The Business of Newsletters with Kendall Baker, “The Sports Newsletter Guy”

The Peel with Turner Novak

Kendall Baker currently leads Yahoo’s sports newsletter business. In 2017 he launched the first daily sports newsletter called Sports Internet, which he sold to Axios in 2019. Before Sports Internet, he convinced the founders of The Hustle to focus their online tech blog on a daily newsletter, which he wrote for a year and a half. And before The Hustle, he produced SportsCenter at ESPN. He’s spent nearly a decade at the intersection of daily news and sports, and this episode is packed with insights on both.

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Read the transcript: https://www.thespl.it/p/the-business-of-newsletters

In this episode, we discuss:

• The history of the newsletter industry
• Why the best writers delete more than they write
• How he got on ESPN SportsCenter
• A crash course on the sports media business
• How to write a daily newsletter
• The importance of experimenting
• How he got his first dollar of revenue
• Why Kendall spent $0 on growth
• Selling his “Sports Internet” newsletter to Axios
• Why Adam Silver, commissioner of the NBA, reads Kendall’s writing
• Why Yahoo’s the next rocketship
• The surging momentum in US soccer
• And the most underrated athletes (current and all-time)

Listen on other platforms:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-business-of-newsletters-kendall-baker/id1694440669?i=1000624033211

YouTube: https://youtu.be/4es4p7sFMf0

Where to find Kendall:

Twitter https://twitter.com/kendallbaker

Where to find Turner:

Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak

Read the transcript: https://www.thespl.it/p/the-business-of-newsletters

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