Building new media in the age of broken trust
Lessons learned one year since launching Opening Bell Daily.
One year ago, I decided to build something new.
In a blog post not unlike this one, I introduced Opening Bell Daily, built on the simple but urgent idea that trust in legacy institutions had eroded, and that readers were hungry for something real, transparent and accountable.
That bet has proven timely and correct.
Over the last 12 months, my co-founder Anthony Pompliano and I have grown our startup into a trusted financial resource with a reach and credibility that rivals legacy newsrooms with far greater resources.
Today, our morning newsletter reaches 190,000 subscribers. Shortly after it goes live, our partners at Bloomberg and Inc. Magazine republish my column to their audiences, too.
This amounts to millions of readers a month, outpacing the viewership I had as a senior reporter at Business Insider.
Importantly, we’ve done this while building a profitable business — a critical detail overlooked by too many media companies seduced by rapid scale or virality.
Our team is lean by design. What we lack in workforce we make up with force of work.
Speed. Consistency. Intensity. Ownership.
Unlike our mainstream peers, though, we do not confuse audience with traffic. Rather than make eyeballs the goal of the game, we see growing readership as a consequence of quality reporting.
Our subscribers seem to agree.
Many have told me they have come to rely exclusively on Opening Bell Daily for their financial news, precisely because we avoid the sensationalism and biases that have marred traditional news.
Indeed, a 2024 Gallup poll found that a record-low 31% of Americans trust mainstream media, while 36% have no trust at all.
One reader, a small business owner in Dallas, Texas, wrote me in early March that Opening Bell Daily is the only outlet she trusts for even-handed coverage on President Trump’s tariff plans because she knows we have two rare qualities:
The journalist behind the newsletter is accessible for real dialogue
We clearly distinguish between data, facts, and opinion
This direct line — impossible within the bureaucracy of traditional media — is Opening Bell Daily’s superpower. It’s how we punch above our weight.
When someone replies to a newsletter, it doesn’t filter through a company inbox or hit customer service.
It’s just me on the other side.
One Wall Street economist who subscribes to Opening Bell Daily, for instance, responded to one of my pieces with a critique of how I wrote about labor market data. His feedback didn’t disappear into a faceless corporation. It simply appeared as a notification on my personal phone.
I realized he was right, adjusted my reporting, and thanked him personally.
This kind of individual-to-individual dialogue is nearly impossible for a corporate newsroom saddled with red tape and hierarchical distance.
Plus, the entrenched Ivory Tower sensibility can be intimidating and off-putting to readers.
Even as a Manhattan-based journalist with a graduate degree myself, I’ve found many large newsrooms increasingly disconnected from their audiences.
That said, Opening Bell Daily doesn’t exist as a rejection of legacy media. Defining yourself solely by what you oppose leaves more room for resentment than optimism.
To build something worthwhile, it must be able to stand on its own. Valuable in a vacuum, not just “in comparison to.”
Opening Bell Daily aims to marry the editorial rigor, professionalism and authority of the old guard with the internet-native, independent, and nimble qualities of the new.
The work is data-driven and optimistic. We publish at an ambitious pace. We want our readers to be informed about the world as it is today, while maintaining hope for what it could be tomorrow.
As I’ve often shared when asked with how we’ve built the company, there are no shortcuts or parlor tricks.
The hard path is the shortcut, as the saying goes.
Readers recognize that. Because our audience is smart and engaged in the work, they wouldn’t stick around through any whiff of foul play or short-changing.
This company was born from a long conversation Anthony and I had over several months. What would the best independent financial newsletter in the world look like?
We work hard to keep answering that question each day — only now it happens alongside nearly a quarter-million participants.
Scale alone won’t shape the future of news. While incumbents are just beginning to figure that out, our team at Opening Bell Daily is moving forward faster than ever.
Onward!
Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily
