“I’m hosting our first-ever community meetup,” the mid-April 2026 email from Chatwan Mongkol read, nine months after launching his Soiciety newsletter. The name, a play on Soi, the Thai word for alley, lent itself both to local Bangkok news as well as walks exploring the city.
A month later, I found myself walking through a park to meet Mongkol and eight fellow readers for the first time. We bonded over a shared love of the city, of infrastructure and public spaces, of a new elevated bridge that connected two parks. The newsletter connected us and was part of the discussion, yet had also been a way to find a group of people with similar interests and bring them together in a shared space.
“Our first walk wasn’t fully baked,” Mongkol admitted when I asked how his ongoing meetups were going and what they meant to his newsletter. What had started with the twin goals of “diversifying revenue and deepening reader engagement” had turned, over the intervening months, into something more “tangible to readers in a way a digital membership isn’t always.”
“Reading about Bangkok’s fragmented infrastructure is one thing,” he told me of a later walk through a jumbled intersection that’d recently witnessed a deadly train-and-bus collision, “but standing directly at Makkasan junction and watching these separate agencies manage a single intersection in real time is another.”
“It takes the reporting out of the inbox and makes it real.” Something imprinted on your memory in a way an email scrolled through with your morning coffee or on a train never could. In an isolated world, half of the appeal of an email newsletter is finding your folks. Meetups can fill the other half, putting a face to the names that fill your subscriber list and sparking a social graph instead of a one-to-many relationship.
Stop imagining all the people
“It’s time to get our community together, in person – and you’re invited to be a part of it,” wrote Creative Good’s Mark Hurst, announcing a new GEL conference a decade after he’d hosted the last one. GEL had, over the years, featured folks ranging from future Flickr and Slack founder Stewart Butterfield to, in 2005, the “worldwide debut of Wikipedia, as young Jimmy Wales gave his very first talk about the site at GEL,” Hurst told me. And then it’d stopped, for a while—but the idea was never far away. Hurst’s newsletter kept the audience intact. When the time was right to pull everyone together again, the newsletter was the perfect place to announce the reunion.
“I'd estimate around half of the attendees bought their tickets on the basis of the emails I sent out in the newsletter about GEL,” Hurst relayed after the most recent conference. “For many of these subscribers, my newsletter is the main way I am in touch with them — and for some, it's the only way. So hearing that GEL was coming back, from a newsletter, was enough of a prompt for a number of people to sign up.”
A quarter century after Bowling Alone was written, our wired world is in many ways more isolated and lonely than ever. Not that the internet’s solely to blame. It would have been impossible at any other point in human history to have a global audience of people who, like you, love some niche thing, for you to find that weird Venn diagram of folks with overlapping tastes and senses of humor. The very possibility of doing so is magical. Yet the internet leaves us with often one-way connections, aside from replies, and that’s not enough.
“I contend that whatever the ostensible focus of the group, the actual point is just to talk to other people,” wrote Buttondown’s own Justin Duke as advice for How to start a club. I’d argue, much of the time, that applies equally to newsletters. You write them as a search query of sorts to find your people, and if that feels hollow after a while, well, the problem might be that you’ve found your people, and now’s the time to talk to them.
It’s a formula that big media has long mastered, from the New York Times’ conferences to National Geographic’s tours and cruises and local media events like the Texas Tribune’s annual festival. “Events are journalism — events are content,” said Evan Smith, then the Texas Tribune’s CEO and editor-in-chief, to Nieman Lab. And that live content lends something that digital-only interactions rarely can. “We get to build trust,” El Paso Matters events director Alyshea D. Johnson told Nieman, “and in turn, that hopefully turns into support.”
Support and trust that even a small newsletter without a newsroom can build in person.
Curate or create
I’ve never been much of a spoken word audio person, aside from the occasional podcast on a road trip. But for this one spell, with a longer solo commute, I started listening to both The Economist’s audio edition and Instapaper’s automated audio renditions of saved articles.
And I noticed something strange. I’d instantly forget articles I’d read on my phone over breakfast, but if I’d been listening to the same article while driving a less-familiar route, that topic would spring to mind whenever I traversed that road again.
The more senses you engage at once, the more you’ll remember things. That was often the seeming-excuse educators tell children for handwritten homework. Yet time and again the idea proves its worth. It’s why you’ll remember an exceptional lunch in a new city years later while struggling to recall what you ate for lunch last week. And it’s one of the best reasons to add an occasional place and time to your newsletter.
It started, for Commonplace.NYC newsletter writer Bram Adams, with Nonsense NYC, a weekly email with an eclectic collection of local events. “My favorite part of the Nonsense NYC newsletter was always the learning section. ‘Here, come take this random woodworking class in Queens,’” Adams told me on a call.
As someone who reads 60 books a year, Adams wanted to bring that same spontaneous potential to New York’s reading scene. At first, that looked like pure curation, turning the Big Apple’s wealth of book-related events into a newsletter that said, “here's things that could be really interesting to you next week,” as Adams described it. But then he had an idea to reinvent the book club, which can often feel “homeworky.”
“What if the book club got a new coat of paint, where the idea of a successful book club is just being able to go to an event and think about a book or talk about a book if you feel so compelled?” Little by little, he shifted his focus to events aligned with book pairings, like a wine pairing for the mind, where these ideas go together. “I think that it, conversely, makes the books that you read more memorable because now you have a physical place to attach them to,” Adams said. “It allows the neurons in your brain to give those words a little bit of color and vision.” That, and other people and their ideas that may expand your interpretation of a book.
That sense of space and structure can be as valuable to the newsletter writers as it is to their audience. You’re your own best reader. “A goal I had for Creatures NYC was that each month I would go out and actually see a creature in the wild,” Sabrina Imbler told me of her newsletter. “I am not really an expert on NYC wildlife the way that many of the guides are. I think the only creature I know enough to lead a walk on are horseshoe crabs, but I really enjoy taking small groups of my friends to see them.” Curating those wildlife walks in a newsletter lets her share a love of nature with others—and give herself an active social calendar to jump into when time permits.
Jenny Zhang, who rounds up grassroots organizing events in her Show Up Toronto newsletter, rarely hears that her newsletter was the reason someone attended an event. But while greeting newcomers at a book club she ran last year, she asked how they’d heard about it, and “one person said Show Up Toronto not knowing that it was my project.” That was “a surreal moment,” she said.
And on the opposite side of the scale, when logistics and a love of the game align, hosting events aligned with your newsletter lets you create the spaces you wish existed. As Isabelle Amazon-Brown did with Norwich Tech for Good, a community of folks in Norwich centered around using tech to do good things for society. “I was looking for a really accessible, simple way of acting on my idea of building a community without overthinking it,” Amazon-Brown told me of why she decided to start a Buttondown newsletter. “I was really uncertain about how many people would be interested, and totally inexperienced at running real-world events — and probably a bit fearful to even commit to regular events!” She tested the waters with a Reddit post; the enthusiasm there convinced her to spin up a newsletter, and then to start hosting events.
Six months later, the community’s finding its shape. “The newsletter has definitely helped the meetups grow, and maybe even more importantly has helped me shape the values of the community itself,” a symbiotic relationship where it’s hard to separate the two.
“To be honest, I see the newsletter and the meetups as one and the same,” she says. The meetups are just the community’s physical manifestation.
Not to say that meetups themselves are easy to pull off. “Running a newsletter, and running a good event, are different skill sets,” says Hurst. “It's really not an easy task to bridge the virtual, with worldwide email, and the physical, with local in-person events. But there's a lot you can do, if you're persistent,” he added.
Newsletter. Meetup. ???. Profit.
What starts out as a leap of faith, to guide others to community events or wrangle events of your own may, at scale, coalesce into something larger.
You don’t have to know what your meetups or newsletter itself will be when they grow up. A bit of ambiguity lends space for your community to find itself. And they need boundaries. “Newsletters (and blogs!) are weird projects with no natural end dates,” Zhang warned. “It’s easier to take breaks when you decide ahead of time how they will happen.”
Events themselves need more than just a time and place. “I realized that a good journalistic walk needs the same architecture as a great article,” Mongkol told me of his newsletter’s walks. “It needs a narrative arc, tension and the ability to leave participants asking questions.”
And they might need a virtual place—it’ll be different from a real-life meetup, but valuable all the same. “There aren't enough people in most cities for an in-person meetup about web performance,” said Sia Karamalegos about the PerformanceObserver newsletter and its virtual meetups she co-runs. Online meetups “work best for niche communities that would never get enough people in-person regularly.” And in the same way, real-world meetups work better for the events that you could never pull off online, even if that means only some of your readers will be close enough to join in. You have to find the best way to get your community together—and trust the process, that today an online meetup might make more sense, before pulling together a local group tomorrow, and taking your meetups on tour the next, the way The Grateful Dead’s print newsletter gave them a primed audience to sell tickets wherever they performed.
Your newsletter alone won’t be enough to carry the event. “You still need to get on an aggregation site like Meetup or Luma,” Karamalegos suggested from her work on Durham Plein Air/Urban Sketching meetups and the NC Art Meets newsletter. “A lot of attendees find the events through sites like these.” As they did through web and AI searches, local events aggregators, and the always-critical word of mouth, with social media and the newsletter keeping the events top-of-mind for followers. And they won’t always let you know beforehand: “I’m always gratified to see who turns up to events even when they don’t rsvp to the meetup via the event listing,” says Amazon-Brown.
Profit may come in all shapes and sizes. Maybe you’ll sell enough event tickets to make more than your costs, earn sponsorships and invitations to host branded events. Perhaps the events will make people want to pay for your newsletter in a virtuous cycle. Or both: Soiciety’s paid subscriptions give free access to events, or free subscribers can pay for events, both routes funding ongoing journalism. Or you may find the event is payment enough, that the community and camaraderie is its own reward in ways you would have never imagined at the start.
Like asking a friend to proofread, events show what works more than any newsletter stats could. Attendee input on walking tours shows “what topics resonate, or don’t,” said Cara Kuhlman after writing about and walking around the Pacific Northwest’s maritime community, and is “an opportunity to be transparent, demonstrate you’re listening and directly respond to questions.” Or as Charlie Jane Anders put it, after running Writers With Drinks events for over twenty years: “There's really no better diagnostic tool than reading your writing to an audience, big or small.”
And for your readers, well, if they show up to an event, then another, if they read one issue after another without unsubscribing, that’s proof enough that they’re finding your newsletter and its meetups worth their while.
“If you sign up for my newsletter… and you go to one event a month and you read one book a month from it, that’s awesome,” said Adams. “I feel like that’s a win.”
It doesn’t have to be much. The less perfect, the more it represents you as a person, perhaps, the better. As Amazon-Brown told me when I asked for recommendations for how to start running meetups: “Feel free to make it your own and be authentic, which sounds cliche but it’s true!” People signed up to your newsletter for your unique voice and perspective; they’ll show up to your events for the same reason. “I'd suggest starting small, with an informal meetup at a local coffee shop or some equivalent venue, and just seeing who shows up,” recommends Hurst.
An eclectic collection of folks showed up at a Bangkok park in the late afternoon last May because we’d found someone who was writing about topics close to our hearts. And as we covered the kilometers between the parks, we put a face and place to the newsletter we’d already been reading for months.
Today, when I think of Soiciety, I’m less likely to think of the blue banner that opens its emails, and more of the monitor lizard that stalked our path on the walk. That’s something a newsletter behind a screen could have never delivered, in a group that, without a newsletter, would have never coalesced.
Coming from the other side of the equation, with a meetup that you’d like to make more sticky with an email newsletter? Check out Buttondown’s The Newsletter Book with anecdotes from Hurst, Mongkol, and others about how they started and kept their newsletters going.
| Image | Credit |
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| Header photo | Soiciety Walk via Matthew Guay |