I subscribe to 37 newsletters. I used to feel guilty about that number, but I have come to realize the problem was never how many I subscribed to. The problem was that I was trying to read them.
We are in the golden age of newsletters. Brilliant writers have left traditional media and are publishing directly on Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv, and ConvertKit. The writing has never been better. But the delivery mechanism, email, is fundamentally broken for long-form content. Nobody reads 2,000-word essays in their inbox. We skim. We star for later. We archive and pretend we will come back.
We will not come back.
The solution I found was to stop treating newsletters as reading and start treating them as listening. Turn the backlog into a personal podcast feed, and suddenly those 37 subscriptions become a curated audio library that fits into time you are already spending.
Why We Subscribe to More Than We Can Read
The newsletter economy has exploded. There are now over 255 million active newsletter readers globally, and the average engaged reader subscribes to far more than they can realistically consume. The reason is simple: subscribing takes one second, and reading takes twenty minutes.
Every time you hit that subscribe button, you are making a promise to your future self that you know you cannot keep. You are optimistic in the moment. "I'll read this during lunch." You will not. You will eat lunch while scrolling Twitter like you always do.
The result is the newsletter guilt spiral:
- Subscribe to an exciting new newsletter
- First few editions arrive, you read them enthusiastically
- Life happens, you skip a week
- Unread editions pile up
- Opening your inbox feels like seeing an overdue library stack
- You either unsubscribe (losing access to great writing) or ignore it (same result)
The tragedy is that you subscribed for a reason. The content is genuinely valuable. The delivery format is just wrong for your life.
The Audio Solution: Newsletters Become Podcast Episodes
Here is the mental shift that fixes everything: treat newsletters not as emails to read, but as episodes to queue.
When a newsletter arrives, you do not open it in your inbox and try to read it between meetings. You send the URL to a text-to-speech tool, it generates an audio version, and it joins your listening queue alongside the other articles and newsletters you want to get through.
Now that newsletter about macroeconomic trends gets absorbed during your Tuesday morning commute. The long-form profile piece from your favorite writer plays while you cook dinner. The industry roundup catches you up during your evening walk.
The content is the same. The writer's words are preserved. But the format now fits the moments where you actually have available attention.
Most newsletter platforms (Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv) publish web versions of
every email. That means every newsletter is a URL, and every URL can be
converted to audio.
Converting Your Newsletters, Step by Step
Different newsletter platforms have slightly different workflows for grabbing the right URL. Here is how to handle each one.
Substack Newsletters
Substack is the easiest. Every Substack post has a public web URL, and Substack's clean HTML formatting makes it ideal for text-to-speech conversion.
1
Find the web version
Open the newsletter email and look for the post title, which is always a
link to the web version. Alternatively, go directly to the writer's Substack
page (e.g., writer.substack.com) and find the post there.
2
Copy the URL
Grab the URL from your browser. It will look something like
https://writer.substack.com/p/post-title.
3
Convert to audio
Paste the URL into speakeasy. The app extracts the article text cleanly and
generates a natural-sounding audio version.
4
Queue and listen
The audio version saves to your library. Queue it alongside your other
newsletters and listen during your next green-light window (commute, walk,
chores).
Ghost Newsletters
Ghost-powered newsletters (many independent writers use this platform) also publish web versions. The process is nearly identical to Substack.
Look for the "View in browser" link at the top of the email, or visit the publication's website directly. Ghost posts tend to have clean formatting that converts well to audio.
Email-Only Newsletters
Some newsletters do not have public web versions. For these, you have a few options:
- Check for an archive page. Many email-only newsletters maintain a web archive. Look for an "archive" or "past issues" link in the email footer.
- Use the email's web view. Most email clients offer a "view in browser" option that generates a temporary web URL. This URL often works for text extraction.
- Forward to a read-later service. Services like Omnivore or Readwise Reader can receive forwarded emails and generate clean web URLs.
If your newsletters offer RSS feeds (most Substack and Ghost publications do), you can subscribe to them directly in speakeasy's RSS reader. New posts automatically appear in your feed, ready to convert to audio without any manual URL copying.
This is the most hands-off approach. Subscribe once, and every new edition shows up in your listening queue automatically.
My Personal Newsletter-to-Audio Workflow
After months of refinement, here is the system I use daily. It takes about 10 minutes per week of active management and keeps me current on all 37 subscriptions.
Sunday Evening: The Weekly Triage
I spend 10 minutes on Sunday evening scanning the newsletters that arrived during the week. I am not reading them. I am triaging. Each newsletter gets one of three treatments:
- Convert now. This is something I want to listen to this week. I drop the URL into speakeasy immediately.
- Skip. Not every edition of every newsletter is relevant. Some weeks a writer covers a topic I do not care about. That is fine. Delete and move on.
- Save for later. Occasionally something looks interesting but not urgent. I star it and revisit next Sunday.
The goal of triage is speed. Thirty seconds per newsletter, max. Do not start reading. Just decide: convert, skip, or save.
Daily: The Commute Queue
Every morning, my listening queue has 3-4 items ready to go. Some are newsletters I converted on Sunday. Some are articles I found during the week. The queue fills naturally without much daily effort because the weekly triage does the heavy lifting.
I listen at 1.5x for newsletters I follow closely (the writer's style is familiar, the topics are in my wheelhouse) and 1x for anything that covers territory that is new to me.
The Result
Since switching to this system, I have gone from consuming maybe 5 newsletters per week (out of 37 subscriptions) to consistently getting through 20-25. That is not a productivity hack. That is just using time I was already spending and matching it to a format that works.
The Sunday triage takes discipline for the first two weeks. After that, it
becomes automatic. The key is keeping it fast. You are sorting, not reading.
The Unexpected Benefits
Beyond the obvious advantage of actually consuming the content you subscribe to, turning newsletters into audio has a few surprising upsides.
You become a better curator. When you know you are going to listen to a newsletter rather than skim it, you become more selective about what makes the cut. Your triage instincts sharpen. You start recognizing which writers consistently deliver value and which ones you subscribed to on impulse.
You engage more deeply. Skimming a newsletter in your inbox takes 30 seconds. Listening to it takes 10 minutes. That forced slowdown means you actually absorb the arguments, notice the nuances, and form your own opinions. Counterintuitively, the "slower" format leads to better engagement.
You actually remember what you consumed. Ask someone what newsletters they read last week and most people cannot name more than one or two. When you listen to a newsletter during a specific activity (the Tuesday commute, Wednesday's cooking session), the context creates a memory anchor. You remember both the content and when you heard it.
You unsubscribe with confidence. After a few weeks of triage, you will notice that some newsletters consistently get skipped. That is a clear signal to unsubscribe. No guilt required. You gave them a fair shot and the content was not making the cut.
Getting Started Today
You do not need to overhaul your entire information diet at once. Start small:
- Pick your 5 most-valued newsletter subscriptions
- This Sunday, triage the week's editions and convert the best ones to audio
- Listen during one commute or walk session this week
- Notice how it feels to actually consume the content you are paying for (or at least giving your email address for)
If the system works, expand it. Add more newsletters to the triage. Incorporate RSS feeds for the publications that support them. Build the queue habit until it becomes second nature.
Your newsletter backlog is not a failure of willpower. It is a format mismatch. Fix the format, and the backlog takes care of itself.