Tag Archives: newsletters

06.05.19
by

Newsletters: How to launch a successful one

Man Reading Newspaper, by Mike Prince, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

This is going to a very meta post because I’m writing about a post from another newsletter about newsletters from the writer of another newsletter.

A couple of days ago, I spotted this very good newsletter from Poytner about journalism tools, and today, Ren LaForme offers up praise for a morning newsletter that he gets from Buffalo, New York, a place where he hasn’t lived more than a decade ago.

It’s both informative and interesting. It’s packed with voice — from individual reporters on the top stories and freelancer Brian Meyer on the roundups, with the occasional edition from Max Kalnitz (a fellow Spectrum student newspaper alumnus) — without losing its institutional authority

In praise of the morning newsletter, by Ren LaForme, Poynter

It’s a great summary of what makes a great newsletter, and being a newsletter about journalism tools, he also links off to a brilliant post by solo businessman Paul Jarvis about newsletters, which are critical to his business. Reading Paul’s post makes me wonder if newsletters are the new blogs – a personal publishing vehicle that helps a person build a professional profile.

Paul has a lot of pithy advice about newsletters, and it’s really useful. He lists three styles of newsletters that are successful, although I’ve seen others list more. For Paul, most successful newsletters are either long-form writing, the roundup (which is my newsletter) or news.

To be successful, he says that you first need to remember that you have to write, and I’ll say that I started doing my newsletter more intentionally to get me back in the habit of writing. I was offering up too many excuses and letting my perfectionism get the best of me. I felt like I needed something weighty to say to write, and slowly over time, the barrier to what was substantial enough to write became greater. Writing a quick summary of my newsletter, lowered that barrier, and it got me back in the habit of writing. The momentum now feels self-sustaining.

I also like this formulation that Paul has about the magic of newsletters:

Newsletters are interesting because they’re the only form of communication where 1:1 and 1:many exist in the same place.

My newsletter approach, by Paul Jarvis

As he says, writing a newsletter needs a cadence. I’m quite surprised that I have been doing this thing almost daily now since last autumn. I have had to flex how I do this as my work schedule changes, but I’ve been able to commit to it more as I got into it more and got more subscribers.

Paul has a great list for how to start your own newsletter. I’ll highlight just point number two:

Where do those people who should be on your newsletter currently spend their time? Who do they currently read? Who has these people as part of their audience already?

All in all, if newsletters are part of your work or are on your agenda, then you’ll want to bookmark Paul’s write-up of his approach.

Right, I better get back to prepping for my newsletter launch at work next week. Thanks for reading, and if you have a story that you think should be in my international media and journalism business letter, please drop me a link on Twitter, @kevglobal.

05.24.19
by

How the Seattle Times earned $400,000 from its morning newsletter

H&R Block, from Giphy

Talking about newsletters in my newsletter today. How meta.

But seriously, newsletters are one of the hot topics in media right now because we have so much data on how they are the first step to converting a user to a subscriber. Or, put another way, newsletters are the “zero subscription” as a Google product manager said at the Google News Initiative Summit that I attended in March.

Poytner has a great interview with Kris Higginson, the editor and lead writer for the Seattle Times’ Morning Brief newsletter. Higginson will be leading a seminar on 25 May about developing a successful newsletter at Poynter.

One thing to note: They use Salesforce Marketing Cloud to produce their newsletter. They had been using Mailchimp, which is what a lot of companies, including mine use. Despite the issues always involved in transitioning to a new platform, Salesforce is important to their strategy because:

Marketing Cloud is part of a bigger suite of programs. It lets the business side have more insight into audience behavior. We can see what content drives conversion. We can offer related content based on individual user habits. These abilities underscore our goal of increasing digital subscriptions.

Behind the success of The Seattle Times’ Morning Brief newsletter, by Mel Grau, Poynter

Hello to even more new subscribers. Wahay! And being new here, if you are new here, I want to extend an invitation to pass along interesting reads to me on Twitter, @kevglobal And if you aren’t a subscriber yet, get the full round of interesting in your inbox every weekday by signing up at my Nuzzel profile.

05.03.19
by

A worksheet from the New Yorker to help you develop your newsletter

Pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical intellectual, and deist, Paine is shown here, in the town of his birth, with a copy of his most celebrated work, ‘Rights of Man’, published in 1791. by Robert Alexander

I’m in the process of developing a daily newsletter at my day job, so newsletter strategy is at the forefront of my mind. That’s why it was super helpful that in the top story of today’s newsletter there is an interview with Dan Oshinsky, who oversees newsletter strategy for The New Yorker. GEN interviewed Oshinsky on how they develop newsletters. Not only is there several good points in the interview, but there is also a link to a worksheet that the New Yorker uses in developing its newsletters. It’s a really handy resource.

In building the organisational case that of all of the digital things we could do that we needed to prioritise a newsletter over other things, I pulled on a lot of data and analysis that newsletters are critical to building a loyal audience primed for membership. I work for one of the longest member-driven media groups in the US, a regional NPR/PBS group, and this is

One of my go-to quotes on newsletter strategy comes from an earlier review of newsletters at The New Yorker and Oshinsky’s thinking in which they found:

Last year, Condé Nast’s data science team built a model to predict which factors best determine whether a NewYorker.com reader will become a subscriber. Whether someone was a newsletter subscriber was the No. 1 indicator. Thus, The New Yorker can draw a straight line between the quality of its newsletter readership and its bottom line: more newsletters subscribers, in turn, means more paid readers.


With its new newsletter director, The New Yorker wants to experiment with standalone and international-focused products, by Ricardo Bilton, Nieman Lab

In addition to newsletter strategy, there is also a really good look at the 1000 true fans theory and what that means for journalism start-ups.

Have a great weekend. And if you have a story, let me know on Twitter, @kevglobal, and if you want to subscribe to the newsletter, it’s easy to do here.