Stop Press: The newsletter boom, what makes them work, and how publishers see them
A newsletter about newsletters
Welcome to Stop Press by Chitranshu Tewari, a weekly newsletter to help you track the news media ecosystem and make sense of it. To get it in your inbox, sign up here.
Lead 🕶️
Seventeen million subscribers.
That’s the number of subscribers NYT announced for its morning newsletter on April 30, after rebranding and launching a “new host and anchor”. It’s an insane number, even by NYT’s standards. The newspaper called it the “largest daily audiences of any kind in journalism, across television, radio, print and digital.”
Newsletters have long been a massive part of the engagement strategy of publishers overseas — more so during a pandemic, as advertisement revenues plummet further. It’s one of the most effective ways to hook a reader before you can convert them into a paying subscriber.
Back in India, we have either ignored newsletters or chosen not to focus on them as a medium. This is partly due to our tech and consumption habits. Instead, publishers used WhatsApp to push updates and newsletter-like messages until last December, when its parent company Facebook cracked down on “automated or bulk messaging, or non-personal use”.
Things are changing, though. In the last one year, a handful of newsletter products have popped up and carved an audience of their own. And I don’t mean the one-newsletter-fits-all type that collects email addresses in exchange for pushing quasi-automated content, I mean domain-specific, curated newsletters, with an editorial voice or a take.
What’s behind the surge in newsletters?
To start with the obvious, online ad revenue has been whisked away by platforms. Covid-19, in many ways, accelerated the inevitability of the reader-supported model. Almost every major English publisher in the digital news ecosystem has a subscription now. Newspapers, too, have amped up their digital (the Hindu) or e-paper (Indian Express) subscriptions.
If you’re a publisher, what’s the one thing you can’t skip when your goal moves from chasing website hits for ads to paying readers? A relationship with the readers. No reader would pay for a news outlet that she doesn’t trust, value or engage with often.
Traffic via social media is not tailored for building such experiences or relationships. The content on our social feeds is driven purely by algorithms, and not by the credibility of the outlet or the value it may bring you. And that’s where the single biggest source of news traffic is at odds with the reader-supported model.
Contrast that with emails and newsletters. Unlike platforms, their reach is not dependent on some algorithm, and they give publishers a medium to directly communicate with the reader.
What makes them work?
First, some context about a larger trend.
A lot of media engagement is moving from brands and publishers to individuals or creators. They call it the creator economy, or the passion economy, where individuality is rewarded and monetised by being paid directly, replacing advertisements as the primary revenue.
It is in the context of this shift that we should consider the growth of subscription platforms that enable direct monetisation, like Patreon, Substack, Anchor, and Buy Me Coffee.
Samit Patil, the founder-CEO of news website Scroll, who recently launched Scrollstack, summed it up here:
“Without the imperative of reaching millions of ‘active users’ for ad dollars, creators can conceive of projects that are viable at much smaller scale. This has the potential to power a better internet of creative experimentation.”
“Be your own self” is a tired, old cliché. Creator platforms, with help from advancements in fintech, are making the most of the broken state of media consumption on platforms.
It’s reflected in newsletters too. The leading newsletters have a unique editorial voice or cater to domains that the conventional set-up may not allow. Finshots is a three-minute daily newsletter to explain the most important finance, business and policy news. Scroll’sThe Political Fix covers politics and policy, and the Third Slip uses humour and satire to compress all the major news of the week into one email. They replace platforms to bridge the gap between the readers and the stories.
How do publishers see it?
Depends on how they make money.
For scale publishers, newsletters are just a way to collect more emails to bombard readers with stories and updates on their events. Most of it is automated, with a bot or a human copy-pasting headlines and straps from stories. It’s not segmented on the basis of interests or an editorial voice. For an outlet chasing millions of readers for ad revenue, focusing on or investing in a product that brings a few thousand readers — with little or no means to monetise that reach — just doesn’t make sense.
For reader-supported outlets, it’s an extension of bringing value to the reader. The Ken has most visibly and successfully used emails, including its newsletter, the Nutgraf, and continues to see it as the primary medium to communicate with its readers. Here’s what Rohin Dharmakumar, its CEO, has to say:
“We are not chasing advertisers as an incentive. We are trying to establish a direct relationship with subscribers on an individual, personal basis. “
Another established feature that publishers in India are catching up with is explanatory journalism. Besides having a dedicated vertical (Indian Express’s “Explained” series being the most prominent one), publishers are using newsletters for the same purpose. For instance, the Times of India, a paper that is nothing if not scale, has a daily newsletter to break down its top 10 stories.
The recently launched Splainer, a newsletter + website that aggregates and simplifies news, fits right into this space. It condenses and explains the day’s news, with humour and sanity breaks to not overwhelm the reader.
Newsletters are here to stay, whether it’s for their curatorial power, domain knowledge (check out Things of Internet, a paid newsletter that takes one digital case each week), or for building a relationship with readers. Publishers will only give the medium more importance with time, and offer readers more ways to engage with news. For example, Scroll’s Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, who writes the Political Fix, wants to bridge the gap between policy and politics and create a community of folks in academia, research and elsewhere who are interested in that conversation.
It’s a fight for your inbox to engage with you on a subject you care about.
Homebrewed
Prasar Bharati, India’s state broadcaster, tells PTI that its reporting was “not in national interest”
Upset with PTI’s coverage of the Ladakh conflict, Prasar Bharati will review its annual subscription worth over Rs 6.75 crore.
🎧 In a pandemic, how can publishers handle news without overwhelming or tiring the reader?
I spoke with Lakshmi Chaudhry about Splainer, explanatory journalism, news fatigue in a pandemic, and what keeps more women from engaging with news.
What happens when hate speech is disguised as journalism?
Why we need to distinguish between the intent of news to educate and its intent to provoke. Nidhi Suresh examines what the Indian media can learn from the trials of one German and three Rwandan journalists who were held accountable for inciting violence.
Platforms
Adidas, Coca-Cola, Ford, Honda, HP, Pfizer, Puma, Starbucks: These are just some big advertisers who are pulling out of Facebook. Why? Facebook’s failure to stop the spread of hate. The most noteworthy of its inaction is its decision to not label posts by US president Donald Trump that Twitter labelled for misinformation (ICYMI: Read it the Stop Press edition on it, here).
The boycott comes in response to #StopFundingHate, a public campaign that is asking corporations to pause advertising on Facebook for its "repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms".
Long story short: After arguing that labelling harmful and bigoted posts of politicians will make it an “arbiter of truth”, Facebook will introduce labels to save the fast-disappearing dollar from its platforms.
NYT is opting out of Apple News
“It’s time to re-examine all of our relationships with the big platforms,” said the chief operating officer of NYT. Publishers are recognising that platforms aren’t of much help in their primary goal of converting readers into subscribers, or forming a direct relationship with the reader.
Google brings fact check info to its images
Fact checks will show up with a small label and the claim/rating data in Google Images.
Chug it out
🎧 Vox’s Land of the Giants: Netflix Effect
After covering Amazon and its journey to being the world's most valuable company in season one, the show turns its attention to Netflix for its second season. Worth every second of your podcast listen.
Bonus
Can the doomsday stop a boy from enjoying his last gulab jamun? Find out in the new comic by Varun Grover, Ankit Kapoor and Sumit Kumar.
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This was the eighth edition of Stop Press, an effort that is primarily an exercise to learn more about the hows and why of the news ecosystem.
For suggestions and feedback, do write to chitranshu@newslaundry.com.