Monday 21st August: What’s it take to make a great daily newsletter?

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We read a lot of newsletters at Media Voices and as Joshua Benton points out for this NiemanLab article, some we look forward to and others feel like homework. Of those Joshua enjoys, he describes Axios Sports as a “crafted, considered editorial product that became a little a.m. ritual.”

Kendall Baker, the man behind that newsletter, has a new job at Yahoo Sports, running their newsletters. In this interview he talks about the sports media landscape, the potential he sees in the Yahoo audience, and what it takes to create a daily newsletter habit. Spoiler, consistency is a big deal.

“I don’t think everything needs to be a daily newsletter. Not everything should,” Baker said, “But if you’re going to be daily or weekly or biweekly, make sure it’s delivered roughly the same time every day or whatever. People need to be able to trust that you’re going to be there.” So that’s why we’re here at 7am every weekday morning.

Esther highlighted Blendle’s departure from the micropayments scene this time last week. Echoing her belief that this does not mean the death of micropayments, this piece from Pugpig’s weekly bulletin highlights a future for micropayments as part of a wider subscription journey where articles are sold directly by publishers. It considers micropayments as a natural evolution of trial subscriptions and as a part-time print publisher, that’s an idea I’ll be giving some thought.

This piece from Press Gazette explains why building out strong non-news verticals can be a useful investment for hard news outlets. “We can just bring a lot more value to our subscribers, and engage them and retain them over longer periods of time, when we offer a suite of products,” said NYT head of games Jonathan Knight. Let’s hear it for the bundle.

The Economist is taking its best content and repurposing it into ‘digestible, engaging, quirky’ formats to tease younger audiences with what’s behind the news weekly’s paywall. “All our videos are based on the original articles which helps us send people back to the website to register and subscribe,” said Liv Moloney, the publisher’s Head of Social Media. With short form video, the company operates on a TikTok-first basis, but content is also used on Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn and X.

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