No.
You don't need a CRM. You need an editorial system with a contact list bolted on.
What's really going on
You're running a newsroom, not a sales floor. Tips come in three channels, get triaged, become stories or get killed, and four newsletters ship every week against deadlines. The real risk isn't losing a "lead" — it's a tip going cold in an Instagram DM, or a freelancer missing a Thursday handoff. At 10–50 inquiries a month with two writers, the bottleneck is editorial coordination, not contact management.
What to do instead
- Notion or Airtable (free tier) — one base with two linked tables: Tips (source, channel, date, status, assigned writer) and Stories (pipeline from idea → drafting → edit → published, plus which newsletter). This is your real CRM.
- HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — only for the paid-tier subscriber list and pitch relationships with PR people and sources you want to nurture. Don't pay for Sales Hub. Don't put tips here.
- Habit: every tip gets logged within 10 minutes of arrival, by whoever sees it. No exceptions for DMs.
First action, 30 minutes: open Airtable, duplicate their "Content Calendar" template, add a "Channel" field with Email / Web form / Instagram DM, and forward the last week of tips into it tonight.
What you're being oversold
Someone will tell you to buy Pipedrive or Sales Hub to "manage your pipeline." Pipedrive is built for sales reps closing deals with a dollar value — your stories don't have ACVs and your sources aren't leads, so the stages won't fit and you'll abandon it in two months. Sales Hub is worse: you'd pay per seat for forecasting features a newsroom doesn't use. The cost of doing nothing isn't money lost — it's a tip from a real source sitting unread in an Instagram DM for nine days while a competitor publishes it.
When to revisit this
When the paid tier crosses a few hundred subscribers and you start running real ad sales or sponsorship deals — that's when a contact CRM earns its keep.
The part worth getting right
The fork is whether the paid tier is a product or a relationship business. If it's self-serve subscriptions through Substack or Ghost, your "CRM" is just the subscriber export and you never need more. If you're chasing industry sponsors, festival partnerships, and studio ad buys to fund the reporting, that IS a sales pipeline — small, high-touch, six-figure deals — and the tools and habits you set up now decide whether you're ready for it or scrambling in month four. Pick wrong and you either over-build for hobby revenue or under-build and fumble a sponsor on a napkin.