‘People aren’t snarky enough any more’: Why Londoners can’t get enough of Feed Me

This New York City digest about “the spirit of enterprise” cunningly reads like a report sent from the back of a 1am Uber gliding through Manhattan. The newsletter contains dramatic references to anonymous sources, reports of Lower East Side restaurant closures, and scoops about media empires shuttering departments. It’s a place where trolling applications for liquor licences or company job boards are a way to read the tea leaves of the city.

Still, gossip doesn’t fully explain why Sundberg’s London subscribers have been lured out of the house on a Wednesday evening. I imagine the crowd is really here to see be in a room with Sundberg herself, a woman the New York Times recently described as the “Carrie Bradshaw of her generation” and the heir apparent to Gawker, and who Air Mail called “the most talked-about young woman in new media”.

Sundberg is in London on a trip that Substack has paid for – the UK being her second biggest market, with more than 100,000 readers, about 10% of those paid. At “Club Sundberg”, the crowd is a mix of young fashionables and fiftysomething media execs, gathered in an upstairs bar of the scene-y Maida Vale pub The Hero, they’re all here to be in the same room as her.

By the door, I join a group of women who identified each other as fellow Feed Me faithfuls. “I’ve been following the newsletter for five years,” says Niki, who is 30 and moved to London from Manila. “Obviously Emily’s in New York but I think being really far removed from that the whole scene, it just seemed really interesting.” But why are so many people outside the five boroughs keen to read about a second new cinema opening in the Hamptons? Who really wants a dispatch from the Community Board 3 meeting in the basement of Mount Sinai Beth Israel on Rivington Street – even if it was to determine the fate of the hipster hangout Dimes Square? A 24-year-old PhD student called Lucy who I met by the bar had a succinct answer. “People aren’t snarky enough any more. I appreciate it.”

I met Sundberg the previous afternoon in the bar of the Lanesborough hotel in Knightsbridge, where I found her working on her laptop in an oversized pink striped shirt. “I have people who live in East Hampton who send me stories. I have people who live in Soho who send me stories. I have people who live in Aspen who send me stories,” she told me. “Then I can either leave my house and investigate it myself or make some phone calls and get to the bottom of it. That alleviates having to go out at night with a hood on.”

Sundberg, who is forthright but friendly, is – to use a word she’s fond of in Feed Me – bullish on the newsletter’s broad appeal. “There’s so much capital in [New York] that there’s a real human interest in it, whether you live in the middle of Arkansas or in London,” she said. “I don’t think if you just said, ‘Hey, this restaurant changed the font on their menu’ and published it in a random newspaper it would make sense, but because it’s housed in this universe that I created, it matters to people.”

In Feed Me, there are a cast of business entrepreneurs that serve as celebrities, details about layoffs and restructures, and reader survey results about people’s gambling habits and how much they blow on stag weekends. The monied universe Sundberg writes about is one that she was raised on the periphery of. “I grew up on Long Island in a very normal household. My dad’s a teacher, my mom’s an artist, and it was just close enough to New York City and the people whose dads cleaned up in the 90s on Wall Street,” she said. Sundberg remembers taking the train into the city and watching the houses get nicer and people with better suits get on the train. She partied a lot growing up but from the age of 14, when she got her first job, she knew she really wanted to make money.

Sundberg has lived in New York City since she moved there at17 but still credits coming from a town outside it for her ability to take notice of the strange queues for pastries forming on the street, or the underground members’ clubs that are roped off for most of the city. So, is Feed Me a rarefied space for the city’s movers and shakers, or full of people fantasising about being part of that world? “I think it’s mostly the latter, but there’s a big percentage of people who are in the world.”

Being the it-girl of gossip has put a spotlight on her. Substack is a place where writers who share more of themselves are rewarded by fans who feel they are being personally addressed by someone who they have bought shares in. These days, Sundberg’s readers all feel they can ask her out for dinner or ask how much money she earns the first time they meet her. How does she politely shake off unwanted invitations? “Lately it’s been a lot of: ‘I’ve been slammed, hope you’re doing well… But come to my next party, I’ll be there.’”

The newsletter used to feature a selfie of her at the top of every post, but she stopped because, ironically, she didn’t like seeing people talking about her online. “I was getting tired of seeing my face so I think everyone else was, too. But I can’t deny the fact that it definitely helped me get an initial wave of readers who still read today.”

Sundberg was married two weeks before we met and the resulting post with photographs from the day is, she says, probably the biggest uptick of paid members she’s seen since launching the newsletter. Afterwards s She considered posting more about herself, then came to her senses. “I think I’ve done a really good job at keeping my personal life under wraps. I haven’t really monetised my home or my closet,” she says.

At Club Sundberg the following evening, the agenda is “drink, gossip, discuss news”, but nobody I meet is discussing the headlines – unless you count Annie, who tells me that she is considering a conclave to find her friend a decent boyfriend. Instead, gossip is being dispatched and people who are usually strangers in the comment section of Feed Me are making fast friends. Later, someone says in hushed tones that they thought Feed Me’s recent guest letter from London– dispatched while Sundberg was on her honeymoon – had surprisingly stale restaurant tips.

Feed Me gives readers the feeling of knowing something that someone, somewhere might not want you to know, a high that’s hard to find on the internet these days. “I don’t have any social media so I’m addicted to non-social media sites where I can get my fill,” says Lindsay, a human rights lawyer and American expat living in London. “I feel like Emily, whether she would accept this title or not, is the queen of Substack. I knew she’d really made it because my Mormon mother in California forwarded me an article by Emily and I was like: ‘You read Feed Me?’ She just responded: ‘Duh…’”

Events are a big part of the draw for paying Feed Me members, with a reported 500-person waiting list for a party Sundberg threw in New York in February. At the Lanesborough,Sundberg told me that her parties had facilitated dates, brought about job offers and instigated members starting companies together. At the event this evening, she welcomes the eager crowd wearing another billowing pink shirt and holding a glass of red wine. “Some of you might be plus-ones, which are totally welcome, I just ask that you subscribe later,” she says, reminding anyone who has London tipoffs that she’s all ears.

In the corner, I join a table of men in suits, a mix of media execs and writers and all Feed Me subscribers. I ask what they think is the draw of a New York City business newsletter for people living in London. “If you work in fashion or art or publishing– like the women over there who I spoke to – I think you want to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening across the pond,” says Paul Needham, the chief executive of restaurant review website The Infatuation.

“This isn’t about who has a good cheeseburger; this is something you read because you want to find out where you’re supposed to be,” says David Rhodes, the chair of Sky News. “The baseball player Yogi Berra had a saying: ‘No one goes to that restaurant any more, it’s too crowded.’ This is about avoiding being in that place.”

Looking around the room, everyone is here to be in the place you’re supposed to be, but might Feed Me eventually become that crowded restaurant? “No comment…” says Rhodes.

Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer