newsletter-topic-landscape

Compare editorial topics and coverage across Substack newsletters through Crawlora publication discovery and bounded public post samples. Use for a newsletter landscape, publication positioning map, coverage-gap brief, or topic-focused reading shortlist without inferring readership.

Access and scope

Set CRAWLORA_API_KEY to your Crawlora key. Prefer the listed Crawlora MCP tools when connected; otherwise use the bundled scripts/crawlora.sh, which sends x-api-key to https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1. Read reference/endpoints.md for exact methods and parameters. Check application code as well as HTTP status; payloads are inside data. Stop on authentication errors, back off on 429, and retry a transient upstream failure once. Bound pages and calls by the requested scope and credit budget. Preserve source IDs, URLs, retrieval times, and source dates where supplied.

Map what a chosen set of newsletters publishes about a topic. Define topic and synonyms, date window, language, publication scope, and balanced per-publication sample budget. Use a supplied publication set first; search and category results are discovery samples rather than a complete newsletter universe.

Resolve publications and sample their editorial work

1. Use site-wide substack_search for candidate posts/publications or discover categories before browsing. Category paid/free scopes differ; do not pass a category ID to a route that expects a publication ID. Search/category pages are zero-based; publication archives use offset/limit.
2. Resolve each publication's subdomain/custom domain and numeric publication ID. Use detail and contributors to distinguish publication identity from writer identity. Recommendations are attributed publication links, not proof of commercial affiliation or endorsement of every story.
3. Sample each publication archive with sort=new for comparable recent coverage, or an explicit topical search. top/community ordering samples popular posts, not chronology; do not call those representative recent coverage. Preserve selection rules, returned dates, offsets, and the stopping reason.
4. Site-wide search supplies metadata, not article bodies. Fetch selected posts using the discovered publication and post slug. Treat public previews and paywalled articles as partial evidence. If only a title is available, label the coding basis as title-only and lower claim specificity.

sh

scripts/crawlora.sh /substack/search query="climate adaptation" page=0
scripts/crawlora.sh /substack/categories
# Use discovered publication/slug values, for example:
# scripts/crawlora.sh /substack/publication/posts publication="$PUBLICATION" sort=new limit=10 offset=0
# scripts/crawlora.sh /substack/post publication="$PUBLICATION" slug="$POST_SLUG"

Code topics and distinguish editorial positioning

Create a shared topic rubric, preserving unexpected topics and uncertain labels. A post may receive multiple labels; label counts can therefore exceed unique posts. Deduplicate by canonical post URL/ID within each publication, and retain cross-publication reposts as related content. Compare topic shares only with visible denominators, equal sampling rules, and unavailable-body counts. Separate frequency of publication, article length/depth, framing, and engagement observations. Likes/comments and leaderboard positions do not establish reader numbers, paid subscribers, revenue, influence, or audience demographics.

Return a publication-by-topic matrix, sampled-post evidence with dates/URLs and coding basis, notable editorial differences, a reading shortlist, and observed coverage gaps. An unobserved topic is a gap in the sample, not proof a publication never covers it or proof of market demand for a new newsletter. Do not subscribe, contact writers, or create a recurring coverage monitor unless requested.