How to Find Substack Newsletters to Pitch: Eight Ways to Build a Newsletter Media List

A growing share of the writers who cover any given industry now publish a newsletter rather than work in a newsroom. Substack passed 5 million paid subscriptions in 2025, and Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2026 survey found that 37% of journalists now publish independently under their own name or brand. For PR teams, that creates a practical problem: there is no masthead for Substack, and no single directory lists who writes about what.

This guide covers how to decide what you are looking for, eight ways to find the right publications, how to qualify them, and how to pitch once you have a list.

Start with the reader, not the platform

Before searching, answer three questions. What topic does the publication need to cover? Who reads it? And how large does the audience need to be for this campaign? The answers decide which methods below are worth your time. A niche B2B story needs a different search than a consumer product launch, and a 3,000-subscriber newsletter in your exact subject will usually outperform a 50,000-subscriber general-interest one, because its readers opened the email for the topic you are offering.

Eight ways to find Substacks

1. Substack’s own category pages and leaderboards. Substack publishes ranked lists by category, such as its top news publications, with separate pages for technology, business, culture, health, and more. They favor the largest publications, so they are a good starting point for the top of a market and a poor one for the long tail. Searching inside the Substack app by keyword reaches further down.

2. The recommendation network. Nearly every Substack publication lists the newsletters its writer recommends, and new subscribers are prompted to follow them. Once you find one good fit, its recommendations usually lead to five more in the same niche. This is the fastest way to expand a list from a single seed publication, and it surfaces small, relevant writers that no directory ranks.

3. Search operators. A search such as site:substack.com “supply chain” returns publications and individual posts that mention the term, and adding words like “newsletter” or “I write about” to a general web search finds writers who describe their own beat. It is slow, but it costs nothing and catches publications that use a custom domain rather than a substack.com address.

4. Third-party Substack directories. Several independent sites index Substack. Sidestack lists the top 100 publications with filters for roughly 30 categories and 15 languages and shows approximate free and paid subscriber ranges. Substack Explorer offers keyword search with subscriber and engagement data on a paid plan. Reletter and Letter Ranks publish ranked charts. These tools are built for readers and newsletter operators rather than PR, so they rarely include contact details, but they are useful for sizing an audience quickly.

5. Media databases. Muck Rack added newsletter authors to its database in 2021 and lets subscribers search them by the topics they cover, add them to media lists, and pitch from the platform. Cision and other enterprise media databases include newsletter writers to varying degrees. If your team already pays for one, check its coverage before buying anything else; the gap is usually in newer, smaller publications.

6. Newsletter sponsorship marketplaces. Platforms such as Paved exist to sell newsletter advertising, but their marketplaces let you filter newsletters by topic and see subscriber counts and audience demographics. They cover newsletters on every platform, not only Substack, and the audience data is better than most directories offer. They will not help you pitch editorial coverage directly, but they are a useful way to identify which publications in a niche have real reach.

7. PR tools built for newsletters. A newer category of PR software indexes Substack specifically. Featured, for example, offers a Find Substacks search that covers 38,746 publications, accepts plain-language queries such as “find Substacks that cover commercial real estate,” and shows each publication’s subscriber count, whether the writer’s direct messages are open, and linked social accounts, with results downloadable as a CSV. Tools in this category trade breadth for workflow: they are narrower than a full media database but faster for this one job.

8. Social search and your own network. Many writers announce every issue on LinkedIn, X, or Bluesky, and a search for a topic plus “my Substack” or “new post” finds active writers quickly. Ask clients, colleagues, and the experts you represent which newsletters they read; the ones that circulate inside an industry are often the ones worth pitching.

Pitch the way writers want to be pitched

The Muck Rack survey found that 69% of journalists prefer pitches under 200 words, 71% reject pitches that feel overly promotional, and 70% named clear relevance to their beat as the top factor in a successful pitch. For a newsletter writer with no editor and no obligation to read your email, those preferences apply with extra force.

Read before you write, and reference a specific recent post. Offer a format rather than a quote: a guest essay, a Q&A, a reader survey, or a cross-promotion gives the writer something easy to say yes to. Bring something exclusive, such as original data or a named expert who will answer follow-up questions. Use the channel the writer prefers, which is usually the DM if it is open. Follow up once, and then stop.

The bottom line

No single tool covers Substack. The best lists come from combining a broad source, such as a media database or a PR tool, with the recommendation network and a few manual searches to reach the writers no index has caught yet. The writers are reachable, the audiences are real, and the research is now a matter of hours rather than days.