Tips to Build Your Journalistic Brand

By Alexandra Zendrian

Some financial services trade publications have faced losing reporters to pursue their own endeavors, such as Nicole Casperson who founded Fintech is Femme and Michael Thrasher with his new Modus News. How does a reporter know when it might be time to strike out on their own?

Robert Huebscher, who is building his own next creation, shared some sage advice.

“In the world of journalism, it’s all about trust,” he noted. “People want to know that if their content is going to appear in your publication that it’s a publication that people trust for honesty, integrity, accuracy and valued information.”

Then the decision becomes whether a journalist’s new business should be heavily tied to their personal brand or not.

“It is much easier to sell a business that is independent of someone’s personal brand than to sell something that depends and is based on someone’s name,” Huebscher said. “And you’ll get much more money for an enduring business.”

Do the market research, understand the competition, understand what your readers want, Huebscher encouraged. He spent the first six months building readership before he ever engaged advertisers for Advisor Perspectives.

“The field of journalism in so far as it serves the planning and wealth management profession, is a challenged world,” Huebscher said. “And it’s become more competitive because there are companies that are now purely online obviously and the barriers to entry, to use a business term, have gone down. So it’s easier now because of technology like Substack if you want to start a publication. So, the technology is better, the ease of entry in becoming a journalist or publisher is now lower. At the same time, if you’re going to be in the business of selling advertising, the people who buy that advertising have become increasingly more sophisticated. They’re going to demand that you have the audience that they want. They’re going to have a way to measure that and to validate whatever you tell them is true and accurate.”

Thrasher disagreed when it came to advertising for this corner of journalism.

“If you’re a journalist and you write about financial services, this is like one of the last corners where display advertising and sponsorship can demand quite a bit of money,” he said. “Depending on what you cover, it could be much, much tougher to have an independent business.” 

Huebscher’s current endeavor will be only his own writing for the first six months and then he may bring in outside contributors.

“For now, I just want to write about things that are really important and meaningful, to interview some people who are really interesting and prominent and that means at most producing maybe one piece every other week,” he said. 

Huebscher is also making himself available as a resource for anyone who is starting something similar and wants to pick his brain.