The weekly email Popbitch has used a business model others are now catching up to, but it has entered new waters with an iPad magazine for $2.99 an issue.

A Gossipy Newsletter Aims Higher

By RAVI SOMAIYAAPRIL 13, 2014

LONDON — Every Thursday the Popbitch newsletter, written in a typewriter font redolent of the early Internet, lands in the inboxes of hundreds of thousands people in Britain and around the world.

Days later its news snippets and celebrity gossip, sourced mostly from an elite group of its readers, among them politicians, celebrities and journalists divulging their secrets, begin percolating through other outlets.

“Even if you have never read or even heard of Popbitch,” The Guardian newspaper has written, “you will have encountered its cultural influence.”

In recent weeks it unearthed a picture of the British prime minister asleep with government papers before a family wedding. It reported that members of one of Britain’s spy agencies, enjoying their snooping powers, sometimes text friends the lyrics of songs the friends happen to be listening to online. And 12 years ago this month, Popbitch presaged the phone-hacking scandal when it wrote: “Which newspaper showbiz desk has a trick for getting stories out of celebs’ mobile phones?”

When it began, on Dec. 17, 1999, the newsletter was sent to 15 people. It now reaches nearly 400,000, said Camilla Wright, one of its founders, in a recent interview near its offices in Soho, London. Its most devoted readers have formed a community of contributors — numbering about 50,000 — who gather on online message boards and in real life. About a dozen weddings have resulted. And members of the group have pooled resources to buy two racehorses.

Many news publications now speak of a future rooted in a committed community of readers, in throwing events, and in running tailored advertising that does not alienate audiences. The newsletter, however, has financed itself on that model for nearly 14 years. Now, it is expanding its ambitions, with an iPad magazine it started this year with longer pieces. Its supporters provided the development money for the initiative — about $50,000 — through the crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

The question is whether an intimate weekly email, with low costs and high impact, can scale to a magazine that asks readers to pay $2.99 an issue.

Popbitch is based firmly in pop culture — music, movies and the cult of celebrity — but its primary aim, Ms. Wright said, is to show its readers what is behind the images we consume, whether in pop, politics or international affairs. With its news snippets that often drive the agenda of British newspapers, it resembles Politico’s Playbook newsletter; its juicy celebrity scoops also bring to mind the gossip site TMZ.

The newsletter has come to reveal, said Adam Curtis, a British documentary filmmaker and adviser to Popbitch, “a ridiculous modern comedy” — that those we consider elite are vain, silly and desperate to join even smaller and more exclusive elites.

Ms. Wright keeps a long file of stories gathered from email tips and the message board, she said. She and a colleague, Chris Lochery, “sit down the two of us on a Tuesday or a Wednesday and see whether we can stand some things up, whether other things check out, see what’s time-dependent.”

When Ms. Wright wrote the newsletter herself, its distinctive voice was inspired by satirical magazines like the defunct Spy and the British bimonthlyPrivate Eye, she said.

Now, it has “its own voice,” dictated by community, “an amalgam of various people who contributed to it.” She describes it as “investigative, but good-natured. We’re trying not to be too mean.” If they get the tone wrong, she said, and skew toward cruelty, readers complain immediately.

The iPad magazine’s first issue included a critical, 2,300-word analysis of the business model of the British tabloid The Daily Mail. The magazine, she said, “gives us the opportunity to do more, with a bigger team and more capability to actually take in these stories, and put them out there.” The company has not yet received precise sales figures, but Ms. Wright said that the Daily Mail story was among its most popular ever.

Its ethos, Ms. Wright said, remains the same: “Be nice, and if you can’t be nice, be funny.”