Though it could expand his outlet’s reach — especially, in his words, as email becomes increasingly important “as a distribution channel with social media declining as a traffic source” — Brodbeck didn’t think creating an additional newsletter was an optimal use of reporter time in the zero-sum, resource-strapped reality of running a hyperlocal news outlet.

“As much as I would love to have a 25-person newsroom covering Northern Virginia, the reality is that we can only sustainably afford an editorial team of eight across our three sites: two reporters/editors per site, a staff [photographer], and an editor,” he said. In short, tapping a reporter to write a morning newsletter would limit ARLnow’s reporting bandwidth.

But with the exponential improvement of AI tools like GPT-4, Brodbeck saw an opportunity to have it both ways: He could generate a whole new newsletter without cutting into journalists’ reporting time. So last month, he began experimenting with a completely automated weekday morning newsletter comprising an AI-written introduction and AI summaries of human-written stories. Using tools like Zapier, Airtable, and RSS, ARLnow can create and send the newsletter without any human intervention.

Since releasing the handbook, Amditis has heard that many publishers and reporters “seem to really appreciate the possibility and potential of using automation for routine tasks,” he told me in an email. Like Brodbeck and others, he believes “AI can save time, help small newsrooms scale up their operations, and even create personalized content for their readers and listeners,” though he raised the widely held concern about “the potential loss of that unique human touch,” not to mention the questions of accuracy, reliability and a hornets’ nest of ethical concerns.

Even when instructing AI to summarize content, Amditis described similar challenges to those Brodbeck has encountered. There’s “a tendency for the summaries and bullet points to sound repetitive if you don’t create variables in your prompts that allow you to adjust the tone/style of the responses based on the type of content you’re feeding to the bot,” he said.

But “the most frustrating part of the work I’ve been doing with publishers of all sizes over the last few months is the nearly ubiquitous assumption about using AI for journalism (newsletters or otherwise) is that we’re out here just asking the bots to write original content from scratch — which is by far one of the least useful applications, in my opinion,” Amditis added.

Brodbeck agrees. “AI is “not a replacement for original local reporting,” he said. “It’s a way to take what has already been reported and repackage it so as to reach more readers.”

The conversation was spurred by questions Sahan Journal’s innovation editor Aala Abdullahi got in response to a new weekly newsletter, called Tani waa su’aashayda, which means “This is my question” in Somali.

Minnesota is home to the largest Somali population in the United States. Sahan Journal was founded in 2019 founded by CEO and publisher Mukhtar Ibrahim to serves the news needs of immigrant communities and communities of color in Minneapolis and throughout the state.

Sahan Journal developed Tani waa su’aashayda after a year of listening sessions with immigrant, refugee, and non-English-speaking communities across Minnesota. (The listening sessions were funded via a grant from the Google News Initiative and conducted in partnership with the media outlets that serve Minneapolis’s large Spanish, Hmong, and Somali-speaking communities: La Raza 95.7 FM, 3HmongTV, and Somali TV Minnesota.) They chose the title “Tani waa su’aashayda” because “we wanted the questions and feedback and the insights of Somalis to be at the center,” Abdullahi said.

Tani waa su’aashayda challenges the traditional newsletter format. Co-produced by Abdullahi and Somali TV’s Diis, it is audio-only. Abdullahi and Diis use the platform GroundSource to send audio files to subscribers via SMS.

Sending the voice notes in this way helps Sahan Journal and Somali TV reach its audience directly instead of relying on social media, and gives them a head start on reporting future stories that affect the community.

When subscribers first sign up, they get a welcoming voice note from Diis explaining what the newsletter is, what users can expect to hear, and how Sahan Journal and Somali TV will incorporate their feedback to grow the newsletter. Every week, Diis records an audio summary of three or four local news stories. When relevant, he also sometimes includes news from Somalia. He then tells subscribers about upcoming local events that Somalis can attend or get involved in.

In the last section, Diis asks subscribers what they did and didn’t enjoy about the week’s newsletter and why. He also asks them to share their questions for journalists. Those question serve as tips and ideas for future Sahan Journal stories, newsletter call-outs, and community discussion. Abdullahi hopes that an increasingly large percentage of Tani waa su’aashayda content’s will come from user feedback and questions.

The sections of the newsletter are recorded in separate voice notes and sent out throughout the week. Abdullahi says she sends out a maximum of six voice notes per week. Then, she compiles all of the audio files and layers on photos and graphics to produce a video to upload to YouTube. That way, people can listen to all of the voice notes in one place with a visual component instead to subscribing to the text message service. Abdullahi also uploads the voice notes to Sahan Journal’s website.

Other than some necessary text to help people navigate the newsletter’s archive page, the newsletter contains no written portions or stories. “The Somali language itself is not one where everyone agrees on the grammar,” Abdullahi, who is Somali herself, said. “There are a lot of dialect differences. We didn’t want to get bogged down by that. It’s a lot more seamless to just make it an audio.”

Sahan Journal had heard in its listening sessions, too, that Somalis living in Minnesota said they preferred to consume news via video or audio rather than reading it. (Sahan Journal has another newsletter called New Home that serves Afghan refugees, but is written and published in Pashto and Dari in a pamphlet format and distributed through PDFs via SMS.)

Breaking away from a traditional newsletter format also means defining new metrics for success. GroundSource doesn’t provide subscriber data or open rates, so Abdullahi instead looks at week-to-week subscriber growth. Today, the newsletter has 211 subscribers, and Abudallahi has received more than 400 texts from 151 users.

By March, Sahan Journal will take its learnings from Tani waa su’aashayda to decide how to best launch similar newsletters for Hmong and Spanish-speaking communities in Minnesota.

“We want to keep it bare bones,” Abdullahi said. “A lot of newsrooms that are similar in size to Sahan Journal are actively thinking about how to incorporate community engagement and feedback into their journalism, and are thinking about distribution models. We want to focus on a model that people could replicate.”

New York Times media reporter Katie Robertson broke the news:

SCOOP: Meta/Facebook is shuttering its Bulletin newsletter subscription service. It plans to wind it down by early next year. I’m told all writers will be paid out their full contracts. Statement from Meta: pic.twitter.com/qEgpnpS6tc

— Katie Robertson (@katie_robertson) October 4, 2022

Bulletin was launched as Facebook’s answer to Substack in 2021, not long after Twitter jumped into the paid newsletter game by acquiring Revue. The first featured authors were folks like Malcolm Gladwell and Malala Yousafzai.

“What’s weird about Bulletin…and perhaps shines a bit of a light on how much faith Facebook actually has in this product long-term, none of the creators they’ve launched with are people who I would think actually need Facebook’s monetization features,” noted Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick at the time. “I have an extremely hard time believing that Tan France needs a monetized newsletter hosted on Facebook.”

I imagine the celebrities recruited by Facebook to write for Bulletin will be okay! But Bulletin had started to extend support to a subset of writers who could really use the Facebook cash: local news reporters.

We know the local news writers had been promised “licensing fees” as part of a “multi-year commitment” that would provide them “time to build a relationship” with their audience but when we wrote about the program last year, Facebook declined to put a dollar value on the support or specify exactly how long writers could expect the payments to last.

A Meta spokesperson said this week that 23 out of the original 25 local news writers are still using the platform and confirmed they will receive licensing payments for at least another year, as the original contracts suggested. The company said they would also provide resources to the writers to help them map out their next steps.

“We are committed to supporting the writers through this transition,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “As mentioned, we are paying out their contracts in full. Additionally, they can keep their subscription revenue and subscriber email lists. In terms of content, they can archive all content and move it to a new platform of their choice.”

Roughly half of the 25 local news writers selected to join Bulletin are journalists of color. They’ve been publishing from communities in Iowa, North Carolina, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Connecticut, Texas, Michigan, California, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Georgia, Washington, Arizona, and Washington, D.C.

The financial support from Facebook was likely not life-changing for the local news writers. (Some boldface names reportedly inked deals with Bulletin in the six figures, but several of the local news reporters were planning to keep other jobs to make ends meet.) Facebook also provided legal resources, design help, newsletter strategy, and coaching to the group.

Soon after the local news partnership was announced, Kerr County Lead writer Louis Amestoy told Nieman Lab he saw a chance for Facebook to shape its information ecosystem of many local communities into something better.

“I think it’s important for Facebook to recognize this opportunity and say, ‘Okay, what do we really want to be?’” Amestoy said. “You see in certain communities that Facebook has come to fill a hole left by news deserts. Who becomes your local authority? The messaging group that’s there? Is there really someone there to curate that — someone who is objective and can differentiate the good stuff from the bad stuff? I certainly hope that they take some of the lessons that they’re going to learn from this, and make some more investments, because I think that there are a lot of opportunities. There’s so many talented journalists out there who really want an opportunity to do kind of thing that I want to do.”

With Tuesday’s abrupt announcement, it seems a little less likely those questions will get answered.

This article has been updated.

When I announced Platformer, I described my reasoning this way: “By going independent I hope to demonstrate that reader-funded reporters can survive and even thrive, breathing new life into a profession that is bleeding out in no small part due to the platforms I cover.”

Two years later, I’m happy to tell you that — thanks entirely to you — Platformer is a growing and sustainable business. When I left my full-time job at The Verge, there were about 24,000 of you reading every free edition. Last year, that number grew to 49,000. Today, there are just under 75,000 of you. And of that group, thousands have become paid subscribers, funding the growing ambitions I’ll share more about below.

I think all this speaks to the need for independent, reader-supported journalism about some of the biggest questions of our age: about the relationship between social networks and the world around them; about how technology ought to be built and governed; and about some of the seismic changes that result from innovation.

I also think it underscores the appeal of this newsletter’s design: one big idea a day, delivered straight to your inbox at a reliable time, without any ads, affiliate links, pop-ups, SEO bait, or any of the other now-familiar features of our digital landscape. Platformer shows up, tells you a few things, and ends. I think the value of this is still somewhat underrated.

But it only works because you show up every day to read, share, and support me. Whether you’re a free or paid subscriber, thank you for making Platformer the best job of my life. Together, I truly believe we’re helping to prove out a new model for independent journalism, and my hope is that many more will take similar approaches in the future. I hope you feel good about that.

Anyway!

What I learned

It’s still a hits business. As was the case last year, most of the moments that drove large numbers of free and paid subscriptions came when I broke news or wrote a piece of analysis that really resonated with you.

Some of the journalism you funded last year:

• I broke the news that Instagram was walking back controversial changes to the app.
• Along with Zoe Schiffer, I revealed how Twitter’s plans to build an OnlyFans competitor were foiled by its struggles to find and remove illegal content on the platform.
• I brought you one of the first on-the-record interviews with a former TikTok policy manager to explain what working for ByteDance is really like.

I’ve also regularly delivered news from inside Twitter as Elon Musk attempted to buy — and then get out of buying — the company, explored the fascinating case of the man who got fired by his DAO, and became one of the first writers to regularly illustrate my newsletter with DALL-E. These pieces really struck a chord with you, and the business grew accordingly.

Despite the fact that most growth is driven by hits, though, medium-performing posts help the business grow as well. They attract enough subscribers to offset churn — I averaged around 3% churn over the past three months — and often inspire some reader to reach out to me with some new idea or scoop that turns into the next hit.

That’s the basic flywheel that powers subscription growth, and it continued to work well in year two.

People will pay you to tell them it’s complicated. Sometimes when I feel like it’s been too long since I’ve had a scoop, a bit of existential dread can creep up on me: Is the work I’m doing here really valuable enough to charge for? (In a related story, I started therapy for the first time this year.)

What I am forgetting in those moments is that people are generally underserved by the commentary and analysis they find online. Most takes (and many reported articles) are still tuned to perform well on Twitter, and as such they tend to emphasize fear and outrage above all else. Most people experience a broader range of human emotion than these, and so browsing the Twitter timeline, or the stories produced in order to appease it, often leave us feeling empty: We know there is nuance and complexity there that has been sacrificed in hopes of getting retweeted.

One reason that some newsletters have become successful during this period, I think, is that they are built with different incentives. I write my newsletter assuming you’ll open it whatever it happens to be about that day; I pride myself on writing headlines that, if not exactly boring, at the very least do not over-promise.

On Twitter, each story competes against every other, warping coverage in ways that can undermine trust. But Platformer competes mostly with the other emails in your inbox — a competition that ought to be much easier to win, if only because there are funnier tweets in Platformer than you will find in most emails.

Moreover, because I write several times a week, the newsletter has an episodic format that makes it resistant to the more obnoxious forms of punditry. I don’t have to tell you absolutely everything I think about a particular subject, because I’m almost certainly going to talk about it again in the future. This lets me focus on nuances and trade-offs that folks in the hot-take business might not. (I sometimes joke that the two most common phrases in Platformer are “on one hand” and “on the other,” only at this point I’m not really sure it’s a joke.)

Anyway, let me give you a concrete example of how this works.

Last month I wrote about a tricky case involving a man who said he had wrongfully been accused of sharing child abuse materials. The case had been well covered by The New York Times. But I wanted to add some context, and underline some aspects of the case that I felt were getting lost in the discussion. In the next 24 hours, 29 of you became paid subscribers — effectively giving me a $2,900 raise (before taxes and platform fees) for a day’s work of walking through some subtle questions about tech policy.

That doesn’t happen every day. And some of those folks will churn before the year is over. But I truly wish every reporter could have the experience of getting a raise on the same day they produced something of value to their readers. It’s a powerful signal about the kind of work you want me to do, and helps to guide me to cover subjects that I might have otherwise set aside.

The Biden era is different. I knew Platformer would be a different publication after President Trump was dislodged from office. Trump was a walking catastrophe for both social networks and democracy, and his election had set in motion the series of events that led me to start writing a newsletter in the first place. (The events of 2016 were particularly difficult for one of my beat companies, which at the time was called Facebook.)

It took one failed coup and another year, but we’re firmly in the Biden era now. And while we still have no shortage of national crises, they’re not breaking out at the same chaotic frequency as they were during the Trump years. From 2017 to the start of 2021, I almost never struggled to decide what to write about on a given day. By 2022, though, it started to happen with some regularity.

That led me to explore subjects adjacent to my core focus on social networks: crypto and AI in particular. For the most part, you all came along, even when I was way too credulous (as I was with Axie Infinity). But because I had wedded myself to four columns a week, I often couldn’t manage to do as much reporting as I wanted to.

Unfortunately, I think the coming years will bring us chaotic news cycles more reminiscent of the Trump years than the ones we are living in today. In the meantime, though, I think the moment probably calls for less analysis and more reporting overall. There are moments when you want someone to help you to understand what you already read, and there are moments when you want someone to give you some interesting new things to read about. I feel like we’re in a latter such moment right now, and I need to move Platformer in that direction.

And to that end …

A four-times-a-week cadence has started to feel like a drag on newsletter quality. The most common question I get about Platformer is how I do it four times a week. The answer is that I rely heavily on the reporting of all the amazing journalists out there illuminating various aspects of tech platforms every day. And when the job is mostly making sense of stories you’re already reading about, I find it enjoyable to show up once a day and try.

But in a moment that calls for more original reporting, four times a week can feel oppressive. It doesn’t give me enough time to talk to platform employees, read upcoming books, chase newsmakers for Q&As, and wander down blind alleys.

I want to be clear that what I am describing here is not “burnout.” I love what I do, and if it seemed appropriate for the news cycle, I think four times a week would be the right way to go. But given where we are, I have some other ideas, which I’ll get to below.

You did not really want Platformer to be a jobs board. I was excited to give that one a shot, and it made a little money, but for the most part you were not clicking on job ads and companies were not buying them. I did like highlighting jobs at nonprofits for free, though; I might want to experiment with some other approaches to this in the future.

You do like the Discord, though. Sidechannel never quite lived up to the expectations I had for it as a kind of collaborative newsroom of independent journalists. But a solid group of you show up there every day to drop links, share commentary, and analyze events with me in real time. It has been an incredible resource for me this year, in sometimes unexpected ways — such as when some lawyers who had previously argued in Delaware Chancery Court helped us pick apart Elon Musk’s Twitter lawsuit.

I still think I’ve realized only about 1% of the value of having a Discord server, but this year convinced me that it’s worth investing in.

Substack figured out some new ways to get newsletters to grow. Last year I wrote here that the only way my newsletter grows is when people tweet about it. As of 2022, though, that’s no longer really the case. Substack did two things that were very helpful here.

One, Substacks can now recommend each other, and when you sign up for one newsletter, you’ll be asked if you want to subscribe to another publication that the newsletter recommends. I’m grateful to the dozens of Substacks who recommend Platformer; thanks largely to them, I’ve added 9,000 free subscribers since August 1. At the current trajectory, Platformer should easily hit 100,000 free subscribers within the next year. (Also, you can see all my recommendations here.)

Two, Substack now lets me send paywalled previews to free subscribers. I love having a model that lets me do journalism and send it out for free to anyone who wants it once a week. But sometimes I write something else during the week that I think might cause you all to consider becoming paid subscribers. Paywall previews let me do just that, sending you the top of a story and inviting you to pay to read the rest. I try not to do this too often, but whenever I have I’ve seen great results.

Substack is also experimenting with a referral program: Some paid subscribers of Platformer will soon be able to give away one-month free subscriptions to their friends and co-workers, in hopes that they will stick around longer.

So far, none of these have been a game-changer in the way that, say, launching a Discord server for paid subscribers was for me last year. But they’re steps in the right direction.

What’s changing

So what am I doing with what I learned?

Last year, I told you that I had two goals for year two: to launch a podcast, and to hire someone to help me. Like any good journalist, I blew right past my deadline. But I’m happy to say that both are happening soon.

So:

The podcast is coming October 7. Since February, I’ve been working with The New York Times on a new weekly chat show that will cover tech, business, and our weird future. My co-host is the great Times journalist Kevin Roose, and we’ve spent the past few months exploring ideas and developing something we’re proud of.

Collaborating with the Times and its incredible producers, artists, composers, and other teams has been a career highlight. I could say a lot more about the show, but I’d rather you just listen to it. To that end, the trailer drops next week — that’s when we’ll share the name of the show, by the way — and the first episode will premiere a week later.

I’m moving from four guaranteed text posts a week to three. For the podcast to be as good as it can be, I need to set aside a day during the week to focus on it. The timing feels right to make this change: the news cycle is a beat slower than it was during the Trump era, and moving to three posts a week will give me more time to do the additional reporting I want to do.

The way I’m thinking about this is that my output will basically be the same, but the fourth “post” of the week will be a podcast — one whose editorial interests align closely with what we talk about around here. And that podcast is going to contain original journalism, by the way: we’ll be interviewing newsmakers, Times journalists, and anyone else who can help explain the moment to us.

And so, with that in mind, this week Platformer moves to its new schedule: you can expect posts from me Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, with the podcast arriving Friday morning. As always, I may write more depending on the news. But I won’t regularly be writing on Wednesdays any more.

I hired someone. For some time now I’ve been looking for someone who can help me summarize the links in each day’s post, to edit my typos and to catch my broken links. I’ve also been seeking someone to help me on the operational side, working to grow the newsletter and business overall.

I’m excited to tell you that I’ve found just such a person — and, as a bonus, this person also does incredible journalism in their own right. I can’t say who it is just yet, But I’m excited to do that very soon — and to share their work with you here over the coming year.

In conclusion

The day I announced Platformer, I said I wanted to create a “tiny media company.” As of this week, that company is now a bit less tiny: paid subscribers are now funding not one but two jobs in journalism, and in time there could be an opportunity grow even further.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for supporting me these past two years. I truly believe that year three is set to the best yet: more newsy; more multimedia; more curious. If that sounds fun to you, and you haven’t become a paid subscriber, now’s the time. The future is going to be messy, but there’s a lot that we can figure out together.

Dirt has published pieces on YouTube desk tours; dressing like a Pokémon trainer; having lots of tabs open on your computer; and what the Sims can teach us about grieving. The publication recently hosted a Discord session where everyone watched the 1995 Japanese animated musical “Whisper of the Heart.” A T-shirt collaboration is in the work, as are TikTok essays — i.e., essays that will run on TikTok. “Dirt is like an afterschool activity club,” Chayka said.

Dirt is also completely free to read. It has no subscriber-only paid level and doesn’t solicit donations from readers. It pays its writers a $500 fee for each 500-word dispatch. Chakya and Alioto didn’t get an an advance from Substack. Instead, Dirt funds itself with the sale of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

No, wait, come back! Really quickly: An NFT is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, or blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies. “Conceptually speaking,” Chayka said, “NFTs are just a way of making multimedia on the internet a scarce commodity.” A piece of code is attached to a digital file and acts as a certificate of authenticity and scarcity. A real-life parallel might be prints of a piece of art: You can have one edition or more. It’s the code that’s traded when an NFT is sold; anyone can still use the image or video or other digital asset that the code is attached to.

Or, as Dirt explains: “Think of the NFT as your Dirt annual subscription, except it’s something you own (until you decide to sell or trade it)”:

Our NFTs are like digital souvenirs, but souvenirs you can trade, sell, and use to access things like private Discord channels and IRL events. By buying one, you become a Dirt supporter but also an insider, helping us develop the future of the publication. Soon, you’ll be able to use the token to vote on topics that we cover and how we focus our editorial. Think of it as a Kickstarter tote bag but much, much better. Whenever a new reader wants to support Dirt, they can buy one of our NFTs (if there are any left).

“I think NFTs are the newest form of digital content,” Chayka said. “Structurally, that fits with Dirt’s scope.” He first encountered NFTs when he was writing a New Yorker profile of the digital artist Beeple, who had just sold an NFT for a record-breaking $60.25 million.

The first lot of Dirt NFTs sold for around $30,000. They were sold in Ether, a cryptocurrency, and liquidated into U.S. dollars over some time to hedge against the fluctuating exchange rate. This paid for Dirt’s “first season,” which was edited by writer and editor Jason Diamond. (Pieces published before this sale are called the “pre-season.”)

Another set of NFTs is now on the market to fund Dirt’s second season, which is being edited by Alioto. The price is 0.1 ETH, or about $380.71, and so far 21 NFTs out of a set of 100 have been sold — worth about USD $8,000.

(If you’re trying to figure out what Dirt might have made by selling regular subscriptions on Substack instead — it has nearly 6,000 subscribers on its free list. Substack says it commonly sees about 5 to 10% of subscribers convert to paid. So if it relied on a paid subscription model, Dirt might expect to make between $15,000 and $30,000 a year.)

So who’s buying these NFTs? Well, because Dirt is the first media outlet attempting to fund itself in this way, the NFT evangelist community is excited about it (and its potential to make cryptocurrency seem more legitimate to non-crypto-evangelist audiences). NFTs publicly show their owners’ blockchain addresses, which let you see that the owners of Dirt NFTs include not just Dirt readers but also Silicon Valley investors and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), which are like racehorse syndicates of people pooling their money, but for crypto-products rather than shares of horses. For Dirt’s third season, Chayka and Alioto will set up a DAO where people may be able to vote with their NFTs on what the newsletter should publish.

a trustless media DAO would work like this: Funding exists in a pool, growing via staking or new subscriptions or whatever; writers propose a fee to write a given pitch; token holders vote on the proposal; writer automatically gets paid from the pool when the pitch is approved

— Kyle Chayka (@chaykak) August 18, 2021

Treating contributors well is important to Chayka, who also co-founded freelancers’ collective Study Hall. They’re giving their first 100 contributors each a free NFT. It’s like a “kind of membership card,” Chayka said, adding that he wanted to reward the writers who got in on the ground floor and helped build the newsletter.

The writers don’t all have crypto wallets that can receive NFTs, though, and so the editions of the NFT haven’t all been distributed. Helping contributors set them up has been one of Alioto’s recent administrative tasks — “the least fun and sexy aspect of any project. If it wasn’t tracking wallet addresses it would be managing subscriptions.”

Some of the writers, though, are crypto evangelists, and a handful have accepted payment for their pieces in Ether. One of them is Alex Marraccini, who said she was “initially very skeptical of Dirt’s foray into crypto.” On thinking about it more, she didn’t see cryptocurrency as being any ethically worse than a fiat currency [From the ed: The carbon dioxide emissions generated by cryptocurrencies are one ethical consideration], and being paid in Ether was easier for her for tax reasons — she works for a German employer and pays German taxes, lives in the U.K., but is also a U.S. resident. “This is normally financial hell,” she says.

Contributors are allowed to sell their free NFTs, though none have tried so far. “Hopefully, the [contributors’] NFT is worth something,” Chayka said. Some buyers of the first-season NFTs have flipped theirs for a profit.

This week, Dirt announced a collaboration with London-based magazine The Fence, a young publication known for its satirical takes and serious investigations. It has a print circulation of under a thousand at the moment, but its following includes Alioto, who reached out about doing an NFT collaboration in late August. “It’s much easier to sell something you believe in,” she says.

NFTs are “a super-contemporary way of funding our old-school magazine,” The Fence editor Charlie Baker said. “The problem with British media is that people in this country expect journalism to be free, and there is also little money in advertising for new publications,” which is why trying something like NFTs is attractive to him.

On Monday, The Fence published a British opinion on the TV show Succession as part of the collaboration, and its NFT — called “Filthy” — went on sale on NFT marketplace Open Sea. Sixty percent of proceeds will go to The Fence, 30% to Dirt, and 10% to the artist Mark Costello.

With the growing newsletter environment, more and more writers are thinking about funding model. Chayka isn’t against funding all this with traditional paid subscriptions in the future, if needed — but the NFT model is a nifty idea that’s working at the moment. Chayka thinks that in a year, media CEOs will be asking “How do we feel about NFTs?” For now, Dirt has its answer.

A year ago, I quit the best job I ever had to start Platformer. Today I wanted to tell you all how it’s going, what I’ve learned, and how I hope the business will evolve in year two. My hope is that this piece offers some texture to ongoing discussions about how the creator economy and traditional journalism intersect, and proves useful both to journalists considering making a move like this and readers who are curious about whether this model can offer a more sustainable path for journalism than the rocky one we’ve been on lately.

I.

Let’s start with the good news. Platformer is, thanks to your support, the best job I’ve ever had. It affords me a good salary, covers my health care, and pays for the various expenses that come with running a small business. I’m hopeful that your continued support will allow me to expand the business soon, in ways I’ll discuss later in this post.

That support has come on the back of growth that surpassed my highest expectations for year one. When I started Platformer with the mailing list I accumulated while writing my previous newsletter, there were around 24,000 of them. Twelve months later, there are 49,604 people subscribed to Platformer’s free list, and they regularly open this newsletter at a rate that far exceeds in the industry average.

How did it grow that quickly? In short, by publishing journalism. The biggest spikes in both free and paid membership over the past year came after I published the best reporting I did this year. Here are some of the stories I’m proud of:

— Platformer was the first to report the details of the email that got Timnit Gebru fired from Google, in a piece later cited in a congressional inquiry.

— I revealed deep tensions within Signal over its plans to incorporate cryptocurrency and new social features into the app, risking a regulatory backlash that could threaten encryption globally.

— I explored how Medium’s latest pivot toward journalism ended in disaster for the talented journalists who worked there.

— I wrote the definitive pieces on what happened at Basecamp after its founders sought to eliminate political discussions in the workplace.

This was the incentive I hoped that this model of journalism would bring to my reporting: readers would encounter my journalism, like it, and pay me to go do more of it.

The result is a job that feels more durable, and sustainable, than any other employment I’ve had. In the past, to lose my job might require only a bad quarter in the ad market, the loss of an ally in upper management, or the takeover of my company by some indifferent telecom company. Today, I can really only lose my job if thousands of people decide independently to “fire” me. As a result, I’ve never felt more empowered to cover the issues I find most meaningful: the fraught, unpredictable collisions between big tech platforms and the world around them.

Anyway, here are some of the lessons I’ve learned in year one.

It’s a hits business. Platformer grows when it’s publishing good journalism — particularly journalism that takes you inside companies in crisis. The rest of the time, the business is largely static. Occasionally, a more analytical post will bring in a range of new signups. So will posts that tackle some new frontier yet to be picked up by traditional publications — this month’s story about Dom Hofmann’s blockchain project Loot was a hit, for example. Generally speaking, though, most columns don’t move the needle. In part that’s because …

Churn is real. Platformer loses 3-4 percent of its paid customers per month. To grow, it has to replace those customers and then find new ones. The good news is that a relatively small percentage of free subscribers ever have to convert to paid subscribers to make this a viable enterprise. But …

I converted a smaller percentage of subscribers to paid than I thought I would. Guidance I had gotten from Substack suggested I might expect 10% or so of my free subscribers to go paid. Given that 24,000 people had been reading me four days a week when I launched — some for three years — I thought that 10% would be a slam dunk. Instead, it was closer to 5%. That number has grown a bit over the past year, but it’s still well under 10.

One thing that did, help, though, was …

A Discord is a superpower that journalists can give themselves. In April I launched Sidechannel along with seven other independent journalists. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stopped by for an interview.) The idea was to give free subscribers a reason to upgrade, since their subscription would now come with access to a community of smart, like-minded people, as well as some of the journalists working on their behalf.

Other than the stories I mentioned above, the Discord launch was the single biggest thing I did over the past year to convert paid subscribers. And beyond the business benefit, I’ve been struck at just how useful it is to have a Discord for my publication. I regularly get tips from readers for stories; good-faith pushback on things I’ve written; links I should read; and good tweets for the end of the daily newsletter. And all that has happened despite the fact that I generally feel like I’ve invested too little in Sidechannel to date. (More on that later.)

My readers hate interviews

Over the past year I’ve brought readers news-making interviews with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Twitch COO Sara Clemens, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, and WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart, among others. Because I write a publication closely associated with the tech industry, and social networks more specifically, it feels important to regularly ask questions of the people running those networks. What I’ve learned, though, is that almost no one becomes a paid subscriber because they liked an interview. (It’s possible my interviews are bad!)

I’m not giving up on Q&As entirely, but suffice to say: message received.

II.

And speaking of not giving up on Q&As entirely, here are some of the questions you asked me when I put out a call on Twitter and Discord about Platformer year 1.

How difficult (or easy) is it to get access to scoops and sources now that you’re working for yourself and not for an org like The Verge?

It’s been relatively easy. Before I quit, I reached out to all my beat companies to see if they would still take my phone calls if I went independent. To my great relief, they all said yes. And as you can see from the list of the interviews above, executives are still engaging with me — in some cases, more than they did before. (One reason: There were some editor-in-chief type conversations I was never invited to before this year, because I had never been editor-in-chief of a tech publication before.)

Meanwhile, I continue to have a great backchannel with rank-and-file workers via replies to each day’s edition and the Discord server. My WhatsApp and Signal are both still popping off. I always want more and better sources, of course, but generally speaking I feel good about this.

How free do you feel in terms of selecting the stories you want to cover and your take? Do you feel like you need to conform to what your paying audience expects?

Being captured by the audience is probably my greatest fear about running a newsletter over the long term. This is a real problem with trade publications — when you spend every day talking to a handful of companies, those companies come to sound more reasonable to you than they do to an average person. The good news is that Platformer also has plenty of paid subscribers who are outside the orbit of Big Tech: they’re academics, policy makers, consultants, and concerned citizens, and I regularly hear back from them when they think I’ve missed the mark. Also: a good number of rank-and-file workers subscribe specifically because they want to empower journalism and analysis that pushes their companies to do better.

I think my best shot at retaining real independence is to position myself at the uncomfortable center of all of these groups, and embrace the fact that they will push and pull me in various directions continuously.

One thing that has given me hope is that I often see a surge in subscriptions when I write about more unexpected subjects, as with the Loot example above. That tells me readers are hungry for novelty and don’t want me to stay in one lane forever.

How far in advance do you plan your publications? What’s your definition of balance between timeless pieces (e.g. Twitter should copy from Tinder) vs. trending (e.g. release of communities by Twitter)?

It varies widely. The general idea is to do at least one piece of high-quality reported journalism every week, give it away for free to a mass audience, and surround it with paid posts that are more relevant to people working in the industry. On a good Monday morning, I know what that free post is going to be, and I have some ideas for at least a couple of the paid posts. Generally I found this easier during the Trump years, when every single day was a series of infinite branching catastrophes. I’m still working to find a good rhythm now that we are in the ever-slightly-more-relaxed Biden era.

One thing I struggle with is that if I decided to investigate something, it generally has to be something I can wrap up quickly: every minute I spend reporting is a minute I’m not writing, and I write four newsletters a week. That tilts the balance of the newsletter away from original journalism more than I’d like, and it’s clear that original journalism is the thing that people are most excited to support financially. Reconciling those two things is going to be a focus for me in year two.

How’s it been working more autonomously versus for a publication? Pros/cons?

Pros: I feel like I have more control over my destiny. I own an asset that can grow in value over time. And I love working directly on behalf of readers, and interacting with them daily. Most of all, I love getting to experiment — with the Discord server, for example.

Cons: Having to do bookkeeping and accounting — there is so much more paperwork than there used to be. Not having a copyeditor for the daily newsletter — thanks to all of you who point out typos, which I endeavor to fix as quickly as possible. Most of all, in this line of work you can’t really afford to have a bad few months the way you can at a staff job. (Ask me about my 2017!) The business only works when I’m working.

All that said: it’s less lonely than people assume. I am still besieged every day by phone calls and text messages and emails and Twitter DMs and Discord pings and Zoom meetings. Thanks to everyone who has stayed in touch!

With limited time, what efforts do you prioritize for audience growth? What about for retention?

The only way a Substack grows is through tweets. I am like 85% serious when I say this. I have been featured in various Substack leaderboards, newspaper articles, podcasts, radio shows, and blog posts since Platformer began. The only thing that ever moves the needle is some screenshot of a paid blog post getting 500 likes. I wish I had other obvious avenues for growth, but to date it really feels like it’s Twitter or nothing.

As for retention, I’m still figuring that out. Usually when people unsubscribe and send a note, they don’t say they hated the publication. Rather, they’ve decided to spend less on subscriptions for whatever reason; they found they weren’t reading it as often as they assumed; or they changed jobs and it’s less useful to them than it was before. I can’t be unhappy about any of this, not even a little bit. For the most part, I think the only good retention strategy is to keep doing good journalism.

Is Sidechannel living up to expectations? What were some things you thought it’d be that didn’t happen? What has it done that surprised you?

Yes and no. It’s been great to build a small community of Platformer readers and interact with them every day. Better yet, to watch them interacting with each other in friendly, constructive ways. And I was surprised when people I had never interacted with before showed up in my Discord DMs offering me story tips and advice. For these reasons alone, it has been a good project.

That said, I imagined it as a great, ongoing conversation between independent writers — a kind of public newsroom Slack channel — and that hasn’t materialized. There are two main reasons why: one, these writers are truly independent. Everyone is focused on getting their newsletter out, on spinning up a podcast, on a book project, on whatever. And so there hasn’t been the kind of regular interaction that I first envisioned. This issue was compounded by the fact that two of our initial writers — for excellent reasons, by the way — quit their newsletters within a few months of launch.

I’m long on Discord as a component of the Platformer subscription, but I think it would offer more value if it felt like a true water cooler for indie writers, and had more regular programming to bring you all in. This is largely a question of time management, and finding passionate collaborators.

One other thing folks have observed to me: no matter the Discord server, every channel seems to be dominated by the same few loud voices. None of them are breaking the rules, exactly, but they tend to crowd out other people who might otherwise share their opinions. I basically have no idea what to do about this.

Anything you learned in year 1 you’d want to avoid if you had to do it all over again?

I incorporated as an LLC using Stripe Atlas. Stripe Atlas is a truly fantastic product in the sense that you essentially snap your fingers and, for $500, get a fully formed LLC in return. At the same time, I now pay taxes in both California and Delaware, where Platformer is incorporated, and in hindsight I wish I had just set up shop in California where I live.

Any stray observations?

I think the first wave of writers leaving mainstream publications for Substack has mostly crested. I talked to more than a dozen writers at big publications over the past year who were considering going independent; in the end almost none of them did. It can be a deceptively hard business, particularly if you don’t have some of the advantages I did — a large existing mailing list and a well-defined product being the two most helpful.

At the same time, I wish more journalists would explore this route. (And have been heartened by the local journalists who are trying this, backed by various platforms and media companies.) In my conversations, I was struck over and over again at how little journalists value their own work — in large part, I think, because their bosses have taught them to. Having myself worked at media companies that remind you often of just how easily you can be replaced, and scoff at the idea of even a 2% raise, I get it. But for the right reporter and the right product, the economics of independent life can be phenomenal.

One of the best things about being independent is the flexibility to strike deals. All the big media companies take near-total ownership over your work, making it difficult to do things like start a newsletter, sell a podcast, or get a TV deal. The avenues for extending your work as a journalist are increasing all the time, and it’s fantastic to be able to take advantage of them. (One deal I’ve never taken is to put ads on the site, despite getting offers now nearly every week. Thanks to the paid subscribers who made that possible.)

What’s coming in year two?

My first priority is to continue to deliver a high-quality newsletter four days a week that breaks news, captures the moment, and promotes high-quality discussion about important issues.

But there are two things I know would make Platformer better. One is developing a podcast that connects to the themes of the newsletter but delivers it through audio. The other is hiring someone to help me put the newsletter together each day and free up more hours for reporting, thinking, and writing.

By the time I write my “what I learned in year two” post, I will have either done both these things or have a hilarious story about how and why I failed.

[UPDATE: The Times folks told us it was 2001, but Lisa Tozzi notes that she was writing a campaign newsletter for the paper a year earlier.]

The news org recently passed the 8 million subscription mark and, as executives have emphasized each and every quarter, the number paying for The New York Times is still a fraction of the 100 million people who have registered with their email at nytimes.com. Alex Hardiman, chief product officer at the Times, described introducing subscriber-only newsletters as “both a retention play and a conversion play.”

“When we look at the intersection between our subscription model and newsletters, newsletters are already really important,” she said. “We see that almost half of subscribers open a newsletter in a given week, and people who do receive newsletters are far more likely to pay and to stay.”

Which newsletters will be exclusive to subscribers?

The existing newsletters going subscriber-only include Well, Watching, Parenting, Smarter Living, At Home and Away, On Politics, On Tech With Shira Ovide, On Soccer with Rory Smith, and those from columnists Jamelle Bouie, Paul Krugman, and Frank Bruni. A new slate of newsletters, also announced Wednesday, will launch as subscriber exclusives; they include new newsletters from linguist John McWhorter, sociologist and essayist Tressie McMillan Cottom, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren, longtime economics writer Peter Coy, and New York Times Magazine critic Jay Caspian Kang.

Notably, the subscriber-only list does not include the Breaking News email or the business-focused DealBook or the uber popular daily newsletter, The Morning, which has a whopping 17 million subscribers.

There have been signs of a new focus on newsletters at the Times for a while now. Managers asked news and opinion staffers to get approval for any newsletter (paid or free) in a memo that called platforms like Substack and Twitter’s Revue “direct competitors” earlier this year. (One of the subscriber-only emails being highlighted, by Paul Krugman, began as a free Substack before being brought into the Times fold and Substack has repeatedly tried to poach top Times writers and columnists with advances “well above” their Times salaries.)

The three kinds of newsletters at the Times

The Times says at least 19 newsletters of the Times’ roughly 50 newsletters will be available only to subscribers. How did the Times choose which to, effectively, paywall? Hardiman outlined three broad categories of emails — briefings, personalized alerts, and (now) subscriber-only newsletters — and said that each type plays a different role in their subscriber strategy.

Briefings like The Morning from David Leonhardt “are really effective at building relationships and daily habit for all readers — paying or not,” Hardiman noted.

That newsletter will stay free, in part because it’s so effective at pointing readers to news articles (which are, of course, subject to the Times’ metered paywall) as well as podcasts, puzzles, and recipes owned by the Times.

“The Morning is helping people every day in their inbox to establish a relationship with the Times, get caught up on the latest news, and experience the breadth of value that we offer across the Times,” Hardiman said. “We feel that is one of the best relationship-building tools that we have, so it very much plays a deliberate role in being open and accessible to all.”

The Morning, in other words, is designed to promote discovery, as you can see if you take a peek at any recent edition. The weekday newsletter starts with an agenda-setting essay from Leonhardt followed by a bulleted list of other noteworthy stories. The newsy bits are followed by links to a smattering of other Times work. On the last day of July, those included an anti-Keurig screed from Wirecutter, a noteworthy obituary, a Modern Love column, and recommendations on what to eat (a freestyle chicken parm recipe via Cooking), play (today’s Spelling Bee), and watch (via a Times review of a recent documentary).

After briefing-style emails, the second category of newsletters are ones that, essentially, function as personalized alerts to help readers follow their favorite writer or stay on top of issues they already care about. The subscriber-only newsletters, Hardiman said, will fill a third — and distinct — user need.

“The subscriber-only newsletters offer exclusive journalism from experts who go deep on the topics that our subscribers are most passionate about, and do it within the convenience of the inbox,” Hardiman said. “When we look at our addressable market of subscribers, it’s an audience of curious people who are lifelong learners and getting a real connection to the experts that we have at The New York Times is one of the reasons why they’re motivated to pay. So that’s why we’re really leaning into newsletters with this roster.”

Anchored by Opinion writers, but showcasing the Times’ breadth

That roster, you might have noticed, features a good number of Opinion columnists. The new newsletter effort is not the first time The New York Times has anchored a play for subscribers around columnists and Opinion content. A very early subscription product, called TimesSelect, offered readers access to editorials, opinion pieces, and columnists back in 2005. A few years later, another standalone product (and app) offered readers the ability to subscribe only to Opinion. (Both efforts were abandoned.)

Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times opinion editor, emphasized personality-driven writing, consistency, and, often, a more casual tone as draws for readers. She also said the Times would continue to experiment with the newsletter form, mentioning serialized fiction and including audio and video clips in emails.

“This is just the start,” she said. “We are trying to figure out what works. We will be adding to this portfolio as time goes on, and we see how readers engage and what they’re clamoring for and how we can address those wants and desires.”

The Times sees one of its strengths as the sheer number of journalists, experts, and personalities it can bring to a reader’s inbox with one paid subscription. It’s a contrast to competitors like Substack, where readers subscribe to (and pay for) newsletters separately.

“If you think about the pricing power of individual newsletters right now, it’s still really nascent,” Hardiman said. “You might for $15 or $20 be able to get three individual newsletters for a given month, whereas with us you can come and get a full subscriber newsletter portfolio and a full subscription for $17 a month. There’s real value in the bundle that we think people will see just because we can help address so many different needs in their news life.”

The Times has shown it’s not afraid to wind down a newsletter or tinker with the format that includes daily, weekly, monthly, and “as needed” updates. Smarter Living, which hasn’t been sent since March, for example, will return with a new focus on going “back to work.” (Speaking of back to work: you can expect a new author. Smarter Living editor Tim Herrera said he quit The New York Times because of burnout.)

This year, Apple announced two big changes that could well make life more difficult for publishers, along with quite a few welcome features, reasonable tweaks, and interesting side experiments. All in all, while the news business was nowhere near center stage Monday, I think this will end up being one of the more impactful Apple events in a while for publishers.

These are the highlights; read straight through or skip ahead to whatever interests you.

• Meaningful changes to notifications that could bury your breaking news alerts on users’ screens
• Some tighter rules on privacy, one of which will change the newsletter industry forever
• A couple of interesting new ways to share news articles with friends
• A long list of changes that could make you more productive at work
• System-wide text recognition in images, opening up lots of possibilities for research
• A few improvements that could make your videos sound and look better

More focused notifications

Apple spent a lot of time pushing a new set of features around focus — about better separating the important stuff you want to focus on from the junk you don’t want to. The biggest, er, focus of that work is in push notifications.

If you’re anything like me, you get a gazillion push notifications on your phone a day. Not to get all Eisenhower Matrix on you, but some of those are important and urgent, some are important or urgent, and some are neither. But on your home screen, they’re all mixed together in reverse chronological order, and it’s easy for the dumb stuff to push the important stuff several screens down.

Apple’s tried to improve notification triage before; think of those “You don’t seem to be tapping on these DumbApp notifications; should I stop showing them to you?” notices you’ve probably seen. But it’s now going significantly further — and in a way that is risky for news outlets that rely on those push notifications for traffic.

• You’ll now be able to create a Focus mode that determines which notifications get through and which don’t: “Customers can set their device to help them be in the moment by creating a custom Focus or selecting a suggested Focus, which uses on-device intelligence to suggest which people and apps are allowed to notify them. Focus suggestions are based on users’ context, like during their work hours or while they’re winding down for bed…Users can create Home Screen pages with apps and widgets that apply to moments of focus to only display relevant apps and reduce temptation.”
• You’ll now be able to have your lower-priority notifications all bunched together and delivered just once a day, in a “notifications summary” delivered “at a more opportune time.”
• If you’re wearing AirPods, Siri can now automatically speak to you when you get an “important, time-sensitive” notification — while staying silent for all the other ones.

These all sound appealing as a user — but they’re worrisome as a news publisher. How, exactly, will the “priority” level of an app be determined? There will be ways for users to manually adjust those settings, but the main work is done by Apple’s machine learning, based on how you interact with the apps on your device each day.

Will my iPhone’s algorithms decide that a breaking news story from Bloomberg is “urgent,” “important,” or “time-sensitive”? How about something more feature-y pushed by The Atlantic, or a game score notification from ESPN?

Maybe the algorithms will make only wise judgments — or maybe they’ll be like every other algorithm in the world and sometimes be a little off. As a commenter here noted, the example given on Apple’s site for the “top” message in a notification summary is…a very ad-like push from Yelp recommending a Thai restaurant.

Given that news apps send a healthy number of pushes per day — and that the value of those notifications often doesn’t require a tap to launch the app, which might make your phone think you’re not paying attention to them — I worry that these changes will make it harder for news to get noticed. At a minimum, it’ll be something for publisher tech teams to monitor, and likely to optimize for. Once you get away from straight reverse-chronological order, you’ve created SEO for push notifications.

It reminds me most of back in 2013, when Google introduced tabbed inboxes for Gmail — you know, the little sections that separate out your important emails from “Social,” “Promotions,” “Updates,” and “Forums” emails. As a user: helpful! But publishers know that having their newsletter or breaking news email buried in Promotions or Updates means it’s less likely to be opened. Gmail users can adjust the algorithm’s decisions — but most will always just stick with the default behavior. This change is worth watching.

Privacy, for better and for worse

Apple has spent the past few years leaning into its reputation for respecting user privacy, using its market position to influence how industries like ad tech operate. Just last month, it made every app that tracks your activities across other apps explicitly ask for your permission to do so. Turns out, people don’t want to be tracked, putting a big crimp in the ad models of Facebook and others.

The OS updates include a number of privacy and security features. Safari will now push you to the HTTPS version of a website if available. If someone steals your phone, you’ll now be able to track its location even after it’s been wiped clean. If some rogue app is using the microphone on your Mac to record you, a little notification will appear to let you know, as it does in iOS.

For paying iCloud customers, it’s offering something called Private Relay, which functions a bit like a VPN for web traffic, encrypting your data and splitting it into two intercept relays, allegedly making it impossible for your device to be connected to your web activity.1 And Hide My Email will make it easy to create (and later delete) burner emails that forward to your real one, building on last year’s Sign in with Apple. (Interesting that those last two are paid features; Apple’s previously opened its privacy features to all users to buff up its brand aura.)

But these updates also add a new battle to Apple’s war against the digital ad business. One of the few bright spots in the news business in recent years has been this little boomlet in newsletters — maybe you’ve heard about it? Newsletter advertising is hardly the data-hoarding beast a Facebook ad is, but it does rely heavily on one little tracker: the tiny tracking pixels embedded in many emails that tell the sender whether their email has been opened, and often by whom and how many times. (Those little images are fetched live from a server, and the URL the email uses to grab it can contain some limited information, like the email address it was sent to.)

These images are the only way newsletter senders know if their emails are actually being opened. And that open rate is an important part of how newsletter publishers sell ads — as well as how they judge the relative success or failure of the email.

Along comes something called Mail Privacy Protection, a new feature that “helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”

There are very legitimate concerns about some distant server being notified whenever you open their email. But on the other hand, it’s kind of the bedrock of the newsletter industry.

There have long been ways to block tracking pixels, but they were mostly only used by nerds like me; this is Apple Mail, the dominant platform for email in the U.S. and elsewhere. According to the most recent market-share numbers from Litmus, for May 2021, 93.5% of all email opens on mobile come in Apple Mail on iPhones or iPads. On desktop, Apple Mail on Mac is responsible for 58.4% of all email opens.

Those numbers are crazy high — much higher than Apple’s device market share because Apple users spend a lot more time receiving and reading email than users on Android, Windows, or Linux. Overall, 61.7% of all emails are opened in Apple Mail, on one device or another.2 So even a small change in how it handles email has a huge impact on the newsletter industry writ large.

Maybe Apple will bury Mail Privacy Protection in some settings menu two levels down or something, and people won’t find it! Nope — this is apparently the first thing you see when you open Mail on iOS 15.

iOS 15: First launch of Mail app. pic.twitter.com/W4ewu9XFCk

— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) June 7, 2021

As with the cross-app tracking permissions Apple started requiring last month, this is a very in-your-face feature. I’m certain the overwhelming majority of people will tap “Protect Mail activity,” because of course they will. And if you somehow don’t see that screen, it’s turned on by default.

Privacy protection in Mail is a setting that’s pre-selected. Don’t really see anyone turning that off. pic.twitter.com/noOrzwIdJk

— (@alexcwilliams) June 7, 2021

This 85-second video from one of Apple’s WWDC developer sessions makes it clear: Open rates will now officially be useless. Mail Privacy Protection will fetch those tracking pixels not just anonymously, but also automatically — meaning that every email you send to an Apple Mail user will appear as if it’s been opened, whether or not it actually has been.

here’s a video from Apple explaining in-detail how their upcoming “Mail Privacy Protection” feature works

tl;dr – email open rates & tracking data will continue their descent into irrelevancy pic.twitter.com/bBjg6dvILw

— Dame.eth (@jacksondame) June 8, 2021

(There’s also some good detail on the importance of tracking pixels to newsletter publishers in this thread from ConvertKit’s Nathan Berry.)

Creators will have to choose between taking extreme list cleaning measures where healthy, engaged subscribers get removed because they aren’t clicking emails.

Or they won’t do any list cleaning which will likely lead to spam filtering for both engaged and unengaged subscribers. pic.twitter.com/iSKPaMgLAK

— Nathan Barry (@nathanbarry) June 8, 2021

Matt Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times, calls Apple’s new policy “lazy” and says it hurts small publishers most:

…much like generally-sensible-in-theory provision like the GDPR, moves like this from Apple are going to most hurt the solo publishers with their Substack newsletters.

A major publisher will be hurt, sure. They’ll lose a lot of data on which they sold their newsletter sponsorships. They’ll be less able to confidently purge subscribers who haven’t opened their newsletter in months (what if they’re iPhone users?)…

A smaller publisher, a local newspaper, a solo freelancer, a small blog; all these will lose data on a significant part of their audience. A likely valuable part of their audience. And it may stifle or slow their growth or opportunities.

Where previously you could unsubscribe readers who hadn’t opened your newsletter to save money, now you don’t know if they’re loyal or not. You’ll have to find other ways to entice them to let you know they are reading. A larger publisher can afford to keep 20,000 recipients on a list that never open an email. A smaller outfit cannot…

Apple’s fight for privacy is really a fight against the web. In signing up for a newsletter, a publisher or marketer already has a more valuable piece of PII: your email address. By focusing on IP addresses, and blocking trackers rather than proxying them on a fuzzy delay (which would provide the same useful publisher data without any PII leak of location or time), Apple are not really fighting for their users so much as they are fighting against email.

I’m sure newsletter publishers will adjust, somehow. If open rates are gone, they’re gone — you’ll have to find some other way to convince advertisers you have an attentive audience, and some other way to see how your email performed and keep your list clean. (Clickthrough rates live on, at least for now. Should we expect stripping URL parameters to be a feature in iOS 17?) But this is another sign that Apple’s war against targeted advertising isn’t just about screwing Facebook — they’re also coming for your Substack.

More ways to share news

I don’t expect either of these to be earth-shatteringly important, but Apple showed two interesting new tools for sharing news.

In Apple News, macOS and iOS will now have a tab called Shared With You. (There’ll be similar tabs in Music and Photos.) If someone texts you a link to a Washington Post story, the Messages app should notice that and ship it off to that Shared With You tab — so it’ll be there for you to see the next time you’re checking out the News app.

How much people will use this is unclear to me; Apple News has a ton of users, but most of them fall on the relatively casual end of the news consumption spectrum, and I don’t know how many will find these time-shifted stories useful. One other question I don’t know the answer to: Will Shared With You will bring in any news article someone texts you, or only articles that already live inside Apple News? I’d assume the former, but that would mean, for example, articles from The New York Times (which isn’t in Apple News) would just not show up where users expect them to.

The second sharing feature isn’t even designed for news: SharePlay will make it easier for multiple people to consume the same content — like watch the same video or listen to the same songs — simultaneously during a FaceTime call. The most obvious use case here is for watching a movie or a baseball game with a friend who lives a few states away — while being able to chat as if you’re sitting next to each other on the couch. But I did notice that a number of streaming platforms that include news video to varying degrees — Hulu (which simulcasts ABC News), Paramount+ (CBS News), ESPN+, Pluto TV — are on board for SharePlay.

I wouldn’t expect many people to actually use SharePlay for news, but this is an interesting concept for watching it together. On Election Night, you and your politics-junkie friends could all get on a call and watch the returns coming in together. Or Oscars night, or the NFL Draft, or a presidential debate. Or, more depressingly, a hurricane hitting your hometown, or a terror attack, or a mass shooting. News recommendations get shared on social a bazillion times a minute, but news consumption is a pretty solitary experience on digital — more solitary, even, than the old network newscasts the whole family might sit in the living room for. Nice to see some efforts to bridge that gap.

Tools for reporters

A lot of journalists spend most of their days staring at an Apple-made screen, whether a Mac, iPad, or iPhone, and there are a few updates here that will be welcome for getting your work done.

iOS Safari can now install desktop Safari extensions — and those extensions can now include a ton of Chrome and Firefox extensions that Safari has lacked. And Safari’s new Tab Groups seem like a surprisingly decent solution to tab triage and organizing. (It looks better to me than Chrome’s clunky tab groups or Edge’s Collections, but of course no one’s actually used it yet.)

If you juggle devices all day, Universal Control — which lets you use the same keyboard and mouse/trackpad across up to three Macs and iPads at the same time — is a little mind-blowing, letting you treat multiple devices as three different screens for the same device.

Macs can now use Shortcuts, the iOS platform for scripting a series of actions across multiple apps; it could let you reduce some multi-step workflows to one click. (It’s more user-friendly in my experience than the old Automator app.)

Quick Note makes it easier to jot down a quick note on your iPad or Mac. Most interesting to me is that if you take a Quick Note while, say, you’re looking at a webpage in Safari, apparently the next time you visit that site again, the note should pop up and be accessible. Notes also has some tagging features that might make it full-featured enough for some to use it as their main scrap-text app.

If you use an iPad for work, multitasking looks a little better, but still nowhere near as intuitive as tapping command-tab to switch apps. There are still a lot of hurdles in the way of bringing the iPad to laptop quality for the sort of writing/editing/researching tasks reporters do all day.

Finally — and perhaps most importantly, at least at certain moments! — Macs will now have a Low Power Mode that’ll let you extend your battery. So if you’re tight on deadline and watching your battery tick down to 0%, Low Power Mode might just save the day.

System-wide OCR with Live Text

Four years ago, Apple introduced Vision, a framework for developers that lets apps perform a number of camera-driven tasks, like detecting a face in a photo or scanning a barcode. Two years ago, it added VisionKit, which made it easy to scan an image for text. That led to a small little explosion for instant-OCR (optical character recognition) apps for both Mac and iOS. Basically, OCR used to be a resource-intensive and complicated process to add to an app. It isn’t anymore.

I have to say: Easy instant OCR has been one of the most transformative recent features on the Mac for me. I use a little $7 app called TextSniper that lets me, with one keystroke, copy all of the text on a particular part of my screen to the clipboard — even if it’s just a picture of text, not text itself. (There are other apps that do the same thing, but TextSniper’s been the more accurate and reliable one for me.)

This is amazing for things like an old scanned PDF or print newspaper article: If it’s on your screen, you can copy it into a text document — which makes it searchable in all the usual ways. If you take nothing else away from this article, go try out TextSniper or a similar app and be amazed how many times a day you were retyping some chunk of text you couldn’t just copy.

Anyway, in the new macOS and iOS, Apple’s put that OCR ability and essentially made it automatic and systemwide. Have you ever taken a screenshot of some text? Your device will now automatically scan every screenshot you take (and every photo you take — every image on the device, basically) for text and make it searchable. (On Macs, this is apparently limited to devices with Apple Silicon.)

Maybe you need to be a digital hoarder like me to find this extremely exciting. But for some historical research I’ve been doing, I now have thousands of image files that contain text that isn’t recognized as text. Scans of 150-year-old newspaper articles. Paragraphs from a Google Books preview. Handwritten notes on an old letter. Screenshot of video stills. As soon as all that text is searchable, finding needles in that haystack gets a lot easier. I’ll be very anxious to see how well it works.

Better sound in your videos

One thing the pandemic taught is the value of a good webcam, and the Mac’s (despite 18 years of practice) have been mediocre for years. (Weird, given that Apple makes some pretty amazing cameras for its iPhones.) The new M1 iMac it released in April showed the first real webcam quality improvements in a long time, and now macOS Monterey promises software improvements.

Probably most important for people recording video on their MacBooks is Voice Isolation, which promises to remove background noise from the room you’re recording in. (Sorry, Krisp.) The flipside is Wide Spectrum sound, which might improve your b-roll. Newer Macs can also use Portrait Mode in videos, which might look nice in a straight-to-camera news video. All three features will also be in iOS 15 for iPhones and iPads.

Apple announced all these as improvements specific to FaceTime, its video chat platform, but it appears they’ll also be available to other apps — so your Zoom calls or Instagram videos should also be able to benefit too, without any updates from the developer.

You’ll also now be able to join FaceTime calls from non-Apple devices like Windows PCs and Android phones. But they can still only be started on an Apple device, so your newsroom will probably stick to Zoom.

1. For that reason, Private Relay won’t be available in countries keen on monitoring their citizens’ web use: China, Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and the Philippines.
2. I should note here that email market share data is notoriously bad, so the error band around these numbers is substantial. But whether the true number is actually 52%, 63%, or 71%, it’s still a lot.

Really excited to see how this plays out – it's already a such a great time to be a star national / international writer with your own paying audience, making it work at local scale would be awesome (and neighborhood FB groups etc have local scale!) https://t.co/4rEfqAzC54

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) April 29, 2021

Facebook is encouraging applicants of color to apply and is prioritizing applications that focus on covering underrepresented local communities. It’s partnered with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and International Center for Journalists to evaluate the applications. If selected, terms of the program include the following:

Successful applicants will receive further consideration for an opportunity to enter into a deal with Facebook which includes the following commitments:

• A multi-year licensing fee to give you time to build a true relationship with your audience.
• Monetization tools starting with subscriptions.
• Access to experts, information and services designed to make it easier to start and build an independent business.

As part of any such deal successful applicants will commit to:

• Regularly publish written, public-interest journalism focused on a local community using Facebook’s tools.
• Engage with their audience through Facebook tools such as Groups, live discussions, and other features that help them connect more deeply with their community.
• From time to time, give the Facebook team feedback on their experience so we can improve our products and services.

Last month, Facebook announced that it would develop and launch a free, self-publishing platform to help independent content creators “build businesses online.” It sounds a lot like Substack, but with integrations to Facebook’s existing features like Pages and Groups.

The announcement about Facebook’s new platform was leaked a month earlier in February, around the same time that Twitter announced its acquisition of Revue. At the time, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote a piece on his platform titled “Welcome, Facebook and Twitter. Seriously.”

“In particular, Facebook and Twitter should do their utmost to give power to writers and readers, McKenzie wrote. “That means letting writers own their relationships with their readers and giving them the ability to take those relationships off the platform whenever they want. It also means letting readers fully control what they see in their feeds by avoiding ads and disincentivizing culture-war superweapons like retweetable quote-retweets.”

Applications close on May 20. Read the full announcement here.

I hope journalists who join this make sure it’s in writing that they own their subscriber list and content and can leave whenever they want. They should not expect support outside of money, while also expecting FB to close/alter this program at any moment. Be mercenary about it. https://t.co/lRY9tX7onu

— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) April 29, 2021

Launched last week, the new twice-weekly newsletter examining how race and identity shape politics, policy, and power is many months in the making. The idea was first proposed in June during a regular “What are we missing?” meeting in the newsroom. As the D.C.-based journalists deliberated, demonstrations over racial inequality and police brutality sparked by George Floyd’s killing were in full steam.

“All of these conversations around diversity in coverage and diversity within newsrooms started to become way more open. We saw a willingness to talk about it in a way that we hadn’t before — at every single level of the newsroom,” said Rishika Dugyala, a digital strategist at Politico who has helped bring the newsletter to life. “One of our colleagues brought up, ‘Would we consider a race and identity newsletter?’ and immediately, we had reporters, editors, and strategists chiming in and signing on.”

What began at the “What are we missing?” session has grown into something close to existential for Politico. Senior editor Teresa Wiltz says that The Recast “expands the notion of who’s a ‘politico'” and the first issue argues that “power dynamics are changing.” A promotional video drives home the point that policy knowledge (and influence) are not exclusive to Washington, D.C. — or any one demographic.

Race and identity have long determined who has power and who makes decisions. But power dynamics are changing.

That’s why we’re bringing you The Recast, a new newsletter with fresh insights and voices that challenge “business as usual.” https://t.co/kaeLtHyMXt pic.twitter.com/mKkI0L3h2q

— POLITICO (@politico) February 23, 2021

Wiltz — who will steer The Recast until NPR’s Brakkton Booker joins Politico as the newsletter’s author at the end of March — emphasized that she wanted to create something that would draw on the entire newsroom. She flagged the industry-wide tendency to treat race-related editorial efforts as a side project as a particular challenge. “Race is something we all own,” she noted.

As she and Dugyala write in The Recast’s first issue, issues related to inequality and identity are on the national agenda “like never before”:

[T]hanks to intensive grassroots organizing, communities of color now wield real political power. Black and brown voters played a pivotal role in the presidential election and in flipping the Senate. This is the most diverse Congress ever. Georgia sent a Black man and a Jewish man to the Senate. And a Black/South Asian woman is the vice president.

We’re in the midst of a massive revolutionary change in this country — the 21st century version of the 1960s. “White” shouldn’t be the default, the assumed norm — and indeed, the share of white voters is on the decline in all 50 states, while the share of Latino voters is on the rise. If anything should be clear about race and ethnicity today, it’s that we all have a race (or races) and/or ethnicity/ethnicities. And that informs our experience in the world. White folks, too.

… Race and identity are an integral part of the DNA of American politics and policy. It informs our past, our present and our future. But power dynamics are changing. “Influence” isn’t just confined to the political establishment.

Dugyala said the digital strategy team wanted to make sure they were creating something that would fill a gap in coverage at Politico, and in political journalism at large.

“Let’s figure out whether there’s something new not only for our company, in terms of how we think about coverage, how we think about signifiers of newsworthiness, who we’re thinking of as power players, who we turn to as experts leading conversation on policy and policy, but also something new for the market,” she said. “Is there something different from Code Switch from NPR or Race/Related at the New York Times or About US at The Washington Post or all the different products that are already out there?”

The Recast joins a roster of 35 newsletters, not counting the editions available only to Politico Pro members. The newsletter will land in inboxes on Tuesday and Friday afternoons, and the earlier edition will be the newsier of the two.

In the inaugural issue, the newsletter led with reporting by Maya King, Politico’s race and politics reporter, that shows there’s a disconnect between the most diverse Congress in history and the Hill staffers who work for them as well as an exclusive demographic analysis of state legislatures. (The takeaway? “In many states, the officials elected to legislative office don’t look much like the people they represent.”) On Fridays, the newsletter will feature a interview called “The Sit Down” as well as cultural recommendations from reporters and contributors. On its first Friday, The Recast featured Sen. Cory Booker discussing the impact of Covid-19 on farmers of color and suggestions to watch “The United States v. Billie Holiday” on Hulu and a light-hearted TikTok.

The Recast feels like a smart bet for Politico, which has built its reputation on locating the levers of power and providing context that help readers understand what (and who) is driving politics and policy. The Recast will feature traditional politicians (see: Booker) but also artists, entertainers, and activists, Wiltz and Dugyala told me. Emerging candidates — including ones from untraditional political backgrounds or without the massive campaign war chests that newsrooms tend to rely on to gauge a candidate’s seriousness — will get a closer look as well.

“How do we determine when a candidate is viable? Are we looking at fundraising numbers? Are we looking at who’s endorsing them? Is that why so many of us missed the rise of AOC in 2018?” Dugyala asked. “That’s one example of redefining what we wait on to signal what we write about. We’re not going to wait on lawmakers to tell us how cannabis policy intersects with policing and racial disparities because they’re not necessarily the experts here. We have to go to community members and academic researchers who are speaking and putting out work on this consistently instead of waiting for a bill to be introduced on the hill.”

If they do their job, there may be less to talk about at the next “What are we missing?” meeting.

Enticed by the independence from editorial oversight Substack offers, several media figures with large followings — including Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Anne Helen Peterson, and Matthew Yglesias — are now striking out on their own.

Substack has also elevated a few commentators — perhaps most notably Heather Cox Richardson, the Boston College historian whose “Letters from an American” is currently Substack’s most-subscribed feature — to near-celebrity status.

Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s co-founder, has compared his company’s promise to an earlier journalistic revolution, likening Substack to the “penny papers” of the 1830s, when printers exploited new technology to make newspapers cheap and ubiquitous. Those newspapers — sold on the street for $0.01 — were the first to exploit mass advertising to lower newspapers’ purchase prices. Proliferating throughout the United States, they launched a new media era.

McKenzie’s analogy isn’t quite right. I believe journalism history offers more context for considering Substack’s future. If Substack is successful, it will remind news consumers that paying for good journalism is worth it.

But if Substack’s pricing precludes widespread distribution of its news and commentary, its value as a public service won’t be fully realized.

Mass advertising subsidized “objective” journalism

I believe Substack’s subscription-based plan is, in fact, closer to the model of journalism that preceded the penny papers. The older versions of U.S. newspapers were relatively expensive and generally read by elite subscribers. The penny papers democratized information by mass-producing news. They widened distribution and lowered the price to reach those previously unable to buy daily newspapers.

Substack, on the other hand, isn’t prioritizing advertising revenue, and by pricing content at recurring subscription levels, it’s restricting, rather than expanding, access to news and commentary that, for a long time, news organizations have traditionally provided free on the web.

History has shown that the economic basis of American journalism is deeply entangled with its style and tone. When one primary revenue source replaces another, much larger evolutions in the information environment occur. The 1830s, again, offer an instructional example.

One morning in 1836, James Watson Webb, the editor of New York City’s most respected newspaper, the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, chased down James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald, and beat Bennett with his cane. For weeks, Bennett had been insulting Webb and his newspaper in The Herald.

In his study of journalistic independence and its relationship to the origins of “objectivity” as an established practice in U.S. journalism, historian David Mindich identifies Webb’s assault on Bennett as a revealing historical moment. The Webb-Bennett rivalry distinguishes two distinct economic models of American journalism.

Before the “penny press” revolution, U.S. journalism was largely subsidized by political parties or printers with political ambition. Webb, for example, coined the name “Whig” for the political party his newspaper helped organize in the 1830s with commercial and mercantile interests, largely in response to the emergence of Jacksonian democracy. Webb’s newspaper catered to his (mostly) Whig subscribers, and its pages were filled with biased partisan commentary and correspondence submitted by his Whig friends.

Bennett’s Herald was different. Untethered from any specific political party, it sold for one penny (though its price soon doubled) to a mass audience coveted by advertisers. Bennett hired reporters — a newly invented job — to capture stories everyone wanted to read, regardless of their political loyalty.

His circulation soon tripled Webb’s, and the profits generated by The Herald’s advertising offered Bennett enormous editorial freedom. He used it to attack rivals, publish wild stories about crime and sex, and to continually stoke more demand for The Herald by giving readers what they clearly enjoyed.

Huge circulation propelled newspapers like Bennett’s Herald and Benjamin Day’s New York Sun to surpass Webb’s Morning Courier and Enquirer in relevance and influence. Webb’s newspaper cost a pricy 6 cents for far less timely and exciting news.

It should be noted, however, that the penny papers’ nonpartisan independence didn’t ensure civic responsibility. To increase sales, the Sun, in 1835, published entirely fictional “reports” claiming a fantastic new telescope had detected life on the moon. Its circulation skyrocketed.

In this sense, editorial independence encouraged publication of what’s now called “fake news” and sensationalistic reports unchecked by editorial oversight.

Substack: A blogging platform with a toll gate?

Perhaps “I.F. Stone’s Weekly” offers the closest historical antecedent for Substack. Stone was an experienced muckraking journalist who began self-publishing an independent, subscription-based newsletter in the early 1950s.

Yet unlike much of Substack’s most famous names, Stone was more reporter than pundit. He’d pore over government documents, public records, congressional testimony, speeches and other overlooked material to publish news ignored by traditional outlets. He often proved prescient: His skeptical reporting on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, questioning the idea of an unprovoked North Vietnamese naval attack, for example, challenged the U.S. government’s official story, and was later vindicated as more accurate than comparable reportage produced by larger news organizations.

There are more recent antecedents to Substack’s go-it-yourself ethos. Blogging, which proliferated in the U.S. media ecosystem earlier this century, encouraged profuse and diverse news commentary. Blogs revived the opinionated invective that James Gordon Bennett loved to publish in The Herald, but they also served as a vital fact-checking mechanism for American journalism.

The direct parallel between blogging and Substack’s platform has been widely noted. In this sense, it’s not surprising that Andrew Sullivan — one of the most successful early bloggers — is now returning to the format.

Information doesn’t want to be free

Even if Substack proves simply an updated blogging service with an uncomplicated tollbooth, it still represents improvement over the “tip jar” financing model and reader appeals that revealed the financial weakness of all but the most famous blogs.

This might be Substack’s most important service. By explicitly asserting that good journalism and commentary are worth paying for, Substack might help retrain web audiences accustomed to believing information is free.

Misguided media corporations persuaded the web’s earliest news consumers that big advertisers would sustain a healthy news ecosystem that didn’t need to charge readers. Yet that economic model, pioneered by the penny papers, has clearly failed. And journalism is still sorting out the ramifications for the industry — and democracy — of its collapse.

It costs money to produce professional, ethical journalism, whether in the 1830s, the 1980s or the 2020s. Web surfing made us forget this. If Substack can help correct this misapprehension, and ensure that journalists are properly remunerated for their labor, it could help remedy our damaged news environment, which is riddled with misinformation.

But Substack’s ability to democratize information will be directly related to the prices its authors choose to charge. If prices are kept low, or if discounts for multiple bundled subscriptions are widely implemented, audiences will grow and Substack’s influence will likely extend beyond an elite readership.

After all: They were called “penny papers” for a reason.

I’m first-generation Pakistani American and culturally, at least in the Pakistani diaspora, our main topics of conversation are politics, religion, food, and getting married.

I grew up in a household that follows Pakistani news every night. I used to help my grandfather load Dawn.com, the website of Pakistan’s most reputable newspaper, so he could read the news and catch up on cricket scores. My family had always had a satellite package that included PTV (owned by the Pakistan Television Corporation), Geo News, ARY News, and others until streaming made more channels more easily available.

But the Urdu spoken in TV news is much more formal than the Urdu I learned to speak at home, making it difficult to understand quick roundups and impossible to follow discussions, where interruptions and yelling are common. Urdu-language newspapers are available in some neighborhoods in major cities in the United States, but often (and rightfully) cover their local diaspora communities and are inaccessible to me because I can’t read Urdu very well. English-language coverage in Pakistan, a country with a news cycle as busy as the United States’, is widely available, but lacks the context a casual reader would need to understand the full impact of an issue.

So with lots of shame, I’ve had to explain that while being Pakistani is a big part of my identity, I’m not well equipped to talk about Pakistani news. That’s common, I imagine, in lots of diasporas, but hard for me to swallow as a journalist.

More recently, I’ve followed major stories by following journalists and regular people on Twitter who live in the country and are reporting or are outspoken about news events. But opening Twitter to scroll and sift through jokes, memes, and hot takes is an extremely chaotic way to find news.

So, knowing all that, you can imagine how thrilled I was, after years of wanting to stay informed, when I stumbled upon The NewsRun, a daily newsletter that summarizes Pakistan’s major stories of the day.

Anam Khan, the founder and lead writer for the NewsRun, has lived half of her life in Pakistan and the other half in the United States. While her family lives in Pakistan, she lives in San Francisco with her husband. Even though she has deep, personal roots in the country, she felt disconnected from the Pakistani news cycle and didn’t like feeling uninformed. And she, like me, found the current offerings difficult to consume for similar reasons.

Every day, each newsletter covers between one and three major stories from the day before. The top story is broken down into an outline, including a one-sentence summary of the story, a paragraph of details, bullet points of context, an explanation of public response when relevant, and a defined bottom line. The other stories are usually shorter, covered in one or two paragraphs. The newsletter is laced with links to local reporting from both English and Urdu news sources. Khan also creates Instagram slides for the top story with bullet points about the issue, and then directs followers to the newsletter for more information.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The NewsRun (@thenewsrun)

These days, the newsletter also includes a daily coronavirus case and death count in the country. Khan also uses Twitter to see what’s trending when she’s picking stories, to get a better sense of what stories to write about and what people need clarity on. Because news in Pakistan can be negative and draining, Khan tries to include some positive news stories as well.

Khan first had the idea in 2017 while she was still living in Pakistan. When she moved back to the U.S. in 2018, she started writing drafts and sharing them with friends for feedback. She soft-launched it in the middle of 2018, but didn’t start marketing it until 2019, after workshopping it and making sure she could deliver the same quality everyday. The NewsRun has a Patreon for subscribers who wish to support it, but for now Khan mostly funds it herself.

Khan, whose background is in marketing and strategic communications, is all about “smart brevity.” She’s been an avid reader of TheSkimm, Morning Brew, and Axios AM, newsletters that embrace a light, easy-to-read writing style. She said that at first, she started the NewsRun to serve Pakistanis like herself living abroad, operating under the impression that it’s only harder for them to keep up with the news because of the distance. Now, with thousands of newsletter subscribers, thousands of Instagram followers, and a 20 to 30 percent daily open rate, Khan has found that her largest readership is young professional men and women actually in Pakistan.

“I kept asking for feedback from subscribers and the ones in Pakistan voluntarily reached out to me and said ‘This is so much easier to understand. It’s a faster read. The way it’s written is clear and it highlights all the key points I need to know, and helps break through the rest of the noise that I’m surrounded with in Pakistan,'” she told me. “Even though they get a lot of news living in Pakistan, there’s just so much of it and they’ve been bombarded with it every day and it’s also very cluttered, which the NewsRun isn’t. So I started to see that this is something that Pakistanis in the country also need.”

One of the big challenges for Khan is the time difference. Living in San Francisco, she’s usually 12 hours behind Pakistan, and now 13 due to daylight savings time. She starts working on the newsletter around 11 a.m. PST and sends it to her fact-checker/copy editor in Pakistan, who edits when she wakes up. Khan schedules the newsletter to be sent out in the early morning for the reader, so subscribers in Pakistan will get it around 9 a.m. their time, while I get it around 6 a.m. EST.

Another challenges is not repeating and putting out more of the same, jargon-y language that Khan is consuming. That’s where her communications background is particularly helpful.

“In communications or in marketing, you’re telling a brand story,” Khan said. “Whether you’re a journalist or working with clients, either way you’re telling a story is just in a different context. So in working on the NewsRun, I’ve applied the skills I’ve gained over time working communications, by focusing on clarity, by focusing on objectivity, by starting with a strong lead, which is not only something you need to do for journalism, it’s something you need to do in communications as well.”

While English-language coverage from within Pakistan is cluttered, foreign coverage of Pakistan tends to lack nuance and sticks to a specific narrative that Pakistan is “a nuclear armed nation that’s unreliable, unpredictable, unsafe, and vulnerable to militant activity and terrorism,” Khan said. American news outlets do newsletters really well, but flub coverage. Pakistani news outlets cover the country extensively, but don’t necessarily engage news consumers in meaningful ways. Publications have newsletters, but they’re often automated with a photo, a headline, and a one-sentence summary that links back to a long-form story.

Khan sees the NewsRun as a unique product that fills those gaps.

“A lot of publications have websites or other touch points,” she said. “The NewsRun’s main product is the newsletter. I specifically did it that way because I wanted to reduce touch points for people. Rather than logging onto a website or scrolling through a cluttered newsfeed, the NewsRun is a single touch point. People get it in their inbox every morning and everything they need to know is compiled onto one platform and broken down in bite-sized format so that they don’t have to scour the internet to read the news. Everything they need is already right there in front of them.”

While the NewsRun’s newsletter is its main product, Khan also occasionally produces deep dives into major issues. One from September explains what Pakistanis can do to end rape culture, in the context of a particular rape case that sparked national outrage. There’s also an interview section on the website that includes Q&As with Pakistani entrepreneurs. During the pandemic, Khan has started hosting virtual roundtables with Pakistani and Pakistani American students to discuss the issues that most affect them. A recent roundtable discussed the experiences of religious and ethnic minorities in Pakistan:

 

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A post shared by The NewsRun (@thenewsrun)

Currently, the NewsRun’s daily newsletter doesn’t offer too much of its own daily reporting, although Khan often finds herself chasing down sources when other news stories are unclear. And, to be fair, much of the reporting and information already exists in Pakistan’s healthy offerings of digital news outlets. Khan is just helping make sense of it all.

In the next few months, she and her two business partners want to scale up by growing the subscriber base, monetizing the newsletter, hosting more deep-dive events, and talking to readers outside of the newsletter.

“I like highlighting stories that focus on gender issues, minority issues, humanitarian issues, because I want to give people living abroad a sense of what’s happening on the ground,” Khan said. “And then there are also issues in Pakistan that I want to raise more awareness about and highlight for local readers as well.”

Along with naming racism and injustices as such, Cardoza makes sure that Anti-Racism Daily doesn’t contribute to harmful and insensitive media practices. She doesn’t publish body-camera footage from police shootings, mugshots, or any other visuals that depict the suffering of people of color and marginalized people.

“I know how difficult it is to read news that isn’t taking into account that toll that it has on our bodies,” Cardoza said. “There’s plenty of people that are going to share the videos and plenty of people that are going to report on people as if they’re bodies and not humans and souls. This platform is not designed to make entertainment out of pain and suffering of communities of color. I don’t write this space for white people to become engaged and informed. I write this space to help protect and center the needs of those most vulnerable.”

The email newsletter is free to subscribe to, though Cardoza encourages people to donate in a variety of ways to help with the upkeep of the product. There’s a monthly subscription on Patreon or a one-time contribution option. People can also donate through Venmo and PayPal. There’s no business model yet in terms of making the products profitable, as Cardoza and the guest writers all work on Anti-Racism Daily on a volunteer basis (though there are three part-time remote positions posted on the website for a graphic designer, a reporter, and an editor).

Cardoza does, however, offer team subscriptions to ARD for workplaces and classrooms. The group subscription includes the daily emails, weekly discussion guides, and monthly engagement reports of the team’s participation, with open rates and the actions taken. A subscription for a team of two to 10 people is $360 while a subscription for a team of 400 or more is $7,200.

Still, Cardoza said she doesn’t wake up thinking about ARD’s bottom line, and hopes to keep it that way.

“The only true benchmark of success is whether or not racism is has ended in America and around the world, and we’re still far away from that.”

Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/anti-racism-daily-is-a-newsletter-that-helps-you-read-the-news-and-do-something-about-it/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/defectors-kelsey-mckinney-on-how-2020-destroyed-the-concept-of-sticking-to-sports/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/defectors-kelsey-mckinney-on-how-2020-destroyed-the-concept-of-sticking-to-sports/#respond Thu, 10 Sep 2020 18:40:41 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=185949

Walt Hickey runs Numlock News, a daily morning newsletter obsessed with fascinating numbers that are buried in the news. A version of this interview originally ran in Numlock Sunday. Kelsey McKinney is a features writer and co-owner of Defector.

Kelsey McKinney is one of the founders of a new sports site, launched this week by a number of ex-Deadspin writers and editors, called Defector Media. You may know her from stories like The Only All-Girls Tackle Football League in America and What A Foul Ball Can Do, as well as her newsletter Written Out.

We spoke about how the ex-Deadspin crew hatched a plan to start their own media company, how they managed to develop a business model on the fly in the face of a global economic catastrophe, how 2020 destroyed the concept of “sticking to sports” — the day we talked was the day the NBA players got the league to commit to using their arenas as voting sites for the 2020 election — and the advantages of a subscriber-supported platform. This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Walt Hickey: You are an owner and a founding writer behind a new site called Defector, a sports and culture site from a lot of alums from Deadspin. Where did this idea come from?

Kelsey McKinney: We left Deadspin in October of 2019, and almost immediately we were still in conversation with each other. It never really ceased. As anyone who has been laid off from a media company — at this point, most people — will tell you, it’s a fairly traumatic experience. People bond together really quickly. We were all in communication, talking, and the problem with being in communication and talking with a group of people who really loved their job is that they want to do their jobs still.

We were all moping and whining about the fact that we didn’t have a blog, and it sucks that we couldn’t cover the things that we wanted to cover. So, we started having a conversation about like, “Okay, what could it look like?”

Initially we thought that looked like finding a big investor, because there were a lot of us and people need money to survive. We started talking to some major investors trying to find someone that could afford to pay us salaries and healthcare. And then the coronavirus hit and the entire economy fell apart. And those deals seemed stagnant.

Because that had been our default, our first idea, once those deals fell apart, we started having a different conversation: “Okay, if we can do this any way in the whole world, how would we do it? What kind of dream publication would we actually want to work for?” And that’s kind of how we stumbled upon this idea of a cooperative mutually-owned organization, by thinking about, “Okay, what failed us in other media organizations? And how can we set up a company that won’t fail its current and future employees?”

Hickey: It feels very back to basics. It’s a new model, but it’s an old model in a nice way.

McKinney: It’s fundamentally a blog, right? That’s nothing new. People have been writing forever, but we’re hoping that the financial plan and the structure of the organization will work.

Hickey: Deadspin’s ostensible reason for existence was to cover sports. But so much of it was covering all of the stories that circulate around sports. And for a while, a pervasive argument against that kind of coverage was like, “Well, audiences prefer when you stick to sports.” In 2020, that view is fairly antiquated, when ESPN right now is having some of the same coverage as CNN.

McKinney: Deadspin was never particularly good at sticking to sports throughout its history. It always covered politics. For a period of time, it had an entire culture vertical, always focused on how sports fit into the world, which means you can’t ignore the outside world.

In 2020, I’ve been thinking constantly about something Sean Doolittle, a pitcher for the Washington Nationals, said early on. His quote was, “Sports are like the reward of a functioning society.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, about how we can’t cover sports right now, or ever, as an individual and separate thing because sports are the gift we get for making our society as just and fair as possible. Right now, we’re seeing that multiplied a hundred times, because you have athletes who are feeling the urgency and have the power to come out and say what they believe politically. ESPN was saying just a few years ago that they wouldn’t cover politics at all. Now there’s no choice there. It’s been made really clear by the athletes, the people who play the sports, that they don’t want that distinction there themselves. So, who are we to decide that it must be imposed?

Hickey: It’s August 28th when we’re speaking, and the NBA is currently setting up their arenas as places for voting availability in many major cities.

McKinney: It’s not just that, right? It’s where the NBA plays, where their stadiums are built, that affects those cities. Everything from the very beginning of a professional organization has ramifications, politically and personally, on the place where it is. So, you can’t just extract that into a separate little thing where we only cover who has the most dunks a year because there’s more going on there.

Hickey: Yeah, nobody wants to follow a blog about a random number generator.

McKinney: Yeah, exactly.

Hickey: You’ve covered some really outstanding stories. Two of my favorites were about the football league that was built for girls and the one about fans who have been hit by foul balls and oftentimes the serious consequences that live with them. So, you cover a lot about the intersection of sports and culture. What are you looking forward to writing about at Defector when you guys launch?

McKinney: I always found stories by asking myself a question and then Googling it, and if there’s no answer, then I write the answer.

Which is to say that there are a lot of things that my beat has entailed over the years, but something that I’m really interested in looking at and focusing more time on at Defector is how sports function at lower levels than the professionals. Thinking about the interactions of fans to sports, but also thinking about high school and travel soccer. Right? And all of these arenas in which a lot of stories are happening that just aren’t being covered because of the complete destruction of local news. So, I’m hoping to kind of cover some of that. We want the site to be fun. So, I’ll also do some stuff that will just be fun stories.

Hickey: That’s a really fascinating type of story, the amount of investment in even just travel soccer is a huge deal. It completely changes who gets to play and who doesn’t get to play. It changes the economics of these sports entirely. A game that typically should involve just the cost of a ball can now involve hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in transportation alone.

McKinney: Yeah, and you see girls that are on two travel soccer teams and their parents are paying for them to go to Princeton Summer Soccer Camps. And, of course, that ends up affecting whether or not you get recruited onto a college team, which affects whether or not you get recruited into the NWSL, whether you can even pay for college in the first place. All of those things are connected, definitely, and that’s the kind of stories I’m interested in, these stories that affect us on a personal level and not necessarily at the highest echelons of where we’re playing the sport.

Hickey: The overwhelming majority of football that is played in America is not in an NFL stadium.

McKinney: Right. And I grew up in Texas! So to me, high school football is the pinnacle of all sports. But also, I saw a lot of people injured playing high school football. I saw a lot of people bank their entire futures on getting a college football scholarship, and then that fell through. We all know stories of sports at a lower level, high school, middle school even, where those have had massive ramifications on people’s lives.

Hickey: Sports is just a fragment of a lot of bigger issues rolled into one.

McKinney: People like things because of who they are holistically, right? You like the TV shows you like because they relate to you in some way. You like the books you like because of the books you read early on. The same thing is true for sports. We try to talk about it as just this separate, completely independent entity. You lose a lot of why people love the sport. It’s not just about coverage, it’s also about what people get out of it.

Hickey: You’ve been working on this project called Written Out about women who are “written out of the literary canon, written out of history, and written out of contemporary literary coverage.” I would love to hear a little bit more about the conception of that and how that’s going.

McKinney: I was a freelancer before I was at Deadspin, and then after quitting Deadspin was also a freelancer. And if you have worked as a freelancer at all in the last five years consistently, you’ve watched the industry just very quickly deteriorate. There are fewer and fewer places to place stories, there is less and less money in those stories. Because those sites are fewer, there are less places that have the money to accept independent pieces.

Because of that, I found myself sitting on seven stories that I knew that no one wanted, right?

I was like, “Nobody is going to want this story about an early 20th century writer who wrote a book about being an old maid at 25 and living with two cats. No one wants that.”

But the founders of Substack reached out to me actually, and they were like, “Have you considered starting a Substack?” And I was like, “No, I’m not doing that right now.” And then I lost a bunch of freelance assignments and I was like, “You know what? Maybe this is the place where I could put all of these weird stories that I have that no one wants.”

And it worked. It’s just been a great place for me to be able to blog and to write things that I really care about as the rest of the industry has been unstable. But also, I think, it’s easy to lose as a professional writer a sense of wonder in your work. Which sounds corny, but I think working in a space that isn’t edited and isn’t decided on by editors-in-chief, or kind of mediated in that way, gets you into some really interesting places.

I think Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter is super fascinating right now. And I think part of that is just because you can read it and watch the way her mind works, right? The cake isn’t fully formed until you get to the end. And I think that’s been true for me too, in my work and my newsletter, that you’re writing to figure it out, which is, I think, interesting in its own way.

Hickey: I enjoy your newsletter and I think that one reason that I really enjoy it is that lots of freelance stuff comes down to what editors want, but with so much media being ad-supported, it’s not even what the editors want so much, it’s the perception of what a broad audience wants, and sometimes those niche pieces can’t happen. But when you have this niche-specific audience, people who specifically sign up for this kind of stuff, like with an Oscars one I write sometimes, I just want to talk to a couple hundred people who really care about the Academy Awards. I just really love yours for that particular reason.

McKinney: Thank you. Yeah, I feel that way about your newsletter too. I think that it’s kind of a revival in a way of the early 2000s’ blog economy.

I used to look at my Google Reader and be like, “Okay, here’s the blog that I read about wallpaper design.” That’s not a sustainable job. It was just someone who was like, “I love wallpaper design and here are three blogs a day about it.”

And I, being an idiot, was like, “Yes, thank you.” I think that’s kind of how newsletters work too. Right? I say I’m super interested in the way that women write and the way that we forget about women writing. And just a few hundred people are like, “Hey, me too.”

Hickey: I’ve enjoyed your post-Deadspin work, and I am so excited for Defector. Can you tell folks where to find Defector, how to subscribe to Defector, and what the offering is?

McKinney: Our hope is that Defector will be a homepage site, so go to defector.com.

We are subscription-funded at multiple levels, depending on how much you want to give us. There will be podcasts, currently we have one. We’re in some brainstorming phases for some others, and there will be newsletters, all of which we’re hoping will fill different needs.

But the bread and butter is the blog on the site. So: Defector.com.

Walt Hickey runs Numlock News, a daily morning newsletter obsessed with fascinating numbers that are buried in the news. A version of this interview originally ran in Numlock Sunday. Kelsey McKinney is a features writer and co-owner of Defector.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/defectors-kelsey-mckinney-on-how-2020-destroyed-the-concept-of-sticking-to-sports/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/to-keep-readers-around-after-covid-publishers-see-hope-in-newsletters-and-podcasts/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/to-keep-readers-around-after-covid-publishers-see-hope-in-newsletters-and-podcasts/#respond Tue, 16 Jun 2020 12:45:59 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=183756 The Reuters Institute’s 2020 Digital News Report makes the case that the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate long-term structural changes toward a more digital, more mobile and more platform dominated news environment. But these trends have already proven deeply problematic for publishers both in terms of revenue, where publishers have been losing out to aggregators and platforms, but also in terms of engagement, which has typically been much lower in digital than for traditional media like print and TV. Most recently the COVID-19 crisis has led to record bumps in website traffic, but has also reminded us that volume on its own does not always lead to financial success.

That’s why publishers have already been rethinking their digital proposition with a greater focus on distinctive content that engages users at a deeper level. This shift to habit and loyalty will be important whether the underlying business model is premium advertising or paid content like subscription or membership. This year’s Digital News Report highlights the benefit of two editorially curated products — podcasts and email newsletters — that are likely to become even more important as part of the drive toward habitual digital use.

Email newsletters

Despite the simplicity and relative lack of sophistication, our data show that email news is striking a chord with many users, particularly those who are older and more interested in news. Across 40 markets, around one in six (16%) receive news via email each week, 21% in the United States. But we also find that around half of these say email is their main way of accessing news.

Daily update emails, normally sent in the morning, have become an important reminder of the range and diversity of the output of the newsroom and an opportunity to build connection. News organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post each offer almost 70 different scheduled emails showcasing the work of different parts of the newsroom, including business, technology, culture, and sports. Over the last few months many have also developed “pop-up” newsletters to showcase coverage on an ongoing story like coronavirus or the 2020 US presidential election. Of those who use email, our data show that 60% get a daily update about general news or politics. Americans get, on average, more emails from different news providers (4) compared with Australians (3) or British (3). Across countries almost half (44%) say they read most of their news emails.

With publishers increasingly wary of platforms, email traffic has been an increasingly important route to content. But with a greater focus on paid models, they are also one of the most effective ways of identifying and converting new digital subscribers.

Once just a series of automated links, the most successful emails are now treated as an editorial product hosted by a senior journalist who brings an informal tone and personal touch which has often been lacking in digital media. The New York Times recently appointed David Leonhardt as anchor of The Morning Newsletter, which it also revealed has more than 17 million subscribers — one of the largest daily audiences of any kind in journalism, across television, radio, print and digital. The use of the term “anchor,” a term borrowed from network TV, shows the value now placed on human curation; on guiding audiences through the news of the day.

In the UK Matt Chorley played a similar role for six years as host of the popular Red Box update for The Times newspaper — mixing politics, humor, and various types of user interaction. Chorley has used the email as a springboard to build a wider personal brand with a weekly podcast, and a nationwide stand-up comedy tour. Now he’s giving up the newsletter to take up a new role as a host on the recently launched Times Radio.

Podcasts playing a similar role for younger audiences

The value of editorial curation is a key factor in the success of daily news podcasts such as The Daily from the New York Times and Today in Focus from the Guardian. Hosts like Michael Barbaro and Anushka Asthana play a critical role in setting the tone and building habit.

As our previous research shows, podcasts can also deliver much deeper engagement with people typically listening for up to 30 minutes two or three times each week. Podcast users in the United States say that the format gives greater depth and understanding of complex issues (59%) and a wider range of perspectives (57%) than other types of media. During the coronavirus crisis, we’ve also seen some breakout hits for podcasts that went into significant detail and were hosted or featured experts. One of the most successful has been CNN’s Fact vs. Fiction, where chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviews experts on issues like the race for a vaccine. Das Coronavirus-Update is a 30-minute show featuring one of Germany’s top virologists, which reached No. 1 in the podcast charts there.

Podcasts are interesting for publishers because they are much more likely to attract younger audiences, since they can be accessed conveniently through smartphones and they offer a diversity of perspectives and voices.

The deep connection that many podcasts seem to create could be opening up opportunities for paid podcasts, alongside public-service and advertising-driven models. In our data this year we find that almost four in ten Australians (39%) said they would be prepared to pay for podcasts they liked, 38% in the United States, and a similar number in Canada (37%).

Putting the personality into digital

Neither email newsletters nor podcasts are going to be the savior of journalism, but they do offer ways in which publishers can build direct connections and ongoing relationships with digital audiences. While a website home page can often be overwhelming and clinical, the hosts and anchors of these products can help guide people through an increasingly complex world, showcasing the full range of talent in a newsroom in the process. Editorial curators are no longer junior staffers but increasingly important public ambassadors for brands shaping the news agenda every day.

But podcasts and emails may only be the start. Curated editions can take many forms, including multimedia packages of content on third-party networks aimed at different market segments. Editorial vs. algorithmic curation could be the next battleground — a chance to show the extra value that publishers can provide and, in the process, help drive more sustainable revenues.

Nic Newman is senior research associate at Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/to-keep-readers-around-after-covid-publishers-see-hope-in-newsletters-and-podcasts/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/the-washington-post-wants-to-join-your-group-chat-and-help-your-not-into-politics-friends-keep-up/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/the-washington-post-wants-to-join-your-group-chat-and-help-your-not-into-politics-friends-keep-up/#respond Mon, 09 Mar 2020 18:25:04 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=180724 The Washington Post knows the news can feel like a bit much these days.

Even before the coronavirus broke out and the stock market went into free fall, about two-thirds of Americans reported feeling “worn out” by the amount of news, according to recent Pew Research Center research.

Enter Drop Me The Link, a new politics newsletter from The Washington Post that promises to deliver election news in a manageable dose. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon, the Post will send a single link to a Post politics story alongside context that will help readers understand the news — and talk about it with friends.

The signup page promises subscribers can “use this newsletter to be the 2020 informer, the plugged-in friend, the Keeper of the Links.”

Three editors — that’s them in the “PostMojis” above — will select the links and unpack the political news:

Three editors at The Post will be sending you good reads: Ric Sanchez, a voice of The Post’s social platforms and Man About Town Internet; Krissah Thompson, an editor in Style with an eye for detail; and Terri Rupar, an editor in politics who was already texting her friends too many Post links anyway.

Drop Me The Link promises to be short and “respectful of the reader’s time,” including just one link per email and a chatty 200-word introduction that the writers hope sounds less like a summary and more like what’d you’d say when texting the article to a friend. There’s a brief section directing readers who want to learn more and a list of important dates (such as upcoming primaries or debates) and the first newsletter — which features a narrative piece selected by Rupar about a Sanders supporter who prefers the term “Bernard Brother” to “Bernie Bro” — also includes a link to live updates for primaries happening the next day.

The thrice-weekly newsletter is targeting younger or first-time voters and people who may have been apathetic in the past but are “newly awakened to their civic responsibility,” said Tanya Sichynsky, newsletter editor at the Washington Post. But it could appeal to anyone feeling besieged by headlines.

“There’s a ton of content out there. People are getting hit from all sides in terms of the news that they can read and where they can get it — and it can really feel overwhelming,” Sichynsky said. “Working at the Post, we see those problems ourselves. We’re constantly trying to read all the news all the time. We wanted to find a solution for those readers who potentially feel overwhelmed or intimidated by just the pace of coverage.”

When the Post team was brainstorming ways to reach readers who weren’t already tuned into their election coverage, two ideas kept coming up. The first was “less is more” — asking readers to read fewer links — and the second was the insight that news that could feel overwhelming in other contexts felt less so in more intimate conversations, including group chats.

“I wanted something that felt like it could be a baby born of both of those strategies,” Sichynsky said. “Something that really serves the core politics coverage goals of the Post, but also had a feeling of accessibility and approachability.”

Drop Me The Link fits with that prioritization of national politics coverage as well as a renewed focus on digital subscriptions.

“The core strategy of the Post has been moving more and more toward the subscriptions base, so obviously newsletters is a massive part of that initiative,” Sichynsky said. But the Post also sees Drop Me The Link as a way to broaden their audience, just as their lifestyle and, especially, food newsletters have found an audience beyond politicos and media types.

Rupar, one of the three newsletter writers who will rotate throughout the week, was most excited about highlighting Post articles that readers seem to have missed on first pass.

“I think all of us have had the experience where there’s a story that you love and you’re asking, ‘Why isn’t everyone reading this story? Don’t they understand that this reporter is great and they found just the right person and just the right tone? And that it really helps you understand things?'” Rupar said. “This is also a chance to show people the one story you really wish that they would read.”

Drop Me The Link will publish its first edition this afternoon and the newsletter writers have been promoting the sign-up page with tweets, memes, and (what else?) a TikTok video.

Today’s @washingtonpost TikTok features @ricsanchez, @Krissah30 and @terri_rupar (their newsletter Drop Me The Link starts Monday) https://t.co/H7wsMoJTdc pic.twitter.com/0QSHNTZBz2

— Dave Jorgenson (@davejorgenson) March 6, 2020

if you’re, like, a normal person w/a job and friends and maybe a pet and you don’t have time to read the avalanche of everything, you should sign up for this newsletter i’m helping with.

we’ll send you ONE (1) link about the election, three days a week. https://t.co/0JJhgoPs8X — ric sanchez (@ricsanchez) March 5, 2020

do you:
wish the election news cycle would slow the heck down
want to tune out the 50-person cable news panels
want to cut through the noise and make sense of the 2020 race
love a good group chat
all of the above

well then this is for you https://t.co/YXepBjeZSS — Tanya Sichynsky (@tanyasic) March 4, 2020

tell your group chat about our new election newsletter https://t.co/PyWJWAtNGT pic.twitter.com/GIXvRbc8aS

— Tanya Sichynsky (@tanyasic) March 3, 2020

Super Tuesday is… a lot. And the campaign is just heating up! Feeling overwhelmed?

Sign up for “Drop Me The Link,” our new newsletter gives you the single most interesting 2020 story that Post editors are sending to their group chats. https://t.co/Jy0UvpRWJ8 — The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 3, 2020

The first edition of Drop Me The Link is in inboxes TODAY. We promise: one link, great reporting, an email you’ll be happy to open. Sign up! https://t.co/H0SZWU6Lu2

— Terri Rupar (@terri_rupar) March 9, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/the-washington-post-wants-to-join-your-group-chat-and-help-your-not-into-politics-friends-keep-up/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/ever-wonder-why-gmail-doesnt-put-your-newsletter-in-subscribers-primary-inbox/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/ever-wonder-why-gmail-doesnt-put-your-newsletter-in-subscribers-primary-inbox/#respond Wed, 26 Feb 2020 20:35:48 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=180439 Ah, deliverability — the bane of email newsletter producers everywhere.

You’ve worked hard to promote your newsletter, gotten lots of people to sign up, and started dishing out that HTML gold. But even if your email gets delivered — where does it get delivered to, exactly? Did it get stuck in a spam filter? Locked in a digital quarantine, set to be released too late to be useful? Or if it reaches the inbox, which inbox? “Focused,” or the dreaded “Other”? Or, for the bazillion Gmail users out there, has it been declared a mere “Promotion” or “Update”?

Newly launched The Markup wants you to know: You’re not alone.

Reporters Adrianne Jeffries, Leon Yin, and Surya Mattu ran an experiment to see how Gmail dealt with one important category of messages: emails from presidential candidates or other political groups. And they found some very wide disparities:

The Markup set up a new Gmail account to find out how the company filters political email from candidates, think tanks, advocacy groups, and nonprofits.

We found that few of the emails we’d signed up to receive — 11 percent — made it to the primary inbox, the first one a user sees when opening Gmail and the one the company says is “for the mail you really, really want.” Half of all emails landed in a tab called “promotions,” which Gmail says is for “deals, offers, and other marketing emails.” Gmail sent another 40 percent to spam.

For political causes and candidates, who get a significant amount of their donations through email, having their messages diverted into less-visible tabs or spam can have profound effects. “The fact that Gmail has so much control over our democracy and what happens and who raises money is frightening,” said Kenneth Pennington, a consultant who worked on Beto O’Rourke’s digital campaign.

Okay, that’s a little overheated even for me, Mr. Pennington. But the really interesting part isn’t just that Gmail sends a lot of emails to Promotions or Spam — it’s that the rates at which it did so differed wildly among candidates and groups.

For example, 63 percent of Pete Buttigieg’s emails and 47 percent of Andrew Yang’s were slotting into the primary inbox — as compared to 2 percent of Bernie Sanders’ and Cory Booker’s, 1 percent of Amy Klobuchar’s, and none of Kamala Harris’, Elizabeth Warren’s, or Joe Biden’s.

That’s a huge and significant gap!

There doesn’t seem to be any clear ideological thread that runs through the senders that Gmail seems to favor (though the conspiracy-friendly will note Buttigieg and Yang each overindexed on Silicon Valley supporters). Among political groups, the conservative American Enterprise Institute and Claremont Institute were top performers — but so were the Democratic Socialists of America and Avaaz. Still, it’s rough to see the extremist John Birch Society (14 percent in primary inbox) have better deliverability than the American Cancer Society (3 percent) or the Sierra Club (0 percent).

Of 44 swing-state House campaigns The Markup tracked, only six of them had even a single email make it to the primary inbox. Equal-opportunity disappointment. (Official House emails from currently elected officials did better — but still suffered a lot of downgrades.)

I’ll note that — unlike, say, a deep statistical analysis into regulated car insurance rates — this is the sort of story you can probably safely try at home, building off The Markup’s recipe. Sign up for the email lists of your local politicians, parties, associations, interest groups — and see what happens. (Personally, I’d love to see someone do the same thing but for news organizations’ newsletters. Does the Quartz Daily Obsession have higher deliverability than, say, The New York Times’ California Today? The Wall Street Journal’s The 10-Point versus Vox Sentences?)

This scale of data is hard to draw any hard conclusions from — other than the noteworthy fact that email newsletters that seem like they should be broadly similar don’t see the same kinds of results once they hit the inbox. (The Markup threw up its hands at the task too: “We did not determine why Gmail categorized certain emails or certain senders’ emails the way that it did.”)

But in the short term, what I hope some enterprising person with time on her hands does next is download gzipped .mbox files — which contain every email The Markup received — and see if you can figure out why, exactly, Mayor Pete beat Bernie 63-0.

Is it all domain-specific factors — like, say, if Buttigieg emails were marked as spam by users far less often, or if they had a stellar open rate, and Gmail adjusted delivery accordingly? In other words, is it all about a sender being rewarded or punished for its past behavior?

Or is it something specific to the emails themselves — the subject lines, the From: field, the structure of the HTML, CAN-SPAM compliance, the length, the file size, or something else in the switched packets themselves?

That could help produce some useful knowledge on how news companies and others can increase deliverability, perhaps beyond what conventional wisdom holds.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/ever-wonder-why-gmail-doesnt-put-your-newsletter-in-subscribers-primary-inbox/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/the-new-yorkers-new-weekly-newsletter-on-climate-change-will-try-to-break-through-the-daily-noise/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/the-new-yorkers-new-weekly-newsletter-on-climate-change-will-try-to-break-through-the-daily-noise/#respond Wed, 19 Feb 2020 20:15:43 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=180228 What’s the right pace for journalism about climate change to maximize its impact?

Hammering people with a constant torrent of stories can make some people feel helpless and overwhelmed by the onslaught — not to mention the sheer scope of the problem. But checking in only sporadically, like when there’s a major new international report, leaves the story too far off the public’s agenda. A crisis many years in the making — with both its impacts and solutions often measured in decades — is hard to align with the rhythms of a newsroom.

The New Yorker is betting that weekly — and in your inbox rather than as just another link in your Twitter feed — might be right. The magazine announced this week that it’s moving deeper into newsletter-only content with a weekly email dedicated to climate change — written by perhaps the biggest name in environmental journalism, Bill McKibben.

McKibben — whose 1989 book The End of Nature was many people’s introduction to global warming — will write a newsletter called The Climate Crisis every week. Despite the magazine’s commitment to — and success with — a metered paywall, the newsletter will be free to everyone, subscriber or not.

Big news from @newyorker. @billmckibben is launching a weekly newsletter, The Climate Crisis. Sign up here. https://t.co/0VKzy6k4Ay

— Michael Luo (@michaelluo) February 18, 2020

The New Yorker has long seen newsletters as central to its mission of turning casual readers into paying subscribers — a way to build habit and attachment that could later be turned into reader revenue. (Here’s a Nieman Lab story from two years ago in which editors were already talking about standalone newsletters.)

Jessanne Collins, The New Yorker’s director of newsletters, said the publication has published newsletter-first content in its food and election coverage, but McKibben’s newsletter will break the mold in key ways. “The Climate Crisis is a new direction for us, as we conceived it first and foremost as a newsletter that highlights the distinct voice of a particular writer and makes the most of the newsletter as an editorial form in itself,” Collins said.

Collins, who previously led the team that published Quartz’s lauded Obsession emails, said newsletters are “a great way to form an intimate bond with readers.”

By making the newsletter free from paywall restrictions, “Our thinking is that a newsletter from an expert like Bill gives us an opportunity to widen our audience at the ‘top of the funnel,'” she said. That flow of new potential subscribers has also informed other New Yorker expansions into non-paywalled content, like its radio show/podcast and videos.

McKibben is a former New Yorker staff writer and has earned a number of awards for his writing and activism since he left the magazine more than three decades ago. (According to his website, McKibben has also been honored by biologists who named a species of woodland gnat after him in 2014.)

Right before Xmas New Yorker editor David Remnick called to ask if I'd do a weekly climate newsletter under the magazine's auspices. My 1st reaction was yes: it was where I'd begun writing about all this in my early 20s and now I was…older if not wiserhttps://t.co/x9bCVpbqsj

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) February 18, 2020

Each issue of The Climate Crisis will consist of a short essay, links, and an interview section called “Pass the Mic” to highlight emerging perspectives on climate change. The name is a nod to the NAACP publication co-founded by W.E.B. Du Bois a little more than a century ago.

The Climate Crisis is hardly the first newsletter dedicated to climate change. From established institutions, there’s the weekly Climate Fwd: from The New York Times. More 2020 is Emily Atkin’s HEATED, a subscriber-only daily on Substack.

I have many *thoughts* on Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion climate pledge — and if you are a subscriber to my newsletter, you can read them! [https://t.co/1rEg9DHmnI](https://t.co/1rEg9DHmnI)

— Emily Atkin (@emorwee) February 18, 2020

Indeed, McKibben tweeted that he hesitated on taking the offer because he didn’t want to hurt Atkin’s prospects.

But my 2nd reaction was, what about this newsletter HEATED that @emorwee had just launched, and that I was very much enjoying. Would it damage her effort? So I asked, and she graciously said she thought not: "there's plenty of space out there for more newsletters…Hell yeah!"

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) February 18, 2020

So I decided to proceed–I'm not competing with HEATED, which you can sign up for here: https://t.co/AkkxcK0jQj And since mine is free, you will have money to subscribe to hers, and since mine is weekly you will have time to read her daily output

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) February 18, 2020

Robinson Meyer, who sent out a climate change newsletter called Not Doomed Yet that we wrote about in 2015, argued that climate change resists the standard article format because it happens on a scale much larger than any election cycle or cultural conversation.

Collins said the digital team at The New Yorker was thinking similarly when it designed The Climate Crisis. The newsletter will serve as a practical guide to understanding climate change, and McKibben will offer readers a sense of what they can do.

“Climate is one of those big, overarching topics that feels essential to understand and also very overwhelming. The newsletter form seems like the right way to approach it because it narrows the focus,” she said. “A newsletter is finite and accessible and even fun to read when it’s done right.”

McKibben’s platform and The New Yorker brand will give the newsletter a shot at reaching readers who want to hear more about climate change. And it’s hard to beat free.

Sign up for this! @billmckibben is the best #climate writer and thinker and synthesizer there is! And the @newyorker climate newsletter is free, so how could you not afford it? https://t.co/4UlD7o5T3l

— Sue Halpern (@suehalpernVT) February 18, 2020

Illustration by Tom Clohosy Cole used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/the-new-yorkers-new-weekly-newsletter-on-climate-change-will-try-to-break-through-the-daily-noise/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/from-newsroom-to-newsletter-how-local-journalists-are-diying-important-coverage-via-email/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/from-newsroom-to-newsletter-how-local-journalists-are-diying-important-coverage-via-email/#respond Mon, 21 Oct 2019 18:21:00 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=175840 Cari Wade Gervin had a story that needed to be reported, and nobody else was going to do it.

After two decades working in journalism, she had lost her job at a Tennessee alt-weekly in 2018 and turned to freelancing. She had found a story that involved the office of the state’s speaker of the house apparently faking an email in order to get the bond of an activist (who’d been arrested for protesting) suspended. “I pitched it, and no one wanted the story. I was like, ‘Well, I’ll just start a newsletter and send it out, because somebody needs to write about it.”

And so she did, in March, launching The Dog and Pony Show. Then she wrote about the governor’s staff using auto-deleting messaging apps to circumvent open records laws. Then she wrote about a married state representative who had voted against LGBTQ interests while using Grindr to meet up with younger men, leading to his resignation. That was the 15th issue of her newsletter (including several distributing the governor’s public schedule), five months after she’d started it, and now with almost a thousand subscribers.

In North Carolina, Tony Mecia was laid off from the conservative Weekly Standard when it shut down, and he too planned to return to freelancing — the same way he’d done it after taking a buyout at The Charlotte Observer a decade earlier. But then he considered the local business reporting scene and wondered how he could play a role. “I didn’t want to borrow or invest a bunch of money starting something up,” he said. So Mecia started sending out a newsletter three mornings a week — free, for now, to start — sharing a mix of original reporting and a scannable roundup. He’s at 1,600 signups after six months. “If it’s something you want to do, then don’t wring your hands,” he said.

Jack Craver highlights the Austin City Council’s happenings in his own newsletter in Texas; Shay Castle started sending out a newsletter about the activities of politicians in Boulder, Colorado after leaving the Daily Camera; and Adam Wren launched a newsletter alongside his freelance reporting on Indiana’s national political presence.

Inboxes are swelling with newsy email newsletters these days, and a lot of the industry dialogue centers on major national brands. (The New York Times in California, Wall Street Journal tweaks, Axios engagement, etc.) While places like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker have all recently created roles specifically for developing their newsletter portfolios and purposes, the trend has taken off locally too — with a twist.

As revenue-starved local newsrooms shed journalists, some of them are using newsletters as a tool to build out their own one-person-show reporting operation — sometimes making money, but often using it to establish a brand presence while piecing together money from freelancing for national outlets, copywriting for corporations, or waiting tables on the side. There’s are any number of local, news-curating, email-driven startups as well (Whereby.Us, 6AM, Inside), but this model diverges by centering on the reporting work itself and turning to readers instead of advertisers for support in a bare bones reporter–reader relationship.

Newsletter companies like Substack and Revue have opened the tech-stack doors to building your own publishing system without relying on social media algorithms, and maybe even pulling in some personal subscription revenue. But they’re not perfect. Half of the journalists I interviewed for this piece use Substack, citing its ease with launch and payments; those not using it said they were either wary of how high the cut of revenue was (10 percent) or unaware that it existed (and had built their own Mailchimp/Stripe/Patreon integrations).

None of the six have been able to make a full-time living off of their local newsletter. But they’ve been able to cobble together an important service for their communities.

Holly Fletcher crunched the numbers on all this when she started her Nashville-focused newsletter on local healthcare and technology news.

“I was a trade reporter for five years covering power and utilities and the intersection with finance,” Fletcher, now a senior media strategist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said. “I was always exposed to very in-depth reporting as an object that someone was willing to pay for.” After working at The Tennessean for three years, she decided to run a little experiment with a local healthcare business newsletter she called BirdDog: “I wanted to know that there was still an audience for thoughtful reporting…and wanted to show that people still respected good information.”

Unlike Gervin and Mecia’s “just do it” approaches, she researched the business models and prospective audience, meeting with nearly 100 people to discuss what BirdDog could look like. She started out in March 2018 with the plan of three issues a week, but quickly realized that two issues were more realistic — and then scaled back even further to one quality email a week, on Sundays, to mirror the Sunday paper habit. Fletcher tested send times (a friend suggested trying an earlier sending time, but “me not being a morning person I thought that was crazy. I scheduled it for 3:30 a.m. and there was a whole group of people opening it before 5 and 6”) and formats (she included ads from two similarly minded entrepreneurs to test readers’ reaction to different designs) — but one of the biggest tests was the commitment created when money is involved.

“Whatever model you’re thinking about, the exchange of money means you owe someone something. You owe them a continuation,” Fletcher said. And she wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue, since she was enjoying the experimentation more than the grind — “I can assure you running a newsletter like that is a sun-up to sun-down job” — and she knew that keeping monetization, via sponsorship, investment, or reader revenue, out of the picture gave her an out. She stopping publishing six months after she launched BirdDog, ending with 1,600 subscribers. (She shared many more findings in her end-of-experiment post, including the newsletter’s 30 to 40 percent open rate and the stat that only 3.9 percent of her reader survey respondents were satisfied with Tennessee’s existing journalism options.)

“If you’re looking to sustain yourself, then you really have to work backwards, and say if I need X amount of money a year, what is that going to be per month, and how many people do I need to pay, or commit X number of months to get me to that number per year. Once you start doing these numbers, a lot of people are going to realize it takes scale,” Fletcher said.

In Boulder, Shay Castle started Boulder Beat (both a site and a newsletter) after leaving the Daily Camera in January and has to remind her 700 readers that she’s doing this for them, and for free. “I believe news should be free and I believe people should pay for news. It’s like any public good or service. Not everybody can afford it — I can’t afford it,” she said. “Boulder is so freaking wealthy and some people can afford to pay. I’ve told my followers straight up: I did a check-in [in September] and I said ‘I’ve made less than $7,000 this year, so if you want to pay me [via Patreon or mail], you can.'”

She also laid it out for her email subscribers to pay attention:

There are other options. Perhaps acquisition, like how Pittsburgh writer Adam Shuck started a local news roundup email in 2014 that recently moved its 9,000 subscribers to Postindustrial Media, rebranding as The Pittsburgh Record. Or form a nonprofit to open up funding options: Tasneem Raja recently secured 501(c)(3) status for her Texas startup The Tyler Loop, which began as a full-blown website in 2017, though she has said she would’ve rather started it as just a newsletter if she did it again.

The subscriber-supported model is not impossible — just a bit tricky. (What, reader, in media these days isn’t?) Adam Wren, writer of Importantville in Indiana, seems closest to making his newsletter solvent — but that’s in part because it’s coupled with his national profile as a contributing editor to Politico Magazine and Indianapolis Monthly. He bills his Substack newsletter as “your indispensable guide to the intersection of Indiana politics, business, and power in the Trump era — and beyond.” After all, the vice president is the state’s former governor, the mayor of the state’s fourth-largest city is earning a high profile in the Democratic race, and there are powerful Hoosiers scattered throughout the administration and Congress. As Wren explained to me: “I found myself as a longform writer with bits and scooplets that I can’t use elsewhere. I should be able to find a way to put them to use, and maybe even monetize them as a freelancer.”

Wren took a local focus but put it on a national scale, with a Politico Playbook style. He’s been writing Importantville since April 2018, but switched from Tinyletter to Substack in June. Wren brought in 600 free subscribers in its first six months on Substack, sending emails two or three times per week. Now he sells subscriptions at $10/month or $100/year — using some proceeds to travel to D.C., Iowa, or New Hampshire, with about 10 percent of his 2,000-3,000 subscribers paying. Everyone gets a newsletter on Mondays with about a 50 percent open rate, but his paid subscribers get at least one extra newsletter per week, with about 70 percent opening. (Familiar to Nieman Lab readers as the Hot Pod model.) Most people in his audience are either connected to the political world or tech workers and young professionals based in Indianapolis — along with some Pete Buttigieg fans across the country. People can forward the newsletter at no charge, sure, but at least one scoop was shared around so much that it brought him 14 new paid subscribers in one day, Wren said.

“For me, it’s still a side hustle,” he said, though landing in inboxes more frequently does remind his sources to stay in touch. “I may only publish six to ten stories [as a freelancer] a year. The newsletter gives me an outlet to cover more stories incrementally and at a faster pace.”

The development of Importantville as a newsletter brand has now expanded into Importantville events, like a debate preview with Indy native and debate-prep expert Ron Klain and a forum with Senator Todd Young and former Rep. Christina Hale. And Wren is now working with a New Hampshire politics newsletter writer just starting out, trading dispatches and promos as Steven Porter tracks the first-in-the-nation primary’s developments.

But Wren still feels the same pressure Fletcher outlined: “Each time I get a new subscriber, it’s like I’m going to be doing this for another year to make sure I’m meeting people’s expectations,” he said. “You have to do it for at least two years to see if it really is going to find an audience.”

Wren’s newsletter has gained a national profile, with network bookers following his scoops. But the relationships between newsletter journalists and existing local media can be just as important as the ones between writers and readers. Mecia, in Charlotte, has gained exposure for his newsletter by appearing on the local NPR station every week, connecting with the moderator of a 35,000-member local Facebook group to share news, and even having established media like the Observer credit his original reporting when they follow up on it.

In Austin, Craver started his daily newsletter to build on his expertise covering the city council for the nonprofit Austin Monitor as a freelancer. He now only covers city hall for his Austin Politics newsletter — “after nine months, it’s a decent part-time job” — and meets up with as many of his subscribers as possible when they first sign up. “I remember meeting up with somebody who had recently subscribed to the newsletter and I said, ‘Thanks, I appreciate your support,’ and she corrected me and said, ‘I’m not being generous. I believe it adds value and it’s a product. I’m buying it,'” Craver said.

He has 230 fully paying subscribers at the same rate as Wren’s, who have the option to convert after a free trial period. Craver purposely avoided the grant-seeking nonprofit track, concerned about conflicts of interest: With subscriptions, he notes, “nobody can give me more than $10.”

Austin Politics is one of his babies; the other is his literal human baby who arrived six months ago. “I didn’t even take a break during that. I did some newsletters in advance,” Craver said. “I did take one week off around the Fourth of July, which everybody seemed cool with.”

Taking a break when you need to, having someone who can cover your beat when you do: These are important elements that are easier to handle in a traditional newsroom than in the freestyling local-newsletter-journalist life.

“This is more than 40 hours a week for far less than minimum wage. To be frank, it’s exhausting. I only do it because it’s so important,” Boulder Beat’s Castle told me hours after a city council meeting had wrapped up around midnight. “It’s weird being the only voice, the only one. You have no backup.”

“Once you get momentum, you’re kind of locked in,” Mecia of The Charlotte Ledger said. “If there’s days I’m out of town or with my kids, I don’t want to let readers down.”

“I would not recommend starting a local news subscription newsletter if you don’t have contacts in the news field that you feel like you can reach out to about the ethics of running something,” said Gervin, the Tennessee journalist whose reporting led to a state rep’s resignation. “It’s good to have a sounding board whose judgment you trust, where you can send them a text and say, ‘I think this is a great story, but I’m kind of worried.'”

With no decades-old news brand to stand behind, Gervin has also faced questions about her legitimacy as a reporter. “The hardest part of all this for me has been just trying to convince some people who are like, ‘Oh, you’re a freelance journalist doing this on your own, what even is your blog, you’re not even a real reporter.'” After the governor’s staff decided to remove her from their press email list, Gervin invited her readers to send a few emails of their own:

There are around one thousand of you lovely subscribers now (!!!), and maybe your influence will help remind the communications staff that the governor’s office is not a private business and doesn’t get to pick and choose which reporters it responds to.

And at least one, who Gervin said she didn’t know personally, did; she shared the email with me on his permission:

I’m writing to encourage you to reinstate Cari Wade Gervin on the Governor’s press list.

I grew up reading the Tennessean in print every morning. At first, it was just sports (Joe Biddle, Larry Woody & Jim Wyatt are names I can never forget), and then as I got older, I read the paper’s comprehensive coverage of Nashville and Tennessee. It’s been sad to see the lack of investment in what was once a great paper.

It’s incredibly challenging to be an informed citizen in today’s media environment. Media companies only provide coverage on events that are significant to the national conversation, because that’s the only way they can make money in the digital era.

Unfortunately, local journalism has not yet found a sustainable business model. I’m intrigued by the work Cari has done so far — and very intrigued by the business model opportunities powered by the newsletter/substack model.

Our politics need to be driven by a local dialogue, and that only occurs when we have local journalists that can make a living off of covering local issues. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about Cari’s deep journalism experience at organizations in Nashville and the region.

That’s why the exclusion of Cari is so troubling to me. In the face of the nationalization of politics and the slow death of local newspapers, the Governor’s office is going out of its way to exclude those trying to power a new business model.

I hope the Governor recognizes the importance of local journalism and does not continue to stymie those that are trying to provide coverage on issues important to the state.

Photo of rural mailboxes by Don Harder used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/from-newsroom-to-newsletter-how-local-journalists-are-diying-important-coverage-via-email/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/07/email-newsletter-platform-substack-nabs-15-3-million-in-funding-and-vows-it-wont-go-the-way-of-other-vc-funded-media-companies/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/07/email-newsletter-platform-substack-nabs-15-3-million-in-funding-and-vows-it-wont-go-the-way-of-other-vc-funded-media-companies/#respond Tue, 16 Jul 2019 16:52:46 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=173427 The email newsletter platform Substack, which has become home to an increasing number of personal and professional newsletters as creators phase out their use of TinyLetter, announced Tuesday that it’s raised $15.3 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator.

Since its launch in 2017, Substack has grown: It says it now has 50,000 paying subscribers across all of the newsletters in its network, up from 11,000 a couple of years ago. Creators can choose to make their newsletters free or paid, with Substack taking 10 percent of revenue from paid subs. As of February, Substack also began allowing users to monetize podcasts.

As of Tuesday, Bill Bishop’s newsletter Sinocism, which is about China and is $15 a month, was the top paid publication on Substack; others among the paid top 10 include Robert Cottrell’s The Browser ($5/month), a newsletter about restructuring and bankruptcy called PETITION ($29/month), Judd Legum’s Popular Information ($6/month), Nicole Cliffe’s Nicole Knows ($5/month), and Daniel Ortberg’s The Shatner Chatner ($5/month). (Disclosure: I host a free newsletter on Substack.)

The mixing of journalism and venture capital has often not benefited writers, and it’s wise to be skeptical about media companies that rely heavily on VC money for growth (see: the implosions of Mic and Mashable, and layoffs at BuzzFeed, Vox Media, and Vice). Substack acknowledged this in its funding announcement, but vowed that, unlike the aforementioned companies, it will never be ad-based:

We know that Silicon Valley venture capital and the media have often not mixed well, but we are committed to getting this right. We have a business model that works and that aligns our incentives with the writer’s. One of our founders, Hamish, is a journalist and author himself. We will never build ad tech into Substack, and we know that the media can’t be saved by algorithm. This Series A will help us to make substantial investments in our product, team, and network of readers and writers. It will allow us to build critical infrastructure, from get-togethers to fellowships, to help writers succeed and readers get the best possible media experiences. And it will let us continue to democratize the tools that writers need to create independent businesses.

To all the writers who have put their trust in us: thank you. You are what makes Substack what it is, and we are determined to do right by you. Our focus remains the same as it was on day one: building a sustainable company based on a model that’s simple and fair.

Substack said that it plans to use the funding to hire more staffers (it currently consists of three people — cofounders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi) and look “for more ways to help writers get started and continue to grow.” (Coincidentally or not, Patreon also announced $60 million in a new round of funding on Tuesday.)

We just raised some money. Now we want to hire someone great to work with writers (bring them to @SubstackInc, help them succeed). Know anyone? (I will follow back for DMs; person will also work with @cjgbest, @jairajs89.)https://t.co/wgIHgpkCy2

— Hamish McKenzie (@hamishmckenzie) July 16, 2019

Using Substack to generate direct income from my newsletter has been revolutionary for my freelance career, v excited to see what happens next for these guys and the future of independent, niche media https://t.co/gNxEm48r8U

— Anna Codrea-Rado (@annacod) July 16, 2019

.@SubstackInc is trying to build a tech startup as if writers actually matter. Pretty crazy idea but so far it's working out pretty well.

(Its the platform for my newsletter, https://t.co/Gl6evY9e4x)

Congrats to @hamishmckenzie and @cjgbest and Jiraj https://t.co/itZeMRDxkM

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 16, 2019

Substack has taken a series A round of funding. Paid email newsletters are one of the only models in which a tech provider’s incentives align with a writer’s. I’m not using Substack, but I want to see them, and the model, flourish. https://t.co/weTIfVILtM

— Brian Lundin (@blundin) July 16, 2019

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/07/email-newsletter-platform-substack-nabs-15-3-million-in-funding-and-vows-it-wont-go-the-way-of-other-vc-funded-media-companies/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/as-of-december-publishers-will-no-longer-be-allowed-to-send-out-newsletters-on-whatsapp/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/as-of-december-publishers-will-no-longer-be-allowed-to-send-out-newsletters-on-whatsapp/#respond Fri, 21 Jun 2019 12:54:18 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=172902 In an effort to crack down on “automated or bulk messaging, or non-personal use” on the platform, WhatsApp will no longer allow publishers to send out newsletters through the app as of December 7, 2019.

WhatsApp to take legal action against business violating its terms of service by sending bulk / non-personal messages, starting December 7, 2019…

e.g. WhatsApp newsletter-style messages and updates like Social Chain's daily updates?

More info: https://t.co/dlSVd52nq7 pic.twitter.com/ROVEwm75PV

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) June 11, 2019

WhatsApp banned bulk message forwarding earlier this year in an effort to cut down on the spread of misinformation on the platform.

Newsletters had been a gray area on WhatsApp, and news publishers that were sending them out had known that the platform could put an end to them at some point.

While the change applies globally, it seems to be attracting particular attention in Germany. IJNet has a good overview of how some German publishers will be affected, highlighting the experience of inFranken.de, a German newspaper that has been sending newsletters to WhatsApp users since 2014. It worked so well that the company discontinued its email newsletters.

Today, inFranken.de sends out three to five daily newsletters via WhatsApp to 12,500 registered subscribers — twice as many subscribers as they had for their email newsletter when they discontinued it in January, 2018. They are also reaching a younger audience than before, as many newsletter readers are under the age of 20.

The success was unexpected.

“WhatsApp is a very personal channel where you chat with your mother and your partner and your football team, and I honestly didn’t think people would want a brand anywhere near that,” Stich said.

“But, surprisingly that has never been an issue,” she continued. “Feedback we have gotten numerous times is that people love having news ‘delivered’ to them without having to actively search for it, or install a separate app.”

The success caught on, too. Shortly after starting the service, one of Germany’s leading newspapers, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, published an article about the initiative.

“After that, a number of colleagues from all over the country reached out to us. WhatsApp was something a lot of journalists wanted to tap into, but were unsure about the technical aspect of it. The feedback was so enormous that we organized a little conference back in January 2015 where we shared our insights and tips. After that, some of the participants started their own WhatsApp push services,” Stich said.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/as-of-december-publishers-will-no-longer-be-allowed-to-send-out-newsletters-on-whatsapp/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/the-new-york-times-brings-its-summer-pop-up-newsletter-back-for-a-second-season-with-lessons-learned/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/the-new-york-times-brings-its-summer-pop-up-newsletter-back-for-a-second-season-with-lessons-learned/#respond Wed, 22 May 2019 13:15:34 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=171959 Summer is fleeting, as is The New York Times’ summer newsletter, which is returning for its second year this week. It will run through Labor Day. In the intervening winter months, the Times surveyed readers and applied what they learned to the newsletter’s second summer — here are some of the changes they’re making:

1. Readers loved the 2018 newsletter — it had more than 80,000 subscribers by the end of the summer — but also found it to be too long. “People thought it was hard to scan,” said Jessica Anderson, a senior staff editor for newsletters, who’s taking over Summer in the City this year from Elisabeth Goodridge, the Times’ deputy travel editor (and the former editorial director for newsletters). So it’s being cut this year, from around 2,200 words to 1,200 (and hopefully won’t get cut off on mobile so much). “Last year we provided two game plans per send,” Anderson said. “This year we’re paring that back to one.” The newsletter is written by Margot Boyer-Dry with food and drinks coverage from Max Falkowitz.
2. Readers wanted more free and cheap activities, and the Times is making room for those as well as a dedicated section for reader feedback.
3. “We would come across these absolutely delicious, only New York activities,” Goodridge said — like a free Kool and the Gang concert in Queens — “but you could only do that night once. Kool and the Gang isn’t playing every night.” So Jessica and her team will look for evergreen options, so that if you miss something one weekend you can do another similar activity another weekend. “We think this will make the newsletter a lot more powerful and drive repeat opens,” Goodridge said.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/the-new-york-times-brings-its-summer-pop-up-newsletter-back-for-a-second-season-with-lessons-learned/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/is-the-email-newsletter-a-business-product-or-an-editorial-responsibility/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/is-the-email-newsletter-a-business-product-or-an-editorial-responsibility/#respond Thu, 08 Nov 2018 16:24:09 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=164854 Newsletters abound in 2018’s reshaping media market — helping to expand the subscription funnel and subvert social media algorithms, among other causes. There are plenty of panels, case studies, and lists of questions about how you can improve yours in the newfound age of email newsletters.

The trend continues: Use email newsletters to build a new thing entirely. I would anticipate this keeps happening (including in smaller markets) https://t.co/n1R3tWSjHZ

— Kevin Loker (@KevinLoker) November 7, 2018

But saying “make me a newsletter” is easier than actually putting in the work for the newsletter to happen successfully.

Harvard’s Shorenstein Center has also been keeping a watchful eye on newsletters, in particular how they interact with nonprofit digital newsrooms. Shorenstein’s Single Subject News Project works with, well, single-subject newsrooms including local education network Chalkbeat, inequality and innovation in education-focused The Hechinger Report, criminal justice investigative outlet The Marshall Project, gun violence reporting startup The Trace, and The War Horse, a newsroom covering the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs built by a “stubborn Marine grunt with a dream.” (The project also works with ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, the Center for Public Integrity, and Reveal/Center for Investigative Reporting.)

For the Single Subject News Project, Caroline Porter surveyed eight news organizations this summer on their internal structure and strategy for newsletters. “They are both editorial and business products, and unlike an advertisement or a news story, their place within news organizations is an open question,” she wrote in her summary of the results.

Here are the top findings:

• Half of organizations surveyed described newsletters’ place in the organization charts as sitting among the “audience” team, or “engagement” team or “digital team,” while the rest used “editorial” or the “newsroom” labels.
• Each newsletter has at least one editorial review before publication, and in some cases involves draft sign-off by upper management, including those in the editor in chief, executive editor, and editorial director roles.
• It makes sense, especially in smaller organizations, that when it comes to workflow many people pitch in to produce a newsletter. In larger organizations, we found that it was more common to have one staff member, such as an engagement reporter, dedicated to the tent-poll newsletters.
• According to our survey, news outlets dedicate between four to 58 hours per week producing newsletters. For three of the news orgs, it’s about 40 hours per week.
• Good product design is also critical. Keeping the newsletter to a certain size, understanding the impact of images, and experimenting with interactive elements are all examples of powerful tools for successful newsletters.

A striking comparison: “A lot of newsrooms operate like everything is breaking news,” Chalkbeat’s head of product, Becca Aaronson, told Porter. “The newsletter and other digital projects require strategic long-term thinking. There are long-term implications, and newsrooms today need to connect all the dots.”

Read the full writeup here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/is-the-email-newsletter-a-business-product-or-an-editorial-responsibility/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/obsessing-over-one-year-of-the-quartz-obsession-email/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/obsessing-over-one-year-of-the-quartz-obsession-email/#respond Thu, 13 Sep 2018 13:56:57 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=162934 If you’re a trivia buff, you probably don’t want to play against Jessanne Collins or Adam Pasick.

The editors are part of the team behind the weekday deep dive into one seemingly random topic (lettuce, sheds, the color purple, and the Mars rover, to name a few) by a Quartz reporter, also known as the Quartz Obsession email. Obsessions have become part of Quartz’s shtick, pushing reporters toward their area of fancy rather than the beat format of a traditional news outlet. So why not make a newsletter about it?

The one-year-old product is a diversion from the hard news that makes up most of Quartz’s email portfolio, a focus for the company since 2012. (Atlantic Media recently sold Quartz to Japanese business media company Uzabase.) It’s been drawing followers for its design and intrigue — it can be about newsy topics, but not all the time, and it’s also just really not news.

Through the sandbox of the Obsession email, the editors can test out audience engagement strategies like a subreddit for subscribers and in-email quizzes.

“There is a real magical cocktail of product, of edits, and of audience and storyline there,” Collins said. “We’re doing a different topic every day and surprising people.”

See these links for the nuts and bolts about the email’s optimization or its early content strategies . Now, here’s your chance to obsess over the Obsession — in the format of an Obsession issue.

By the digits

84 percent— the open rate of July 9’s obsession on CBD, a drug based on compounds found in marijuana; other high open rates include 80 percent for olive oil on July 26; 77 percent for Mr. Rogers when the documentary about his children’s show was hitting everyone in the nostalgia feels in June; 75 percent for the big red button back when President Trump and Kim Jong Un were playing nuclear chicken in January; and 69 percent for emotional labor in May, which Collins said unleashed emails from readers who saw it as an awakening for their own experiences.

10,000 — the number of users who have responded to the prompts at the end of the Obsession emails over its first year specifically, the Let’s Talk or Sound Off cards (see above).

4 p.m. — the time, in each local time zone, when the Obsession email is sent out to readers worldwide. It’s meant to help the afternoon blahs and counter some of the 24-hour news cycle, Collins said.

$15 a month or $150 a year — the price of the subscription for Quartz’s first paid email newsletter, about cryptocurrency; the Obsession email, like the other Quartz emails (for now), is free!

“Hundreds if not many dozens” — the amount of people who have been involved in the Quartz Obsession email process since its launch last September, according to Collins.

Backstory: Bit by the Obsession bug

Obsessions have been baked into Quartz’s framework since its founding in 2012. The original definition of a Quartz obsession, according to former senior editor Gideon Lichfield:

At Quartz, we’ll try to fit the framework to the audience. We want to reach a global, cosmopolitan crowd, people who see themselves as living “in the world.” They are keenly aware of how distant events influence one another; their lives and careers are subject to constant disruption from changes in technology and the global economy. So instead of fixed beats, we structure our newsroom around an ever-evolving collection of phenomena — the patterns, trends and seismic shifts that are shaping the world our readers live in.

To translate it to newsletter form, “we knew that it was going to be a lot of work doing one of these every [week]day, but the reality has really driven that point home,” said Pasick, Quartz’s push news editor. But he also called it one of the “most rewarding” projects he’s ever worked on: “The fact that we’re able to take on these topics scratches a real journalism itch for me.”

Collins borrowed that analogy to describe the engagement side of the newsletter. The Obsession email, she said, complements the rest of Quartz’s email products by offering “a little bit of breathing space away from the news cycle.”

A good obsession, according to Collins, is something that “speaks to you as worthwhile” — and a good Obsession writer can pull out the hidden story behind a topic, like how garden sheds are part of a societal system in Australia to give men a space to build community. The team also outlined six qualifiers of a “good” obsession here, including “It’s not too broad or narrow. (Think: not ‘the economy’ but ‘the nostalgia economy’; not ‘beverages’ but ‘LaCroix,’ ‘cold brew,’ or ‘rosé.’)” and “It’s part of the news or the zeitgeist…or maybe it’s entirely evergreen, but it tells us something about how we live now.”

Timeline

17th century: In early psychological writings, obsessions were thought to be symptoms of “religious melancholy.”

1949: The British crime film “Obsession,” released in the U.S. as “The Hidden Room,” is described by The New York Times as “a first-rate study in suspense and abnormal psychology.”

1971: Ray Tomlinson sends the first email, a test message sent to himself.

2009: Mariah Carey asks “Why you so obsessed with me?” in her single “Obsessed,” reaching No. 7 in Billboard’s Hot 100.

2012: Quartz starts using the framework of obsessions at its launch.

2017: Quartz sends its first Obsession email.

Listen up

The feedback loop is strong in the Obsession email, unsurprising for an organization with a heavy culture of talking with bots all day. Readers can participate in topical quizzes (the right answer turns green if you tap on it, and the wrongs red), polls (questions like “What’s the best way to use a shed?” with options of “Tools, lawn equipment, everything else I will neither throw away nor use,” “Airbnb ‘rustic’ granny flat, baby,” and “Secret hideaway at the bottom of the garden”) with results included in the next day’s email, respond directly to the specific email’s writers and editors, and suggest new topics to obsess over.

New as of the first week of August: A subreddit for readers to nerd out about the topic in the email or another item piquing their interest, with the hope of inspiring others to research their own Obsessions. It hasn’t gained a lot of traction yet, but Collins said the team plans to build it out further in year two of the email, including with at least one live participatory event.

(This is the part of the email where there’s usually an advertisement.)

Quotable

“One of my fears when we started was that there wouldn’t be enough topics, but it’s safe to say that’s not a concern.” — Adam Pasick

Fun fact

Usually Obsession emails take days to research, draft, edit, and send through the rest of the pipeline, but the fastest-written Obsession so far was the one focusing on Aretha Franklin written by Pasick in one morning. “It was a true labor of love and got me crying at my computer,” he said.

Picking favorites

In addition to the high-open rate emails, Pasick and Collins shouted out the Obsessions on LaCroix and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” as particularly notable examples.

“[The Carey email] was the perfect level of specific but it went in so many directions,” Collins said. “You learned so many things you weren’t expecting to learn; you saw the power in this song that is everywhere. This email really convinced me that it mattered in a huge way.”

Take me down this rabbit hole

• A Q&A with Quartz publisher Jay Lauf about the business site’s forthcoming app, adblocking, Quartz’s potential sale, and more
  
• Here’s what you need to know to build successful paid newsletters, popup newsletters, morning digests, and community newsletters
• The Washington Post on Reddit surprises users with its non-promotional, ultra helpful presence

See the full Quartz Obsession email on Baby Shark here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/obsessing-over-one-year-of-the-quartz-obsession-email/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/what-works-and-doesnt-for-advertising-your-news-organizations-subscriptions/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/what-works-and-doesnt-for-advertising-your-news-organizations-subscriptions/#respond Wed, 05 Sep 2018 13:56:30 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=162785 Your logo isn’t that cool anymore. But talking about what your audience can gain from following you is.

A new report from the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, written by Natalie Stroud, Yujin Kim, and Jessica Collier studied different ways news organizations proffer themselves to potential subscribers through the lens of paid Facebook ads promoting their subscriptions.

In a nutshell: “People aren’t persuaded by logos or messages conveying what’s at stake, and they want to sign up for free newsletters more than they want to pay for a subscription,” Collier said.

In a study funded by the American Press Institute, CME worked with six news organizations that already have a reputation for bringing in subscription or donor money (only three newsrooms were included in the experimental portion). The news organizations, ranging from a large local newspaper in the southwest to a small regional newsmagazine in the west, then tested the following strategies on either a promoted Facebook post, an email, and/or an advertisement in their newsletter:

• A subscription offer with a photo — of either the organization’s logo, a journalist at work (recording an interview with a video camera, interviewing a man with a pen and paper, or interviewing a man holding a cell phone), or a depiction of a top story covered by the newsroom (such as a forest fire or the aftermath of a hurricane)
• The wording of the subscription offer (“Get the news you need to stay informed…” vs. “Don’t miss out on the news you need to stay informed…”)
• The type of offer — for a free newsletter or paid print/digital access

The experiment took place for one month between April and May 2018, using a combination of 23 different tests and hitting almost 500,000 Facebook or email accounts. And they spent nearly $5,000 per newsroom during that time, with not too many subscriptions as a result. The topline findings:

• On Facebook, logos reduce click-through on subscription appeals relative to other images, such as journalists doing their work.

• When soliciting subscriptions via email, messages emphasizing what you’d lose without news frequently result in lower click-through rates compared to other strategies, such as telling people what they’d gain from a subscription or just giving them details about the subscription.

• Ads for free newsletter subscriptions garner more clicks than do ads for paid print/digital access.

• For the messages and images tested here, there is little evidence that Facebook ads alone yield an acceptable return on investment.

The CME researchers also note that many more people actually clicked through to the subscription page than actually ended up subscribing, hinting that there could be an issue with that page. These findings can be added to the funnel for getting to the funnel of loyal audiences/subscribers. A similar study by CME and City Bureau focused on news consumers in Chicago at the beginning of this year found that individuals are more likely to donate money to a free news site than pay money to access the news.

But perhaps the newsletters are just sowing the fruit of reader relationships to come. As Spirited Media’s Brian Boyer framed it: “The website is for adding newsletter subscribers, and the newsletter is for making members.”

Read the full CME report here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/what-works-and-doesnt-for-advertising-your-news-organizations-subscriptions/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-revamping-its-newsletters-and-trying-to-add-some-whimsy/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-revamping-its-newsletters-and-trying-to-add-some-whimsy/#respond Wed, 08 Aug 2018 16:00:55 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=161562 The Wall Street Journal is not exactly known for its sense of whimsy — but that’s what the folks revamping its newsletter system are aiming for.

When Cory Schouten and Annemarie Dooling (formerly of CJR/Indianapolis Business Journal and Vox Media, respectively) joined the Journal’s newsletter team earlier this year, they embarked on the journey of whittling down the paper’s 126 newsletters. Some were automated but didn’t generate many clicks; others had a little more voice, but a pretty dry voice nonetheless.

That whittling has led to what are now around 40 streamlined, audience-driven emails. They can now feature market information updating in real time (even after a newsletter is sent), and coaxing non-payers toward a subscription is core to their mission and design. (This process began under product designer Cory Etzkorn three years ago and accelerated through a migration to the Campaign Monitor platform since last fall.)

“When we walked into it, they’d been added [one by one] over many years,” Etzkorn said. “One year a Life and Arts newsletter would get added, then Sports would get added, but a different team or person would lead the design or strategy. Over a decade, we had a portfolio of close to 50 newsletters that looked totally different. They didn’t all have the Wall Street Journal logo. Some were just autogenerated lists of links, others were more thoughtful. Some were really good. Some weren’t so good.”

He spearheaded the design team’s build of a modular newsletter structure as the decision was made not to re-license their previous email newsletter vendor. (They wouldn’t name names.) Dooling, who built newsletters at Racked and later Vox Media from the ground up (she shared her lessons learned here), came onboard as the product lead two months ago, while Schouten has been shaping the newsroom’s perspective on newsletters for the past five months as senior editor.

“Because newsletters were an afterthought when I got here, there wasn’t really a system for what we were doing with these numbers — they were all being thrown at editors, engineers, everyone,” Dooling said. “I would look at the list and figure out: If these people aren’t clicking what are they doing with newsletter and what can we give them?”

The Journal, like other publications of its venerable stature, has been trying to find its way in the journalism world today — it slipped behind The New York Times and The Washington Post on scoops and Pulitzers under a rocky five years with a now-exited editor-in-chief. But the organization has also beefed up its digital strategy department and been experimenting with personalization, bendy paywalls, and now newsletters (they ditched blogs). Here are some of the ways they’ve tried to breathe new life into their emails.

The Journal thinks (and tests) a lot about the prospective subscriber and getting them across their flexible paywall, which changes how a visitor to the site encounters the paywall based on their individual propensity score. My colleague Shan Wang described the framework earlier this year:

Non-subscribed visitors to WSJ.com now each receive a propensity score based on more than 60 signals, such as whether the reader is visiting for the first time, the operating system they’re using, the device they’re reading on, what they chose to click on, and their location (plus a whole host of other demographic info it infers from that location). Using machine learning to inform a more flexible paywall takes away guesswork around how many stories, or what kinds of stories, to let readers read for free, and whether readers will respond to hitting paywall by paying for access or simply leaving. (The Journal didn’t share additional details about the score, such as the exact range of numbers it could be. I asked what my personal score was; no luck there, since the scores are anonymized.)

“If we’re thinking about the newsletter that is for members only, what does the landing page look like? What’s the signup form? Does the whole experience feel premium? Does it feel like something special you get as a member?” Dooling said. To win over prospective subscribers, “it’s not enough to give them a cheaper version. It’s more about how can we show you the content we have for you in the best way possible without making it less of an experience.”

That also means measuring different newsletters differently; premium newsletters might focus more on open rate while free ones worry more about clickthroughs, for example. “Each newsletter ultimately has a role and a responsibility,” Schouten said.

Case study: The 10-Point newsletter

Flagged to readers as “a personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal,” this newsletter is curated by the editor-in-chief in the style of the Journal’s (print) front-page What’s News column. Close media observers might remember that the Journal’s previous editor-in-chief, Gerard Baker, left the lead role in June, transitioning to editor-at-large, a weekend columnist, and host of a Journal-themed show at Fox Business Network. His successor, Matt Murray, quickly stepped in.

In two weeks, Dooling, Schouten, Etzkorn, and the rest of the newsletter brigade rebuilt the flagship newsletter. They broke up the blocks of text into 10 numbered points — stopping it from getting truncated in Gmail — and aimed for a briefer, more streamlined style so readers could better scan. (Plus, the 10th point, “Today’s Question and Answer,” shares the responses of readers to the previous day’s prompt.)

After the revamped version debuted, the team asked readers to share their thoughts and ran the “hundreds of responses” through IBM’s Watson, Schouten said; the prevailing sentiment: “joy.”

“The idea of a morning newsletter relaunching and generating joy is really exciting feedback to read,” he said.

Tomorrow’s newsletter

Next on the trio’s list is taming the email lists of the legacy organization to maintain sender integrity (as few Promotions filters as possible!) and running the ideas like the series nudge and real-time modules through more tests over the next few months. Dooling also wants to take a step back and look at the user experience more broadly.

“The newsletter itself in your inbox is simply not enough,” she said. “What is it like to speak to the editor if you reply? What do you want to do with the information? What is the action involved when you get this newsletter?”

“We’re trying to innovate on a platform that hasn’t really innovated in a long time,” Etzkorn said.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-revamping-its-newsletters-and-trying-to-add-some-whimsy/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/06/all-the-news-thats-fit-for-you-the-new-york-times-your-weekly-edition-is-a-brand-new-newsletter-personalized-for-each-recipient/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/06/all-the-news-thats-fit-for-you-the-new-york-times-your-weekly-edition-is-a-brand-new-newsletter-personalized-for-each-recipient/#respond Wed, 06 Jun 2018 13:56:57 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=159135 “We have more than 55 newsletters now,” said Elisabeth Goodridge, newsletter editorial director at The New York Times. “I encourage you to sign up for all of them!”

I haven’t signed up for all of them, but I did sign up for a bunch, including one so new that it’s not actually included on the Times’ newsletters page yet: Your Weekly Edition, a three-week-old “experimental newsletter [that] aims to provide you with a personalized selection of the week’s most important news, analysis and features,” using a mix of editorial curation and algorithms.

One goal: to show you only things that you haven’t read already. Here’s how the Times explains it:

After choosing the most timely and impactful stories and commentary of the past seven days, our editors group them into three sets:

Best of The Times Riveting journalism that we’ve published recently, including video, graphics and rich multimedia pieces.

News you might have missed A selection of the news stories, analyses and explainers you might have missed.

Opinion Commentary from some of the world’s most provocative thinkers

Discover Highlights from our features coverage, including stories from travel, food, health and other lifestyle sections.

Once these sets are populated, we algorithmically select the articles we hope will be most interesting to you, based on articles you have read as well as stories that other Times readers found interesting.

The more you read as a logged-in user on the Times’ website (something the Times also wants you to do for other reasons too, of course), the better Your Weekly Edition will be. But even if all you read on the Times is — I don’t know — cooking articles, that’s not all you’ll see in the newsletter.

“With this structure, we’re trying to hit the right balance — broadening your interests and helping you find what the Times is publishing that’s the best,” said Eugene Wang, senior product manager of personalization at the Times. “And, very simply, we try not to show you stuff you’ve already read.”

“Say you read a lot about cooking, and someone similar to you has also read a lot about cooking, but also read a Saturday profile from International about a chef in Italy,” said Goodridge. “We may surface that story in your queue in your newsletter.”

Your Weekly Edition is the Times’ first major editorial product with a heavy personalization component, following some earlier experiments we wrote about last year. Goodridge, Wang, and design director Elena Gianni cautioned me that the newsletter is so new that it’s too early to draw conclusions about what is or isn’t working. Each edition asks readers for feedback, and reactions have been largely positive so far. Gianni said that one thing the Times hopes to do is provide readers with a little more insight into how the algorithm works — “without hitting anyone over the head with too much tech.” With the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the news around the time of the newsletter’s launch, she said she’d feared readers might shy away from anything that seemed too targeted. So far, though, that hasn’t happened. “It makes me think that the kind of approach we have, mixing curation with personalization, is a promising approach,” she said.

You can sign up to try it here.

Your Weekly Edition is just a small part of the Times’ newsletter strategy, which has been honed by Goodridge, the first person to hold the role (she started in late 2016). Before then, the launch of Times newsletters had been somewhat haphazard — “There was an awful lot of ‘I want a newsletter’ 15 years ago, not a lot of thought behind audience or product,” she said. A large part of her job now is determining what to sunset, refine, upgrade, and launch. When she started, the Times had 40 newsletters; now, there are 55, but some of the original 40 were killed. The T Magazine newsletter was folded into Vanessa Friedman’s Open Thread fashion newsletter, for instance. Also gone: Entrepreneurship and Booming, which were “tied to verticals that were very important 5 or 6 years ago, but then the verticals and staff went away and we still had the newsletters — it didn’t make sense.”

The Times has different goals for its different kinds of newsletters. Some of them, like The Interpreter, are meant to be enjoyed entirely within the email. “Read, enjoy, learn, and click delete, no need to ever leave your inbox,” Goodridge explained. At the other end of the spectrum are newsletters that are more of a “laundry list of links,” like Science Times, which is one of the Times’ fastest-growing newsletters. With the enjoy-in-your-inbox newsletters, Goodridge places more emphasis on open rates and subscriber numbers; for the link-y, audience-driving newsletters, click-through rates are the most important criteria.

And some newsletters are simply designed to be temporary: The Times just launched Summer in the City, which includes recommendations for young New Yorkers who live in the city. “For that newsletter, we hired two millennial female writers [Tejal Rao and Margot Boyer-Dry], one covering events and culture, the other covering food and bars,” Goodridge said. It’s a pop-up, and it’ll be gone after Labor Day.

And then there is the Times’ most important newsletter of all.

“A masthead editor came up to me and said, ‘I’ve been really impressed with the algorithm [of Your Weekly Edition]. But I’d already read one of the stories that was recommended in my queue,'” Goodridge recounted. “I asked, ‘Oh, which one?’ And she said, ‘Oh, wait. It was one that I’d already read in print.'”

Nieman Lab’s algorithm has selected the following stories just for you.

— Tiny personalizations on the Times’ homepage.

— “We were trying to avoid, as much as possible, some Apple News–type screen where you have to select your topics before you jump in.”

— How Vox’s healthcare newsletter is filling a role beyond “articles on the Internet.”

Photo by William Felker on Unsplash.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/06/all-the-news-thats-fit-for-you-the-new-york-times-your-weekly-edition-is-a-brand-new-newsletter-personalized-for-each-recipient/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/heres-what-you-need-to-know-to-build-successful-paid-newsletters-popup-newsletters-morning-digests-and-community-newsletters/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/heres-what-you-need-to-know-to-build-successful-paid-newsletters-popup-newsletters-morning-digests-and-community-newsletters/#respond Mon, 16 Apr 2018 17:56:16 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=157212 Thinking about starting your own email newsletter? A panel at ISOJ 2018 contains a wealth of advice for launching all types of editorial newsletters, from paywalled offerings to limited-run recaps tied to popular television shows to indispensable morning digests to community-creating newsletters.

Elisabeth Goodridge, editorial director of newsletters and messaging at The New York Times, presented a selection of the Times’s 55 different email newsletters (the Times newsletters benefit from some serious internal investments on the product side as well: it’s building a new email service platform for them).

“You can’t just be an editor and write something and send it to somebody else,” she cautioned. “You have to know how the product is doing, how you’re going to refine it — and not just your text, but your product, your audience, and your deliverability.”

Thinking about a more niche newsletter targeting a subset of your audience? Here’s The New York Times basic checklist when it thought about launching its Game of Thrones newsletter:

Make sure you consider send time: that GoT newsletter also went out on Tuesdays, because readers would watch the shows on Sunday night, read internet recaps on Monday, and then read the mother of all recaps from Times on Tuesday. 80,000 people subscribed, the newsletter went out eight times, and every email had a 60 percent unique open rate.

Monica Guzman, of The Evergrey newsletter in Seattle, which is focused on building (and serving) a dedicated local audience, spoke about her small team’s guiding principles when crafting the emails: curious, honest, useful, bold, and inclusive. Every day, the newsletter opens with a good morning or a hello, and then moves into a piece of original Evergrey content.

It focuses on residents who feel they haven’t found a “tribe” yet in a city they’re still trying to settle into, and maintains a (no “ICYMI”-type lines, which make busy people feel guilty they’ve somehow missed something they shouldn’t have missed).

“Pro tip for local: Anything that is a hidden gem, delight, that people feel they have insider knowledge, they love to share,” Gúzman said. A callout for hidden murals around the city, for instance, generated a ton of reader responses.

The presenters made it clear that newsletters, done well, with real staff behind them, are serious revenue streams. Poder360, a Brazilian political outlet styled like Politico in the U.S., now has around 11,000 paid subscribers, sustaining a staff of more than 30 at the entire Poder360 organization (the news site, its various opinion verticals, an events business). 95 percent of the organization’s audience comes via mobile phone.

The morning newsletter The Skimm — which has been branching into a paid calendar app and podcasting and other products — is now a true behemoth (including registering 110,000 people to vote). It’s built up an audience of seven million female “millennial” subscribers, slotting into a busy day:

So how does an organization get to so many subscribers? How do you get people to give you their email in the first place? Make sure there’s encouragement to forward to their friends. Find the people who already have a lot of connections in their communities, and get their input and partner with them before you even launch the newsletter. Build a good, prominent email signup page (“TheSkimm.com, almost to an extreme, is just an email sign up,” Dheerja Kaur, the head of product and design at the company, said).

You can watch the full panel here:

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/heres-what-you-need-to-know-to-build-successful-paid-newsletters-popup-newsletters-morning-digests-and-community-newsletters/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/the-dutch-newsletter-platform-revue-with-around-30000-users-is-opening-up-subscription-features/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/the-dutch-newsletter-platform-revue-with-around-30000-users-is-opening-up-subscription-features/#respond Wed, 11 Apr 2018 13:19:36 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=156894 For people interested in a no-frills way to spin up a new personal newsletter, there are more alternatives to Mailchimp-TinyLetter than ever.

Prominent newcomers like U.S. startup Substack or the Netherlands-based Revue have focused on simplifying writing tools and streamlining software for the entire newsletter management process, from writing to sending to maintaining the subscriber list to handling paid memberships.

Revue, co-founded by Martijn de Kuijper and Mohamed El Maslouhi, pitches an easy-to-use authoring interface (the company suggested Medium or Tumblr as reference points), with many small but useful additional features like video embeds or Facebook content integrations, all developed together with or as requests from its users. It’s a service centered entirely around longer, editorial newsletter writing, so significant work went into template design and email readability. The tiny team handles all technical issues and feature requests itself. There’s also some language flexibility: the profile page for readers who’ve signed up is translated into 10 languages.

For those benefits, Revue charges individual writers based on the total number of emails they send out, starting at a rate of $5 per month (users with fewer than 50 subscribers can send emails for free). As of last year, it began offering a publisher plan, used by which allows for multiple newsletters, multiple team members and roles, and approval workflow (custom pricing, starting at a base of $2,000 a year).

The company is currently three people (de Kuijper, El Maslouhi, and Mark Schiefelbein, who is helping Revue grow its user base) and has around 30,000 users on its platform, about 2,000 of whom are paying to use Revue, according to de Kuijper. Most of these paying users fall into the $5 range, with a couple of hundred subscribers per newsletter. It began as a tech-content-centric service; around 60 or 70 percent of its user base is from the U.S., according to Schiefelbein.

On Thursday, Revue is opening up its subscriptions feature, which it had been testing in private beta with around 50 writers, to anyone using its platform. Interested newsletter authors can set their own rates and mark specific issues of their newsletter as paid or free; non-paying subscribers to a paid newsletter can see the free issues, but paywalled ones will be greyed out for them. The feature connects to Stripe for payments; Revue takes a 6 percent cut of what the newsletter writer makes.

“We take a lot of pride in the fact that we are focused on support for our users, and that we’re really fast to respond. We have an on-site chat people can use, and we’re always available there,” de Kuijper said. “We’re super flexible and can develop new features really fast — the publisher plan, for instance, we’d been developing with a publisher in the U.S. who came to us and asked for an approvals feature and those sorts of things. The whole reason we’re now talking to you about subscriptions — that came from our users.”

Other features from a laundry list de Kuijper and Schiefelbein touted when we spoke ahead of the launch of the company’s paid newsletter option include an quick, visual way for readers to give feedback at the bottom of each email, a clean Twitter embedding function, integrations that let a newsletter writer link to or pull in content quickly from outside the newsletter, and an easy way to port over Mailchimp subscribers if you’re switching newsletter services.

“A year ago the whole idea of a newsletter was pretty novel to me, so there was a lot of trial and error. When we decided to do a newsletter we did very thorough research. We had several platforms to choose from, but Revue seemed to give the best value,” Arjen van der Horst, a reporter at a Dutch public broadcaster who writes a weekly summary of goings-on in Trumpland, wrote to me in an email. Van der Horst began writing it as a personal project and a resource for other Dutch reporters looking to catch up on the firehose of Donald Trump–related news, but his organization adopted the project formally and began paying for it (“Back then our pricing only went up to 10,000 subscribers, and it seemed like almost daily they were emailing me, ‘hey, we need more,'” de Kuijper told me). The Trump Weekly newsletter, still written and sent by van der Horst directly, is up to 33,453 subscribers.

“You don’t need any tutorials; it all speaks for itself,” van der Horst said. “They keep developing the application and keep adding new functions and features to it. For instance, originally I wasn’t happy with the way YouTube links were embedded in the newsletter. They changed it to a much better-looking version. I was missing an certain edit function in the mobile version that only existed in the desktop version. I requested if they could add that function to the mobile version as well. Within a few hours they had done just that.”

Casey Newton, Silicon Valley editor at The Verge, came across Revue via ProductHunt, noting that it emphasized editorial features, not marketing ones. His newsletter, The Interface, is up to 2,884 subscribers.

“The key thing that makes it work for me is very nerdy — it offers a browser extension and an iOS share sheet extension for saving links,” he told me via Twitter DMs. “That means whenever I see an interesting link, whether I’m on my laptop or mobile, I can save it to Revue with two taps. It makes organizing a newsletter that can have 40 or more links in a day manageable.”

“We have a whole long list of other features we want to implement and obviously a lot of other requests, which are mainly around customization, integrations, and analytics: people want to have more data, they want to integrate with, for instance, Google Analytics,” de Kuijper told me. Subscriber management tools in the pipeline include features to help newsletter owners handle subscribers who haven’t opened any emails for several issues.

Revue raised around €300,000 (USD $369,345) toward the end of 2016, and is aiming to break even by this summer, Schiefelbein said. He hopes to see around 50 percent of Revue’s revenues by the end of the year coming from larger publisher accounts. The paid newsletter offering will add a small but new revenue source for the company.

“We see some of the more professional ones set the price point accordingly, but we also have seen people treat it more as, if you enjoy my writing, please support me for $3 or $4 a month. It’s the equivalent of a latteccino or something — that seems to be the analogy to persuade people to pay for creative work,” Schiefelbein said. “At the end of the day it’s just what enables these writers to keep writing and be funded fully by their readers rather than by sponsor or advertiser.”

What about custom support from Revue for advertising?

“Right now we don’t have any specific features that allow our users to add sponsored content, although they’re free to run sponsored content if they want,” de Kuijper said. “The first thing we’ll do is paid subscriptions — we believe in the paying members model more than sponsorship model. But I’m not trying to say we don’t ever, ever want to do it, if it fits within our goal to help our users monetize their work.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/the-dutch-newsletter-platform-revue-with-around-30000-users-is-opening-up-subscription-features/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/with-audience-engagement-and-live-events-finimize-is-finding-new-ways-to-boost-readers-financial-literacy/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/with-audience-engagement-and-live-events-finimize-is-finding-new-ways-to-boost-readers-financial-literacy/#respond Wed, 21 Feb 2018 16:16:47 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=154848 What better way to promote a daily email newsletter that sums up an industry’s latest news than…in another daily email newsletter that sums up an industry’s latest news? It’s a natural. So if you get Axios’ Login tech-industry newsletter, you may have seen some in-email ads this month promoting Finimize, a daily finance newsletter aimed at millennials. Or, if you’re one of Finimize’s 175,000 subscribers, vice versa.

Finimize’s formula for drawing in more readers is straightforward: less jargon, more emoji. The London-based newsletter is designed to give its readers a crash course in financial literacy. Each day, the newsletter offers a brief digest of the day’s biggest financial stories, breaking them down in a way that it think will be most accessible to people unfamiliar with complex financial concepts.

For example, earlier this month, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,000 points, Finimize centered its coverage around a handful of big questions: What’s going on here? What does this mean? Why should I care? (“Investors are fearful of sharply higher interest rates,” it answers.) Finimize uses these questions to frame its coverage of all its stories — an approach that makes it a kindred spirit with Axios, which uses phrases like “Why it matters” and “What’s next” to guide readers through stories.

Finimize CEO Maximilian Rofagha said that Finimize’s coverage is valuable because it simplifies complex stories — but not so much that they become “so dumbed down and simple that [they] doesn’t really have any value anymore. People read us because we’re accessible, but also because there’s real substance and analysis,” he said. Hearing that pitch, you won’t be surprised that Finimize’s homepage highlights a comparison to breakout email success The Skimm.

Like @theskimm, @finimize is keeping me in the know about the #financial world. Highly recommend! https://t.co/Yg0jLaCV5M

— Meaghan Webster (@meaghanwebster) August 23, 2016

Finimize’s approach is in large part informed by Rofagha’s experience building DeinDeal, a Swiss travel and home goods e-commerce company that he helped launch in 2010. He said that taught him the importance of product thinking and making the needs of users central to the experience. This user focus is clear in various features of Finimize, particularly the one that tells users exactly how long it should take them to get through the newsletter (typically around three minutes). The newsletter itself is a product of following and responding to user behavior. Rofagha initially launched it as a website, but soon realized that its readers (whose average age is around 28 to 30) were mostly sharing and reading it via email, which encouraged him to focus entirely on email distribution.

Rofagha said that that Finimize’s approach has helped broaden its appeal beyond its target demographic. It’s 175,000 daily subscribers may not be in the same league as The Skimm (6 million!), but it compares well to one-year-old Axios, whose 11 newsletters had a combined 260,000 subscribers as of late January.

Finimize also has a heavy audience engagement component. At the end of every story, a big green button invites readers to email the Finimize team with questions about the story they just read. Finimize’s writers (who include former employees of Goldman Sachs and Barclays) answer every question they get, but they also pick the most interesting question and publish it at the bottom the email each day. Recent questions have included: “Does an increase in a company’s earnings correlate to an increase in stock returns?” “Why is it that acquiring firms usually pay a premium to share prices during a takeover?” and “Why hasn’t the US Department of Justice initiated antitrust suits against Amazon and other monster tech conglomerates?”

Rofagha said that this is another area where Finimize differentiates itself from typical finance news coverage. “Publications like the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal assume a lot of things about what their readers know. If the price of oil goes up, what happens to the dollar? They assume you know that. We assume our readers don’t.” The company’s audience research suggests that this is the area that Finimize’s readers enjoy the most, Rofagha said.

Finimize has also been working on ways to deepen its relationships with readers. The company has organized a handful of community events focused on topics like cryptocurrencies and personal finance. While resource constraints have limited the events to London, some Finimize readers have independently organized similar events stateside as well. A February event in Boston, for example, brought together readers to discuss the future of millennials and banks. “We really had nothing to do with that event,” said Rofagha. “It really shows you how alive the community is.”

While Finimize started as a newsletter in 2015, the company has since used the initial product to funnel users into Finimize MyLife (check that acronym), a free financial-planning platform that helps users track their goals and manage their money. Rofagha argued that the company’s success so far in selling that product to its newsletter audience is a direct byproduct of the relationship that it’s built with them over the past two years. “We use the content to build up that trust and add real value to people’s lives,” Rofagha said. “It always starts with that.”

Photo of a stack of dollar bills by photobunny used under a Creative Commons license.

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