#Times newsletters director changes how to#

You can use it to drive traffic to your website, convert new readers to paying subscribers or donors or members, get readers out to an event or to show up on Zoom – if you want them to do anything and you want people to stay engaged. The other reason email is so powerful is that email does a little bit of everything. If you do an amazing job, you can keep a reader for a really long time. There are people who signed up in 2012 who still read it every week. Some fellow University of Missouri alumni took it over from me a few years ago, and are still doing an amazing job with it. I still have readers of my very first newsletter I launched in 2012 called Tools for Reporters. With email I know that if I get an email address today, tomorrow, a year from now, if I do a really good job, if I build a relationship, a reader will stay with me. You can reach them, but you’re going to have to spend money to get content in front of them. Facebook could decide it doesn’t want your fans to see your content anymore, or it wants you to pay for them to see it. You can have 10 million fans on Facebook, but it’s not necessarily the audience you can reach tomorrow. But if you don’t have a way to get stories out to readers, you’re in trouble.įacebook, Google, Twitter or other algorithm-powered channels control the audience. The stories, the reporting a newsroom does, is so important. The other thing is that, as an old colleague of mine, Jonathan Perelman at BuzzFeed, used to say, is that content is king, but distribution is queen. The amazing thing about email is that you can ask a reader a question and they can write back, just hit reply and share their thoughts directly. Newsletters allow you to build a relationship with your readers. Should every news organization have a newsletter strategy in place in 2020? Dan Oshinsky, former Newsletters Director of both The New Yorker and BuzzFeed This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

#Times newsletters director changes how to#

He is also the creator of Not a Newsletter (sign-up here), a monthly briefing with news, tips, and ideas about how to send better email. We collected them into a shorter piece: 7 potent insights, ideas and resources for your newsroom newsletter.Ībout Dan: He runs Inbox Collective, an email consultancy that works with news organizations, non-profits, and brands to grow audiences, build relationships, and convert readers to subscribers, members, donors, or customers via email. There are a lot of tips, insights and resources within the interview. Even without a direct reader revenue strategy, Oshinsky says, newsletters are a great way to stay connected to your audience. No matter if they are big or small, newsletters are a bedrock of your reader revenue efforts. Using these newsletters, the Times can introduce readers to other parts of its coverage that require registration.In this interview, Dan Oshinsky, the former Newsletters Director of both The New Yorker and BuzzFeed explains why your newsroom should have a newsletter strategy. In September 2017, the Times launched The Sweeper, a daily newsletter about fantasy football, and in 2014, it unveiled Red Box, a political newsletter that now has 43,000 subscribers, according to Whitelaw. Editorial staffers at various news desks handle much of the daily newsletter writing. These, like Brexit Briefing written by Times political reporter Henry Zeffman, tend to have a lot of original content, and because their recipients are already signed up, the Times doesn’t need them to click back to the site. The Times also has another 20 newsletters for paying subscribers. These are designed to expose nonpaying users to a variety of articles, so they hit their weekly limit and convert into subscribers. The Times has four other newsletters around topics like football, driving, style, and food and drink, which are available for nonpaying, registered-access users.

The newsletter, which Whitelaw says has around 2 million subscribers, covers the day’s top stories across the news, international, sports, business and opinion sections. Shortly after the Times introduced its registered-access model - readers can access two articles a week in exchange for an email address - nearly two years ago, it launched the Best of Times daily email for those who register.