has atrophied as those services limit links to external sites to keep users locked in. Google Search’s excerpts and, more recently, AI overviews have satisfied users’ questions before they click on the article that actually provided the information. Some have abandoned Search altogether for ChatGPT or other chatbot LLMs that summarize journalists’ work with varying degrees of accuracy, often without linking or even mentioning the source.
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These intermediary platforms between news organizations and readers are undergoing a type of predictable decay Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”.a As executives twiddle the knobs to extract ever more profits from their user base, things worsen for people on both ends of the consumer–producer relationship. Readers no longer see news articles from the journalists they chose to follow on Twitter as the site downranks any posts that link offsite. When they search on Google, they’re bombarded with error-ridden AI facsimiles before reaching the higher-quality underlying work. Producers who once relied on social media and search engines to drive visits are losing traffic as platforms embrace a vampiric strategy: rip off others’ work while expecting high-quality journalism to magically continue to appear, even as journalists are starved of audience and revenue.

The newsletter strategy aims to bypass these rapidly enshittifying intermediaries and instead establish more direct relationships with subscribers. “I don’t intend to ever rely on someone else’s distribution ever again,” wrote Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel on Bluesky.3 Although email has undergone some enshittification of its own,b its fundamental nature as a protocol rather than a platform has provided one essential prophylactic to enshittification: the escape hatch. If your email provider suddenly inserted ads two sentences into every email, you could easily switch providersc and still receive emails from everyone you previously emailed. As a result, email has become a go-to refuge for news outlets fleeing their abusive relationships with deeply enshittified platforms they grew reliant upon.

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