By Joanne C. Gerstner

The idea was intriguing and scary when it was presented last summer: would I be interested in having my own platform and newsletter, hosted by Facebook/Bulletin.com? The social media superpower reached out to me, and a few dozen other global journalists and content creators, to be part of its beta newsletter program.

I had never pondered jumping into the newsletter game, a new and hot front in content creator-driven journalism that is decoupled from traditional news outlets.

But I thought about it, and decided I needed to take this risk. And so, Open Court, aka opencourt.bulletin.com, went live in late July 2021. Five months and 40 pieces later, I can say the jump has been a fantastic learning opportunity – and hopefully something fulfilling to my growing audience.

Open Court has its own logo, attitude, and vibe. I am a sports journalist, and one of the few women who write sports for a living in the Bulletin.com platform (which includes household names such as women’s rights activist Malala, authors Mitch Albom and Malcolm Gladwell). I take my voice and platform seriously. I wanted Open Court to be a space where we can gather to discuss the big things in sports and life and have some fun. The goals of Open Court are to gain a subscriber base from scratch, find ways to monetize the content, and make it fly twice per week.

The newsletter hustle life is real: you are the managing editor, content creator, promoter, social media curator, comment responder/gatekeeper, photo/video/audio editor, and business executive running the show. In the former real world, when I used to work for traditional media outlets, I only had to do one or two of those important jobs. Now, unless I decide to hire people to do those things for me, I am the complete boss and sole employee of my content operation. It is a lot of work, especially considering it is a side gig to my full-time job of being a journalism professor at Michigan State. But I have always hustled, and this is a new adventure.

It’s a daunting and exhilarating thing. When I do something that resonates, I know it quickly. The pieces I did on Indigenous lacrosse players finding success in college, the Paralympics, or on the hot music group BTS, were smashes. My social and traffic metrics shot up. Comments through the roof, with each needing curation. When I wrote things that the audience didn’t care about…sigh…I knew about that quickly by the cyberspace crickets.

The alchemy of Open Court will be finding my true voice (the eternal work in progress for any writer), getting people to subscribe for free (opencourt.bulletin.com/subscribe), and keep them coming back without sacrificing who I am to pander to the masses.

I look forward to sharing this journey – from the frontside of the Open Court platform, to the backside of what it takes to make this work – with my AWC Detroit colleagues through an online chat in the new year.

In the meantime, I would appreciate your support (please subscribe! and like my facebook.com/joannecgerstner page), and as always, if you have any ideas you want me to write about, drop me a line at joanne@joannecgerstner.com.

Welcome to my Open Court!

Joanne is an award-winning multimedia journalist, author, college professor and Fulbright specialist. She extensively covers, and is an expert, on sports, concussions in sports, the global business of athletics, women in media, and journalism/social media for outlets such as The New York Times, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, the BBC, USA Today, ESPN.com and Detroit News.  She is the Brandt Fellow Sports Journalist in Residence at the School of Journalism at Michigan State University.  Gerstner received the AWC Detroit 2017 Headliner Award and was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in September 2021.