Jacob Cohen
Donnelly

Most media people sell you a dream. Jacob Cohen Donnelly asks for the spreadsheet. Twice a week, from a five-person operation in New York, he publishes A Media Operator for the people who actually run digital publishing companies, and the thing that makes the writing land is that he wants the numbers. He reads an executive's previous interviews to find the revenue figure they let slip once, then asks about it again when they try to change the subject. He calls the style "mildly antagonistic." The executives keep saying yes.

Today AMO is a business, not a byline. There is a website, two newsletters a week, a podcast called The AMO Show, a members' Slack, and a conference that media leaders rearrange their calendars for. The whole apparatus did roughly a million dollars in revenue in 2025, run by five people. Donnelly's bet is that in a world drowning in commodity content, the scarce thing is not another article. It is who you can get into one room and what they say to each other once they are there.

That bet has a name inside the company: the love brand. The idea is that a publication people choose to open, that they would miss if it vanished, is worth more than a billion algorithmic impressions you do not control. He learned that lesson the hard way watching the open web, and he says it plainly.

The weekend that wouldn't stay a weekend

It started in August 2019 as a Substack he wrote on Saturdays. On weekdays he was running digital revenue and audience growth at CoinDesk; the newsletter was where he thought out loud about the same problem that paid his salary, which was how digital media companies make money without pretending advertising would save them. He kept it up after moving to Morning Brew, where he ran the B2B division behind brands like Retail Brew and Marketing Brew, and eventually became Publisher.

The newsletter was supposed to be the side thing. Then the side thing developed a gravitational pull. By 2024 he had left Morning Brew, hired a reporter, and given AMO his full attention. In January 2025 he rebuilt it from a newsletter homepage into something that looked and behaved like an actual media company, and called the new version 2.0. The hobby had eaten the career, which is roughly how the best companies start.

Small on purpose

At Morning Brew, Donnelly watched a team grow from four people to sixty-five. He is candid that some of that growth was the natural physics of a fast company, and some of it was the empire-building instinct that takes over when the person hiring is not the person paying the bills. Now he is the person paying the bills, and he has built AMO the opposite way: thin in the middle, with the headcount concentrated where the value is. He likes to point out that he built a personalized cold-outreach system using AI in about an hour, the sort of leverage that lets five people behave like fifteen.

The room is the product

The AMO Summit began in October 2023 with 130 people. By its third year it had doubled. It runs single-track in New York, which means there is no schedule to optimize and no FOMO about the session you skipped, because there is only one session and everyone is in it. Donnelly treats the venue as a feature rather than a line-item to minimize, spending a large share of the budget on the room itself. The waitlist tends to close weeks before the doors open.

His theory of the conference is unusually humble about his own importance. The host's job, as he describes it, is hospitality more than performance.

He measures whether a session is working by listening for laughter in the room, a metric no analytics dashboard reports. And he has made peace with the strange logic of a convener's success: the better he connects the right people to each other, the less they need him in the middle. He has said as much, that the better he does the job, the less relevant he becomes. Most founders would find that terrifying. He says it like a man who has already priced it in.

Why a history degree, of all things

Donnelly did not study business or journalism. He took a Bachelor of Arts in history and political science at Mount Saint Mary College, finishing in 2010, then started his career as a business analyst at ThomasNet before media pulled him in. It shows. The newsletter reads like someone who learned to find the argument inside the evidence rather than someone who learned to chase a press release. He is a New York Knicks fan, which in itself is a study in optimism unsupported by recent results, a quality he has turned into something like a philosophy.

The arguments he keeps making

Read enough of AMO and a worldview takes shape, and it is not the one most of the industry was operating on. Donnelly argues that diversification is widely misunderstood: a company is better off with several scaled revenue lines inside one vertical than with a scattering of unscaled bets across many industries. Focus, in his telling, beats hedging. He pairs that with a structural prescription he calls the barbell, a thin layer of middle management with heavy investment at the two ends, the people making the content and the people selling it. The squishy middle, he suspects, is where AI is coming first.

The other recurring theme is what you might call the convening economy. When information is infinite and nearly free, the value migrates to the thing that cannot be copied and pasted, which is a trusted group of the right people gathered in one place. That is why the Summit is not a marketing expense bolted onto a newsletter; in Donnelly's model it is the destination the whole machine points toward. The newsletter builds the audience, the podcast deepens the relationship, the Slack keeps it warm, and the conference converts all of it into something durable. He has been honest about the open question inside this too, that getting attendees to connect with each other, rather than just with the stage, is a design problem he is still working on.

The interview chair

The AMO Show is where the thesis gets pressure-tested in public. Donnelly sits down with media founders and operators to talk through what is working, what is not, how they are growing, and the financials underneath, the parts most trade press leaves out. He treats it less like a Q&A and more like a magazine profile conducted live, doing the homework first so he can ask the second and third question rather than accepting the first answer. It is the same instinct that runs through everything he makes: respect the audience enough to get specific.

What he's building toward

The number he names out loud is five million dollars, reached through enterprise subscriptions and additional verticals rather than chasing scale for its own sake. But the larger argument underneath AMO is about durability. He calls the ecosystem of newsletter, podcast, Slack, and Summit the "human infrastructure" of the business, relationships that survive a Google update because they were never built on one. In an industry that spent two decades renting its audience from platforms, Donnelly is making the unglamorous case for owning the relationship, owning the platform, and owning the room. He has built his own company as the proof.