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Geneva S. Thomas was letting her gel manicure dry when she had an idea. “It just dropped into my lap like a feather,” Thomas, a veteran of digital media, said. She pulled her hands from the LED dryer, grabbed her phone, and started typing. “It was like a download.” She started writing notes for what would eventually become The Knowing, a digital magazine delivered via newsletter for Black millennials and Gen Z audiences. She’s calling it the “world’s first inbox magazine.”
It took Thomas, who is forty-three, roughly three years to get from feather-idea to The Knowing’s debut last month, developing a subscription plan and working with a user-experience designer, creative director, and developers. “As you move through the issue in your email, you feel like you’re reading this premium glossy; the vision was to innovate newsletters,” she said. The inaugural cover story was about Black women workers wantonly pushed out of their jobs because of the Trump administration’s dismantling of diversity and inclusion efforts. A feature story looked at why Gladys Knight is still working at eighty-two. The pieces hark back to a bygone era of Ebony and Essence—Thomas’s undergraduate thesis was about the latter’s history—that offered a rare space for Black women and buoyed readers aspiring to America’s professional class.
Now, in this era of racist and sexist backlash, Thomas thinks it’s time to rebuild that space. A vertical in The Knowing called “Sanctuary” provides a space for confessions on how “women move in between worlds” and “how they’re defining themselves in between.” There are six verticals in total, spanning culture, politics, music, beauty. And in addition to the inbox magazine—which Thomas refers to, faithfully, as “the hero product”—there are other offerings coming, she said, including a summit and private dinner “collection.” Professional, entrepreneurial women are the target. “We’re bringing this autonomous brand identity and editorial identity, not just in our programming and coverage across news, culture, beauty, and wellness, but actually in the visuals that you see,” she said. The Knowing’s tagline is “News, Culture & Sovereignty.”
Thomas’s strategy is informed by a long career. She got her start at Condé Nast, in editorial, then jumped to the business side; she left as the global head of growth marketing. She went on to become the vice president of digital business at Essence, then the vice president of business operations at People Inc. She worked through industry-disrupting shifts: pivot to video, pivot to short form. She survived what she describes as the cannibalizing of publishers by Google and Meta. By the time she had the idea for The Knowing, she was on a career break. “For legacy businesses like Time Inc., Condé Nast, a big part of our digital growth strategy were newsletters,” she said. “Newsletters have seen an explosion in the past five, six years with companies like Puck, Semafor, 1440, Morning Brew, and we’ve seen consumers really take to Substack.”
For The Knowing, however, Substack was out of the question. “It was incredibly important for me to build an autonomous and proprietary media business,” Thomas said. With Substack, “you are truly building the Substack business. Their logos, their branding—you really have to live within their templates.” She sees The Knowing’s mission as more aligned with that of the legacy publications for which she once worked. “We have seen the sacrifice of deeply reported journalism, and there are certain publishers, like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, that still get to do that. But the reason why is because they built incredibly strong subscription businesses,” she said. “We have not seen any Black-owned media build a robust subscription business, so we are really first movers when it comes to that.”
At the start of 2027, The Knowing will target ten million dollars in Series A funding. For now, it’s on Thomas to produce the issues, which go out every Saturday, and to manage the day-to-day operations. “With leadership additions to our newsroom this year, including freelance support, production will be co-led for the hero, with runway to verticalize newsletter products,” she told me. Eventually, she said, she would like to hire a head of news and a head of beauty to help her with content.
Thomas hopes that her efforts will inspire investors by attracting subscriptions from Black readers who have endured neglect and harm from major outlets. Generations of Black publications have delivered alternative coverage—and The Knowing has entered the ring among other young publications such as Capital B and MLK50—to stake a claim on what the magazine describes as “an audience orphaned by a publication of record producing fact-based, trusted journalism and criticism.” But Thomas’s (digital) glossiness brings something different. The Knowing’s website evokes a luxury hotel experience: “What if news felt like a concierge and not an interruption?” As she told me: “It’s very custom and bespoke, from header to footer. It really gives this ultra-premium experience of classical print.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to clarify details about The Knowing.
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