Casey Newton after he left Substack found a “creative hack” to save his flat-lining Newsletter subscription business.

The moral of the story is “networking and who you know” is still one of the keys to traditional and financial success, even as a writer. Casey as a journalist, is stuck somewhere between being a Creator and a writer now.

He recently interviewed Adam Mosseri (the Head of Instagram) and has developed close connections in Silicon Valley players over the years that have enabled him to become a big influencer on Threads, which has exploded to 175 million MAUs after its 1 year.

You can read his interview with Adam here:

Casey appears to have done two major recent things with Platformer tweaking it slightly, he writes more about AI and has leveraged places like Threads to gain more exposure. This social traffic likely improves his SEO.

Casey Newton now has nearly 70k followers on Threads, which is a lot and probably way more valuable than his 200k followers on Twitter/X ever were. Casey’s ability to get “tight with the right people”, has enabled him to be successful as a journalist.

By abandoning Substack and embracing Threads - Casey has just extended the viability of his career for a little while longer. Creators might be familiar with the idea of “catching waves”. In the period where Threads doesn’t have Ads yet, it’s perceived as a place for text based dialogue.

It makes you wonder what it takes for a writer or journalist to succeed in this world. He now refers to himself jokingly on his threads profile as an “Email Salesman”. Whatever it takes to keep sharing the news bro.

Everyone carves out their own path. Sometimes painfully so between digital worlds.