Breaker founder Lachlan Cartwright (left) and Breaker Media’s website homepage on 6 February 2026.
A New York-based news site and twice-weekly newsletter has become profitable within a year, driven by subscriber revenue and a direct relationship with “superfans”.
Breaker Media was launched in February 2025 and covers “the stories that flow through downtown Manhattan — media, power, and culture”, providing “scoops that you can’t get anywhere else”, according to founder Lachlan Cartwright.
“That’s why people will pay for Breaker. And I think that’s what sets us apart, as well as the voice. It’s that cheekiness.”
The newsletter (powered by Beehiiv ), with more than 40,000 paid and unpaid subscribers, acts as Breaker’s “core product”, while its website is an “add-on” to this.
“I’m probably one of the only people who has worked for Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, David Pecker and Jay Penske,” Cartwright said, adding he has “grown up in the tabloids” working across a range of UK and US-based titles.
Cartwright began his career in his homeland Australia at TV network Win TV in Victoria. He moved on to report for The Sun in London, before heading to the US to join the New York Post, The New York Times magazine and New York Daily News. He was executive editor of US Weekly publisher American Media Inc from 2014 to 2017 and in 2018 joined the Daily Beast as editor-at-large. Cartwright was a special correspondent at The Hollywood Reporter in 2024 when he left to found Breaker.
“So I have that mix of sort of highbrow-lowbrow, which kind of comes through in Breaker,” Cartwright said.
Cartwright added Breaker’s tone is “never mean, because mean is for amateurs”.
“But we will, as I like to say, give some of these very high-profile figures a bit of a tickle.”
‘Huge wave of subscription revenue’ in the autumn
Cartwright is the only full-time staff member at Breaker, supported by a part-time copy editor and two soon-to-join interns. Lionel Barber, the former editor of the Financial Times , also contributes a weekly column.
He said the site is already profitable, adding: “I’m a very lucky bloke [in] that, a year in, I’m earning on par with what I was making in legacy media.”
The site turned a financial corner in the autumn following a “run of big scoops”, hosting its first event and booking “a stellar lineup of guests” for the second season of its podcast.
“And then that just generated a huge wave of subscription revenue,” said Cartwright.
Breaker is “pretty much wholly reliant on subscription revenue”, offering its newsletter and site content for $12 a month or $120 a year. A premium tier costs $500 a year, which will soon give exclusive access to events and merchandise.
“A significant number of those paid subscribers are C-suite industry execs in the media as well as top editors at pretty much every big publication,” Cartwright said.
He did not take external funding to launch the site, but “put what little bit of life savings I had for an apartment into Breaker”.
Subscription revenue is largely supported by what Breaker calls its “superfans”.
“If Breaker is not out by 8:30pm [on Tuesdays and Thursdays] , I start getting texts [asking] ‘where is it?’,” said Cartwright.
He added this “level of engagement” points to “a huge growth path ahead of us, where I know that there are many more people who are still on the free tier to convert over to paid”.
While editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, Cartwright wrote a newsletter that “generated a very loyal audience, and those people have followed me over to Breaker”.
Hard paywall with ‘cliffhangers’
An example of Breaker’s newsletter cliffhangers, teasing the frontrunner of Politico’s next global editor-in-chief. Picture: Breaker
Breaker puts its newsletter and site content behind a hard paywall, teasing stories with a “cliffhanger”.
“I give a fair amount of thought as to where we put the hard paywall in the newsletter as you really have to give the punters a nudge to pay,” said Cartwright.
“I refer to it as ‘the cliffhanger’ and am very careful to ensure the payoff is worth it… every time a newsletter goes out it converts to paid subscribers because behind the paywall are the saucy scooplets which people will pay for.”
One of the main challenges Cartwright faces is subscribers forwarding newsletters, which run on newsletter platform Beehiiv , to non-subscribers, allowing content to be accessed for free. He said single newsletters have been opened up to 600 times, “and that’s not one person opening it,” said Cartwright.
He plans to combat this with group subscriptions and appealing to media companies with this.
“You’re appealing to people’s good nature and them realising that if it is mass forwarded, that is lost revenue for Breaker,” he said. “That will obviously open up another path of revenue.”
A Black Friday discount has also proved successful, dropping the annual cost from $120 to $99.
This drew “a lot of people” in, said Cartwright, adding he is considering holding this discount once a year.
Aside from subscriptions, Breaker receives some revenue from newsletter advertising.
The company also generates revenue from Youtube from its podcast, which is also available on Spotify, after the platform waived its usual size requirements for monetisation in May.
This was due to Youtube seeing “value” in Breaker’s “unique” video podcast concept, said Cartwright, with in-person interviews filmed in different New York venues, “from restaurants to bars to coffee shops”.
“That’s why they got behind us, and they’ve really helped us grow it,” said Cartwright. “Last season we had everyone from David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker… to Joe Scarborough [presenter on MSNBC] and we’re already starting to book big guests for season three.”
The podcast’s third season is set to launch in March, with each season comprising six to eight episodes.
Expansion to London
In 2026, Cartwright’s main focus is growing subscription revenue – but he “can’t be wholly reliant on subscriptions”.
“I think we’ll do that twofold again by continuing to produce agenda-setting scoops, and also [with] the group subscriptions,” he said, adding that brand partnerships and events are also in development. The purpose of one of its incoming interns “is to really drill down into these other lines of revenue”.
Expansion to London could also be on the cards for Breaker, with Cartwright considering the city to be a “real white space”.
“You have everything from The Telegraph sale, which we’ve covered extensively here at Breaker, to the Murdochs to Axel Springer out of Berlin. So I want to sort of generate more yarns out of London.”
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