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How a viral Substack essay led to a major book deal

By the time Dana Miranda launched her newsletter Healthy Rich in 2021, she’d been writing about personal finance for over a half decade, mostly as a freelancer. But while her freelance reporting focused on general financial advice, she wanted her newsletter to focus on the lived realities of people from a variety of backgrounds and socioeconomic situations. So she started soliciting personal essays that reflected a greater diversity of viewpoints, and the newsletter slowly started to grow.

What really put Miranda on the map, however, was a piece she wrote for someone else’s newsletter. Culture Study, one of the most popular publications on Substack, put out a call for essays, and Miranda submitted one titled “Budget Culture and the Dave Ramseyfication of Money.” It went so viral that she received emails from a literary agent and an editor at a major book publisher. In 2024, Little Brown released “You Don't Need a Budget,” the book that grew out of that original essay.

In a recent interview, Miranda discussed why she launched her Substack, how she landed a book deal, and whether she plans to return to freelancing now that the book is out.

You can check out our interview in the video embedded below:

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Star athletes launch location-specific social media channels

This is neat: star athletes in the US are hiring marketing agencies to create China-specific social media content to reach their fans in that country:

“Mirroring the same content on your Chinese channels as your western ones really isn’t diving deeper into that Chinese culture,” said Michael Lin, a vice president of digital at Mailman who oversees its U.S. sports operation. “Athletes do a lot better when they’re creating personalized content that’s speaking to the Chinese fans.”

This reminds me of MrBeast's strategy of hiring voice actors to dub his videos in every major language. We could be heading toward a future where it becomes increasingly common for large stars and media outlets to hire country-specific social marketing teams to translate their content for native audiences. Imagine if, say, The New York Times employed a small team in India that's focused on translating all of its work into Hindi. It seems like the investment would be worth it.

MSNBC doubles down on original journalism

With MSNBC now spun off from its parent company, it needs to sink or swim without the journalistic support of NBC News. It’s good to see that its leaders plan to double down on original journalism:

The network will be hiring more than 100 journalists — from field producers to correspondents to photographers — to work across the operation, which will include a bureau in Washington (for which it’s looking for a bureau chief) and a newsroom in New York …

… “I actually think building a news organization from scratch is a really fun idea in this day and age, because, first of all, there’re a lot of good people available, and you can craft a pretty good news organization for a pretty reasonable amount of money,” said former CNN president and NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Zucker. MSNBC is “going to actually be building and growing and unencumbered by having to worry about what NBC News thinks about it.”

I think it's smart that MSNBC is making a large investment in hiring actual journalists who will be focused on original reporting. Political opinion is a hugely saturated market, and there's little to differentiate what you see on MSNBC every night with the burgeoning video podcast scene on YouTube. The only way for modern day media companies to truly differentiate themselves in the marketplace is by producing information that can't be found anywhere else.

One person who gets this is Emma Tucker. Since taking over the editorial reins at the Wall Street Journal she's doubled down on longform reporting. I've been a WSJ subscriber for years, but I'm reading its content more than ever before because it's just so good.

Another company attempts to marry media with commerce

The food media outlet Tastemade has been acquired by a company that offers everything from food delivery to meal kits:

The Tastemade deal will give Wonder a content studio and a media company that has been producing short- and long-form food and cooking videos since 2012. Tastemade also operates streaming channels carrying travel, home and design shows. Wonder executives hope that will help them promote their brands to a wider audience.

The acquisition means viewers who watch a famous chef make her signature pasta on a Tastemade streaming channel, for example, may soon be able to easily order the dish to their door through Wonder, Grubhub or Blue Apron.

This is an interesting attempt to marry a media company with a commerce company, the idea being that someone consuming the media content can then be funneled into ordering food delivery or booking a table at a restaurant.

The hardest part will be actually creating that funnel. When the watch site Hodinkee merged with a watch-selling platform, its audience quickly grew tired of all the content trying to push them into buying a watch. Wonder needs to market its products to Tastemade's audience without turning them off. There are so many companies that made expensive purchases of media outlets and yet never found any real synergies. Just ask AT&T (it bought Yahoo and AOL and later sold them) or Verizon (it bought and sold Warner Media).

What Hollywood can learn from MrBeast

Heading into 2025, we knew that MrBeast had a huge online following. After all, his main channel has grown to over 300 million subscribers and 74 billion views.

But what we didn’t know was whether this online fame would translate into traditional Hollywood success. MrBeast famously signed a $100 million deal with Amazon to create one of the most ambitious game shows of all time, and it debuted in December with 1,000 contestants and $5 million in grand prize money.

Flash forward to today, and it’s clear that the show was an unequivocal success, with Amazon claiming it reached record viewership numbers. Now, Hollywood studios are casting about for other projects that can be helmed by popular creators.

What will those projects look like? To answer that question, I spoke to Lucia Moses, the co-author of a Business Insider piece titled “What MrBeast can teach Hollywood.” We discussed why previous creator-led shows failed, how the Beast Games viewership compared to other popular shows, and whether MrBeast’s production mishaps that led to a class action lawsuit will give studio executives any pause.

You can check out the interview over here.

A good longform article

Taylor Sheridan is probably the most prolific writer in Hollywood, rivaled only by Tyler Perry. Not only is his output prodigious — he's created eight TV shows and wrote most of the episodes himself — but his hit rate is unheard of. His shows might represent the last claim to a TV monoculture, as they manage to appeal to vast swaths of Americans across age groups and regions. [Rolling Stone]

ICYMI: Was Randy Cassingham the first member of the Creator Economy?

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An actual good use of AI for newsgathering...