Not an insider, Inver Grove Heights man builds a following for his entertainment biz reporting

Rick Ellis knows that producing his newsletter on the world of television and streaming from the Twin Cities suburbs — and not Hollywood — is a selling point.

Ellis writes his Too Much TV newsletter on Substack from home in Inver Grove Heights five days a week. “Both for readers and for the industry, not being in Hollywood, they see as a positive, I’m outside the bubble. I have a perspective about it.”

To both groups, he isn’t worried about losing access or going to parties or pleasing business partners. “And honestly, it helps I’m at an age where I could care less. What, you’re going to ruin my career?”

Now, Ellis, who says he’s in his 60s, puts his base of paid and free subscribers at 140,000, with each newsletter he sends out getting shared another time or two. (Substack’s biggest newsletters have 200,000-plus subscribers.) His reporting there has made headlines across the news spectrum, most lately a candid interview with a staffer on Jimmy Kimmel’s show after it was pulled by ABC for a week.

“If people are paying for what you’re doing, then you’re doing something right,” Ellis said. “They’re not just paying for you to be polite.”

In a world where it’s getting more complicated to draw lines between TV, streaming and cinema, Ellis doesn’t cover theatrical releases. He maintains a free level of access to his newsletter so it’s accessible to all — and shareable, too — but also offers extras to his paid subscribers, including videos and regular Zoom calls.

After an extended stint as a comic based in Chicago, Ellis got a job working for Internet Broadcasting in St. Paul, which hired him to manage the online operations for the NBC affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama. He did that for a couple of years before relocating north. The job didn’t last, the first of three layoffs in two years.

Family drove a lot of Ellis’ thinking. “For us, the primary factor was that we have a son on the spectrum, and they have really good care in Minnesota.” That put a job offer in Manhattan in perspective. He turned it down and decided to continue freelance writing in Minnesota and transform a personal website into a full-time business.

“It took about maybe three or four years to get to the point where the business was self-sufficient,” Ellis said.

Ellis also has a varied background, early multimedia news lessons and connections to draw on, including work covering the media industry for a startup financial news site out of the Bay Area, entertainment freelancing in the Chicago area and working as a radio host along with his time in comedy. One early scoop was breaking news of MSNBC letting Phil Donahue go in the run-up to the second Iraq war.

But entertainment news? Ellis admits it was an unconventional choice. “If you were picking ways to make money, writing about entertainment would not be the first choice, because there’s a lot of big players,” he said.

He has boosted his name in the crowded marketplace with more investigative efforts, including a story about a Minnesotan who worked with casting young actors facing accusations of abuse and later pleaded guilty in a couple of cases. The story won him the 2024 David Robb Award for Best Investigative Civil Justice Story at the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards from the Los Angeles Press Club, beating out writers from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News for national recognition. And a $5,000 cash prize, which goes a long way for an independent operator.

A couple of technical shifts helped him work from the Twin Cities suburbs: In the wake of COVID, outlets turned to Zoom and other remote ways to access talent for interviews.

Also, the growth of Substack, which combines a blogging platform with delivery via email, allowed him to monetize his audience. That’s something he couldn’t do with his first website in 1999, and Substack also allows him to send out as many emails as he wants for free.

Now his All Your Screens website primarily hosts the content for his newsletter. “It’s just me, and honestly, I don’t know of anybody out there, particularly in the media and television space, writing this much on a regular basis, and not just writing, it’s reporting and interviews,” he said. “It’s a firehose.”