There's a lot of news around newsletters becoming the new thing in news even when they're really not new at all.
The current darling of the newsletter world is Substack, where big-name journalists and other creators have decamped to build their own audience and generate direct revenue. While the business case is only solid for the most popular writers, that hasn't kept other platforms from getting into the game, including Facebook and Twitter.
In local news, the headline is the uncoupling of newsletters from a broader news organization or platform. In Nashville, 6AM City had just started sending out NASHToday, one of its eleven daily city newsletters, when I saw a tweet from Axios Local that said Nashville was also on their expansion list for the year.
They join others, including Whereby.us, which currently has five city newsletters and has launched Letterhead, a product for others to create newsletters based on geography or content niches in the same way. These new entrants are not personality-driven, like Substack, and they don't create the news as much as curate it, delivering a more customized collection of content in an engaging format.
“There is a ton of news in Denver, but it’s really fragmented,” said Alayna Alvarez, Axios Denver reporter. “We provide value by being the people that bring it all together and tell you why it matters.”1
We all know that newsletters aren't new to the news and publishing business, but like email itself, it seems to cycle in and out of favor. The popularity wanes as publishers fail to refresh their newsletters and as other channels become shiny objects that distract. Then periodically people remember that email is a persistent presence in our lives and remains one of the most flexible and direct ways to communicate with a known audience.
So as legacy publishers make hard choices about what they can cover, and niche products pop up to occupy a defined lane in the collective attention span, these emerging newsletter-first organizations are seizing an opportunity to create a broad audience by aggregating niche content and delivering it in a user-friendly package.
Within the existing news landscape, there are a number of great examples of publishers doing it right, from large organizations like the New York Times to local sites like the Daily Memphian. For many, however, there remains an opportunity to revisit their newsletter strategy to both support their primary news channel as wells as develop relationships built through email.
With recent experience researching and buying advertising in newsletters from publishers across the country, I have a few recommendations:
Tap the value of curation - audiences need help finding the work publishers produce, particularly on digital channels. Consistently curating content and delivering it in brief clearly has value in a fragmented and crowded information marketplace, so much so, publishers might even consider linking to content they don't produce themselves.
Make signing up easy - I'm amazed how often I have to search to see if a publisher has a newsletter, and if so, how to sign up. The best have anchored their ask in key spots like front and article pages, have a landing page to presents all options, and link to examples so people know what they're getting.
Provide options for delivery - this applies to email subscriptions of all kinds, but providing subscribers a simple tool to choose their preferences, pick their frequency, and pause as well as opt-out, can reduce churn.
Use newsletters to drive data strategy - newsletter databases have to be integrated with registered users, subscriber accounts, and overall customer communication management. This requires a level of sophistication some might not have, but searching for solutions will pay off as first-party data increases in value.
Create an effective ad package - the best publishers, and these new newsletter-first organizations, take care to deliver value for the advertisers. This includes creating sponsorships with high profile and regular frequency, display ads that look good and feature the advertiser, and native positions that integrate sponsored posts with content.
Bonus - once your solid advertising solutions are ready, offer them in a self-service platform like Letterhead.
1 - Ad Age, Axios Local Is on Pace to Generate Up to $5 Million This Year.