How Michelle Leder Built (and Sold) the Footnoted Brand

by Maya Payne Smart

Michelle Leder jokes that she was the first person to be fired by e-mail. She lost her last staff newspaper job in 1998 while backpacking in Christchurch, New Zealand. Leder had taken a long leave of absence from a business reporting position with the Poughkeepsie Journal to travel around the world with her husband. When she wrote her editor to remind him of her return in two weeks, he replied, "Don't bother."

 

That message launched her into the freelance world. "I would like to say I was clairvoyant and knew that daily journalism was going down the tubes in 1998, but I'm not quite that smart and brilliant," she says. "In all honesty, I'm glad I got out when I did. Had I stayed in daily journalism, I would now be a mid-career journalist struggling to figure out what the hell I was doing for the next 20-something years of my life."

 

Instead, Leder began freelancing for Crain's New York Business and, by the beginning of 1999, she had regular assignments from The New York Times Sunday business section and others. Around the same time, she came up with the idea to write a book about digging into financial footnotes. In 2002, Wiley accepted her proposal for "Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company's True Value," and in February 2003, she registered the domain name footnoted.org. Seven years later, almost to the day, Morningstar, a global investment research firm, acquired the site for an undisclosed amount.

 

"It just felt important to me to have a Web presence to correspond with the book," she says.
For the first two years, the blog--originally hosted by the free Blogger platform--played second fiddle to the book's promotion page. But when Leder started posting new content daily, the balance shifted. In no time, she'd earned a sizable following. The Wall Street Journal called Footnoted.org a must-read blog in 2005, and the next year Time magazine named it one of the 50 coolest sites. "The fact that I was getting attention from so-called Big Media sort of kept me going," she says. "I wasn't just toiling in vain, people were noticing my work."

 

In 2007, Footnoted.org underwent a major redesign, "so it didn't look like it was from some person in their room in Peekskill, New York, just doing a site." In truth, it was exactly that--a one-woman operation.

 

The enhanced site raised Leder's recognition as a skilled financial blogger and bolstered her income from book sales, site advertising, donations and articles. She also taught seminars for journalists, security analysts and researchers who were interested in digging into financial statements.

 

"I was repurposing content and reselling," she says. "I was involved with Portfolio magazine from the beginning. Would I have gotten the regular gig at Portfolio without the site? I don't know. That's why I'm trying to talk about the interrelation. You have to build your brand and basically see what works and what sticks."

 

Maintaining readers' trust was a part of the brand. "I always feel like I have a very strong ethical compass, and there are things I turned down that didn't seem right to me," she says. "I didn't do PR or any of that other stuff; I didn't have to go that route."

 

Presenting financial information with a touch of personality, humor and conviction was another part. "There was one post I did that I felt really strongly about last year on the election with Obama. I came out strongly on it. There were a lot of readers who said, 'You shouldn't interject politics. If I wanted someone's opinion, I'd go somewhere else,'" she recalls. "I thought, 'Well, if you want something un-opinionated, go read EDGAR [the database of financial information] and have fun with that.' I was totally unapologetic about it. That's the New Yorker in me."

 

While the site brought Leder 500,000 page views a month and multiple revenue streams, it was her subscription newsletter "Footnoted PRO" that attracted potential buyers like Morningstar. "They're very interested in the brand and what I've built," she says. "Clearly, they were more attracted by the potential of what we can do going forward with some additional resources than the actual revenue stream that exists today."

 

Michelle Leder's Tips for Entrepreneurial Journalism Success

 

1. Develop an expertise that others will pay money for you to provide. "I wrote about a very specialized type of financial information," Leder says. "Reading SEC filings is very cumbersome. Can someone do it themselves? Absolutely, but there's an amount of time involved."
   

2. Don't expect to be an overnight success. "You really have to work at it. If you asked my husband, he would tell you there were nights I was sitting there reading SEC filings at midnight," she recalls. "He'd say, 'Come to bed.' I would say, 'I have to read more filings.'"

3. Set a schedule. "I set a schedule where I had to have a post up every morning by 11 a.m. It wasn't when I felt like it or when I found something interesting or good. It was, 'I'm going to do this every single day. It's my job. I may not be getting paid for it every single day, but it's my job.'"

4. Be consistent. "You have to have quality. If you don't, no one is going to pay attention," Leder says. "There is even more noise out there than when I began."

5. Don't be afraid. "If it doesn't work, you correct. No one is judging you on how many mistakes you make in life."