Andrew Ross Sorkin's best sources are often "jilted" individuals—bankers who lost a deal, executives passed over for promotion, or spurned partners. These sources have nothing to lose and are motivated to talk, providing reporters with a powerful, albeit biased, starting point for a story.

Don't wait for large corporate campaigns to get audience feedback. Marketers should be "religiously" creating content on their personal social channels to micro-test messaging, language, and program ideas. This provides a direct, rapid feedback loop on what the audience actually cares about, enabling content-led innovation.

Andrew Ross Sorkin launched the Dealbook email newsletter in 2001 not as a grand innovation, but as a defensive tool to bypass the physical paper and reach Wall Street professionals who preferred the Wall Street Journal. It was an internal disruption designed to capture a key audience the main product was missing.

Stop thinking of content as a one-way broadcast. A sophisticated approach involves creating posts designed to provoke responses. Then, systematically mine the comments for raw, unfiltered consumer insights, effectively turning your social channels into a free, real-time market research platform.

Beyond marketing metrics, actively soliciting replies on non-business topics (e.g., "What's your favorite hobby?") uncovers valuable first-party data about your audience's interests. This enables more relatable and personalized content that resonates on a human level.

Shift your primary success metric from passive opens to active replies. A reply signifies a genuine two-way conversation and a much deeper level of engagement. Actively inviting responses in your emails transforms a broadcast into a powerful relationship-building tool and provides invaluable audience feedback.

Instead of asking for confirmation on a rumor, Sorkin's method is to build the story almost completely with details from various sources. By the time he asks the company for comment, he presents so many facts that they are incentivized to cooperate and shape the narrative, rather than just deny it.

To turn passive listeners into an active community, Klue created a feedback loop for their podcast. After each episode, the brand and creators posted on LinkedIn asking the audience to vote for their favorite segment. This coordinated effort boosted engagement and provided valuable feedback for future episodes.

Personal newsletters are resurging as a sanctuary from the exhaustion of social media. Creators crave a space for deeper context away from performative platforms, while audiences seek intentional, high-value content that respects their attention, leading to a boom in personality-driven newsletters.