Should a newsletter team have separate writers and social media people, or one owner per brand?

There are two ways to staff a group of newsletters. You can have specialists: a writer here, a social media person there. Or you can have one person responsible for everything related to a brand. I want the second one.

Why one owner per brand?

Ownership. It's one of the biggest concerns I have with our whole model.

"We need people to own their work, okay? Own what they're doing. And so the best way to do that is to own the brand. Like, your success is the brand's success, right?"

So there's no social media person. Everybody is a writer, editor and social media person in one, for their brand.

What goes wrong when you split the jobs?

Nobody is responsible for growth. The writer says, I'm doing good over here, he's not doing social media. The social person says the newsletter isn't good. Everyone has an excuse that points at someone else.

With one owner, there's one answer. That brand is yours, and you're responsible for its success.

Isn't that too much for one person?

Not anymore. We have templates for social media, and AI is writing 90% of the content anyway. If the system is set up right, the owner's job is making sure it's working.

What one owner covers:

• Writing and editing the newsletter
• Social media for the brand
• Maybe, eventually, managing cold outreach to advertisers in that town: making sure the system runs, responding to people, or forwarding them to us

What about sales?

Selling is different. For someone starting a newsletter near a big university, I suggested two interns: one for sales and one for social media. Those skills rarely live in the same person. I know people doing this and crushing it, and you teach the interns a ton about marketing in return.

One newsletter publisher I know was struggling to make money because she's not a salesperson and didn't want to be. She found a college student who turned out to be a home run hire, out selling like hotcakes. One good connection changed her entire business.

What breaks as the team grows?

Communication. In May 2025 I had four newsletters, two sending twice a week and two once a week, and I'd just hired my third person. It still felt like a lot.

When you add people, it gets chaotic: who's doing what, who's talking to who. You hear stories that things start breaking around 10 people. I was already feeling it at three, probably because I wasn't very good at it yet. You have to try to get better.

How do I keep from being the bottleneck?

I tell my lead team members I want to hand them a concept and have them come back with it done. Double-check with me at the beginning, sure. They don't need to be amazing or perfect.

For recurring content, I ask them to fill a scheduler with two weeks of posts and tell me it's ready to go out. That push makes me edit it quickly. "Get to this when you can" just ends up not being a priority.

More on handing off brands in how I run many brands without losing focus.