We spoke with Executive Editor Neal Freyman, who has written, edited, and overseen the newsletter since 2017, when it was still in its infancy. While he’s stepping away from being our newsletter overlord this summer to focus on co-hosting the Morning Brew Daily podcast (and hopefully getting more than four hours of sleep a night), for us writers, listening to Neal’s lore from the early days of the Brew is like hearing your parents reminisce about their wild teenage years. We think you’ll enjoy it, too.—SK This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. A longer version can be found on our website.
Sam: What is your Morning Brew origin story?
Neal: I was working at an economic development nonprofit in Princeton, New Jersey. I don’t know if I loved it. So, I was very casually looking for other things. I was just scrolling on LinkedIn and I saw that this guy named Alex Lieberman had posted a job opening. It wasn’t for a writer, it was for a “content creator,” which wasn’t even a thing in 2017. So, I was confused about what that was. I knew the current writer through friends. I called him up and he was like, “Dude, I think this is gonna go to the moon. I’m literally working ’til 3am, I’m sleeping on this sofa in New York City, I am going crazy. I need you to come and help me write this so I can, like, sleep for three hours.” At the time, Morning Brew only had about 30,000 readers. I’ve always loved news, and one of my heroes is Stephen Colbert, who’s able to break things down in a simple and funny way. So I read Morning Brew as it was and thought to myself, “I could just do this a little bit better than it is now.” But I didn’t know anything about business. I didn’t know why Warren Buffett was famous, or what an IPO was. So, it was going to be a learning curve. Sam: How has the newsletter changed over the years? Neal: I feel like the bones and the concept are the same. There’s a greeting at the top, a market snapshot, a summary of the day’s business news, a quick links roundup section, lifestyle and career tips, and a puzzle at the end. Those have evolved over the years, but, at its core, it’s very much the same product I think. The only significant change is maybe in the breadth of coverage. Because back when it started, Morning Brew was really geared toward finance bros who were studying to be junior bankers in New York. And so, more of the coverage was focused on big-shot investors like Bill Ackman and Ray Dalio. We’ve shifted to cover the intersection of business and politics, culture, sports, et cetera. Sam: Can you talk about something that didn’t go according to plan in the early days? Neal: There were some high-profile mess-ups. We took getting everything right so seriously. If we had one mistake, no matter how small it was, it was like a death in the family. We once wrote “Logan Paul” when we meant “Jake Paul,” and readers were writing in every five seconds, telling us we were the worst people on Earth. I remember no one talked in that office for hours because we thought it was the end of the world. Sam: Did you start getting reader feedback early on? Neal: Yes, and it was a key part of our strategy to reply to every email that came in. One of the great and bad things about email is that people can literally just hit reply. So, the first few hours of every day, we would reply to emails, and I thought that was invaluable to establishing a relationship with them. Once you reply to somebody, they become a reader for life. Sam: Was there a point where you were like, okay, we’re a real media company now and not just a nascent newsletter startup? Neal: One of the most validating things was when other people in the industry said they were readers. I remember one of the Freakonomics guys, Stephen Dubner, was an early reader. I went up to Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times Dealbook conference after he interviewed Bill Clinton. And he was like, “Oh yeah, of course I know Morning Brew. I read it every morning before I go on CNBC.” Sam: Is there a favorite joke or just anything that you’re really proud of? Neal: The headline “President Trump: I’m in love with the state of U” for an article about his first State of the Union. I think I was also one of the first people to do the “Xi said, she said” joke about Chinese leader Xi Jinping, which is now cliche. Sam: You’ve referenced Lorne Michaels before when brainstorming jokes for the newsletter. What do you think Morning Brew has to do to achieve SNL longevity? Neal: I mean, SNL has kept the same structure for, like, 50 years now. And as we’ve talked about, Morning Brew has had the same structure for 10. I don’t see any reason to change that, because it fulfills a very deep need for people, which is to stay informed and not look stupid at work, and so there should never be any deviation from that. | 
