- The Publisher Newsletter
- Posts
- Friday 31st March: Why the FT chose newsletters for a new course
Friday 31st March: Why the FT chose newsletters for a new course
Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Esther.
Have you got an upcoming event, job opening or report coming out, or would you simply like to shout about what your company does? We're opening up this slot for a lead ad. That can be a banner, text, or a mix! Slots can be booked on a day-by-day basis via our self-serve system, or just reply to this email if you'd like put together a package for block bookings.
When Sarah Ebner, the FT's Head of Newsletters spoke to us on the podcast last month, she mentioned that they'd just launched their first course delivered via email. Here, I spoke to the project's lead, Emily Goldberg, the FT's US Newsletter Editor, about why they chose a newsletter course, balancing information delivery, and why evergreen content is growing increasingly important to newsletter publishers.
The point I found particularly interesting here is the target audience for the course. The FT has one of the hardest paywalls in the industry, so offering a free newsletter series doesn't seem like an obvious fit. But Goldberg explained that because it is aligned with their existing successful MBA rankings programme, they are attracting younger sign-ups who they can then work on converting to an FT student subscription.
It's a clever place to start. Also, because the series starts whenever someone signs up, it can run for years with only the initial costs of putting it together. There's some inspiration to take you into the weekend.
It looks like BuzzFeed's plans to use AI to generate articles are well under way. Futurism reported yesterday that alongside the quizzes, there are now over 40 SEO-driven travel guides bylined 'As Told to Buzzy'. The articles are pretty bad, but as Laura Hazard Owen points out, they actually look a lot like the SEO-driven, human-written meh content that you'll find all over the rest of the internet. Whoop whoop.
This is a fascinating look behind the scenes of the Dotdash Meredith merger. We don't often think about the logistics of combining two publishing houses of this scale and complexity. In the year following the merger, the team have moved over a million pieces of content, migrated or killed 1-200,000 pieces, and retrained hundreds of editors on new CMS systems.
If you take AI-related articles out of the equation, there has been an awful lot of industry chatter about local media over the past few weeks. Our own thoughts were sparked by some unfortunate comments from UK execs, but we don't often get to hear much from those overseas. Simon Owens has done a neat round-up of the issues over the pond, and who is seeing success. Interestingly, not anyone with a print portfolio...
More from Media Voices
Simon's piece reflects what we found last year when we spoke to a number of local news start-ups. The path to sustainability isn't straightforward, but there are some organisations making it work with lean operations, and a hyper-focus on their local areas.
