The Newsletter That Knows What You’re Thinking Before You Do
Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me occupies a specific and hard-won position in the current media landscape – it’s the newsletter your fashion-industry friend forwards you with a one-line message that just says “this.” Derek C. Blasberg spoke with Sundberg for Harper’s Bazaar about how she got there, what influence actually means when you’re running a one-woman operation, and why the girlboss era deserves every bit of the contempt it currently receives.
A Media Business Built Differently
Feed Me didn’t grow out of a venture-backed content studio or a legacy masthead looking to diversify its digital footprint. It grew out of something closer to a very well-curated group chat – the kind where someone always knows which restaurant just changed its reservation policy and which brand is quietly imploding behind a cheerful Instagram grid. Sundberg understood early that this conversational intimacy, the feeling that you’re getting real information rather than packaged content, was not just a tone choice. It was the product.
That instinct has proven financially and culturally durable. Feed Me has become what many newsletters aspire to be and few achieve: genuinely insider without being exclusionary, specific without being niche to the point of irrelevance. The readership treats it less like a publication and more like a source – the way people used to treat a particularly plugged-in colleague who always had the unvarnished version of whatever story was circulating.
Building that kind of trust requires a specific editorial discipline. Sundberg isn’t hedging or both-sidesing her way through topics the way larger, advertiser-dependent outlets often must. The independence of the newsletter format is load-bearing here. Without a sales team to protect or an editorial board to placate, the writing can go where the observation actually leads, which is precisely what readers are paying for – and increasingly, they are paying for it directly.
The business structure that enables this is worth examining on its own terms. Newsletters, particularly those running on platforms like Substack, have rewritten the math of media sustainability. A focused, loyal subscriber base can generate more reliable revenue than a massive but passive audience monetized through programmatic advertising. Sundberg’s approach – building from the group chat up, as Blasberg frames it – maps directly onto this economics. She didn’t chase scale first. She chased depth, and scale followed.
On Influence, the Girlboss, and What Comes After
Sundberg speaks with particular clarity about the girlboss era and its aftermath, and the conversation with Blasberg gives that clarity room to breathe. The girlboss framework – women performing a specific flavor of ambition that was essentially male-coded hustle with better branding – has aged badly, and Sundberg seems to have seen its limitations in real time. What made it so insidious wasn’t just the aesthetic. It was the way it collapsed the distinction between personal identity and professional persona, leaving women with brands instead of careers and followings instead of audiences.
The ignominy Sundberg attaches to that era isn’t purely retrospective bitterness. It’s analytical. She’s describing a system that instrumentalized authenticity – turned the appearance of realness into a growth strategy – and then expressed surprise when readers and followers felt deceived once the cracks showed. Feed Me operates on a different premise: that the audience is intelligent, that they will notice when something is performed versus observed, and that the only sustainable version of an editorial voice is one that doesn’t require the writer to become a character.
The nature of influence is something Sundberg is clearly thinking about with more precision than most people operating in the space. Influence in fashion and culture media has traditionally been measured in reach – follower counts, open rates, press placements. But what Feed Me demonstrates is that influence can also be measured in something closer to trust velocity: how quickly, and how reliably, does a recommendation or observation move through a specific community of people who actually act on what they read? A smaller number of highly engaged readers who forward, discuss, and reference the newsletter in professional conversations may represent more actual influence than a much larger passive audience.
This reframes the entire conversation about what it means to build a media business right now. Sundberg isn’t competing with Vogue or The Cut on traffic. She’s competing – and apparently winning – on the metric of who gets called the source when someone in a fashion-adjacent meeting asks where a particular read on the industry came from. That’s a different race entirely, and it’s one that legacy media is poorly positioned to run.
There’s also something worth noting about the gender dynamics embedded in how Sundberg’s work gets categorized. Newsletters helmed by women covering culture, fashion, and lifestyle have historically been dismissed as soft – personal essays dressed up as analysis. What Sundberg has done with Feed Me is collapse that distinction by making the personal observation do real analytical work. The conversational register isn’t a concession to approachability; it’s a deliberate editorial choice that allows her to move between cultural observation and industry critique without the seams showing.
The Ongoing Question of What Readers Actually Want
What Sundberg knows about what people want is, at its core, something deceptively simple: they want to feel like they’re getting the real version of something. Not the press release, not the managed narrative, not the influencer-approved talking points – the thing someone would actually say if they weren’t worried about maintaining access or protecting a relationship. The entire architecture of Feed Me is built around providing exactly that, consistently enough that readers come to depend on it.
Which raises the question that any successful independent media operation eventually has to answer: what happens when the thing that made it work – the single voice, the unmediated perspective, the group-chat intimacy – comes under pressure from growth itself? Sundberg has built something people want. Whether the structure that delivered it can hold as the audience expands, as brand interest increases, as the newsletter graduates from insider favorite to something with broader cultural visibility, is the tension that doesn’t resolve neatly from the outside.
