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How dismantling silos gave Metro’s newsletter team room to experiment

Metro.co.uk’s Newsletter Editor Sophie Laughton explains how the freesheet’s newsletters went from free-for-all to a structured, sophisticated newsletter production process.

Metro – one of the UK’s most prominent freesheet tabloids – underwent a redesign in November last year. It was designed to bring the digital edition in line with changed audience expectations, with increased prominence for video content and a slicker UI.

While audiences benefited from the changes, a newsroom reshuffle also provided editorial and commercial opportunities for Metro’s various teams too: notably, it allowed its newsletters team to increase the visibility of the various bulletins across the site.

It was the culmination of many months of work. Since 2022, the Metro team had been taking pains to ensure that the newsroom structure was fit for purpose. That meant, among other things, making the title’s disparate newsletters the purview of a dedicated newsletter team.

Sophie Laughton is Metro’s Newsletter Editor. On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, she explains that the change was an opportunity to create some structure for newsletter production that had not been there before: “We have oversight on everything. And I think this was a bit of a turning point for the way that Metro thinks about our newsletters and deals with our newsletters: something that we tagged on to the end of that redesign was actually changing the tech in the way that we set up new newsletters.”

She notes that the old production process for newsletters was “long and arduous”; a remark that will sound all-too-familiar to anyone who has produced newsletters for a long time. The redesign, however, allowed the team to “tag on” a refresh of the newsletter tech to the changes. As a result, Metro’s newsletter team is much better placed to reach audiences: the sign-up process is easier for users on the front-end, and behind the scenes the team “designed everything around efficiency for setting up the newsletter”.

That’s an enviably holistic change to Metro’s newsletter capabilities – but Laughton notes that the team is far from finished when it comes to their ambitions.

Niches to newsletters

Laughton says that the changes to the newsletter capabilities came from a growing recognition of the value of newsletters to Metro. She states that the changes to the sign-up process were specifically designed to catch audiences at a point at which they are amenable to signing up. She explains that the team is exploring more targeted topics for that purpose:

“We’re really looking at niches at the moment, niches as a newsroom. So where can we develop reporters to be more specialised, and have a beat and have something that is their thing. And then what we’re trying to do is develop those specialist areas into newsletters.”

She cites the title’s Senior Politics Reporter Craig Munro’s newsletter ‘Alright Gov’ as an example of one of those specialist areas that has proven to be a draw for newsletter subscribers. The author has a distinct ‘patch’ and a strong tone-of-voice – and as such the site redesign allows for easier discovery of a newsletter that caters to audiences that want that.

“That was one of the real reasons why we wanted to do the site redesign as a whole but specifically the newsletter pages redesign, [to make it] easier to have these call to actions popping up all over the site. Basically saying ‘you’re on the politics page on the site [so] here’s the politics newsletter,” Laughton explains.

So, as a result of the backroom changes, Laughton and the Metro team have made a point of dismantling the silos between departments. Newsletter team members take part in editorial meetings, and work with the teams on the various desks to make sure the newsletters are providing what the audience expects.

That de-siloed approach makes providing that feedback and disseminating lessons about what’s worked for other newsletters much easier. Laughton says: “There are so many aspects of being in a newsroom where things are very siloed, so this is a very good opportunity to for someone to be able to step back and go, ‘Okay, this is how we make something work with commercial and your desk, and then we can do this fun thing with some tech, and then we’ve made it all look beautiful’.”

Turning newsletter challenges into chances

In addition to catering for existing audiences, Laughton’s team is also looking for new opportunities to use newsletters to benefit the wider business.

She says that a pop-up newsletter or email-based course is on the agenda for experimentation: “The nice thing about them is [they’re] a huge project, but they have an end date. So you’re not spinning a new newsletter that is something that you’re working on for ages. It’s something that you work on for a limited time and then it works for you for ages.”

It’s a great example of how newsletters can work for publishers, and one that could help newsletter teams work smarter rather than harder as changes to the email ecosystem come into play.

Laughton notes: “Everything is getting harder and harder to cut through and get those people’s engagement. Now with the changes to inbox privacy changes, what Meta are doing with AI, changing the preview text… there are new challenges being thrown up all the time, and I think it’s just looking at ways to try and make those challenges work for you.”

She cites the use of AI to create better preview text as an example, and notes that the trends around AI-powered personalisation are likely to disrupt some newsletter providers more than others. She points out that aggregator-style newsletters will be hardest-hit as a result of AI-powered news updates, so suggests that email newsletters need to become more consciously curated with the particular audience in mind.

Launches and strategy changes are always easier said than done. It’s one thing to fire a signal flare and quite another to turn a fleet around. But the Metro newsletter team is now in a far better place when it comes to being agile and reactive, as a result of demolishing the silos that kept the newsletter team apart from the wider editorial and commercial teams.

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