The Rebooting launched in October 2020 as a Substack. What Morrissey had in his back pocket was a decade of watching the media industry try to solve its own problems - and failing, often in the same ways, with the same rationale, on the same quarterly schedule.
He had watched publishers chase Facebook traffic, then chase subscription revenue, then chase programmatic advertising, then chase branded content. He had covered the wave from Adweek. He had lived inside the wave at Digiday. When he left, he wanted to write about what came after the wave.
The newsletter covers the structural economics of publishing: what business models actually work, which metrics are vanity, how to build reader revenue that doesn't evaporate when a platform changes its algorithm. It is trade journalism with an operator's sensibility - Morrissey writes like someone who had to make payroll.
The Rebooting Show adds a podcast layer with 220+ episodes, interviewing publishers, media executives, newsletter operators, and the occasional investor who pays attention to media. The roster of guests maps the industry's who's-who over five years.
TRB Pro is the membership tier - a way for subscribers willing to pay more to get closer access to gatherings, events, and community. It is the kind of business-within-a-business that Morrissey writes about other publishers attempting.
All the other sort of more administrative stuff I've found a challenge. I'm not naturally super organized, and I think that's a common trait among journalists.
- Brian Morrissey, 2024His argument about subscriptions is worth noting in full: the numbers-go-up era is over. When subscribers were novel, retention was easy. Now every serious publication has a paywall, every reader has three or four subscriptions already, and the question is not how to add a subscriber but how to make each subscriber worth more. ARPU - average revenue per user - is the metric that matters.
This is the kind of insight that sounds obvious until you realize that most media companies are still building growth dashboards instead of revenue-per-reader dashboards. Morrissey says the quiet part loud, in 800 words, every week, to 92,000 people.