Thursday 15th July: Email newsletters have a lot of looming disadvantages

July 15, 2021

Good morning! Thursday's Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter

This is maybe a wee bit meta, but there have been a couple of great opinions expressed on newsletters this week and since the whole point of this newsletter is to share great opinions, well, here we are.

In his Rebooting newsletter, Brian Morrisey lists lots of reasons email newsletters are hot. But he goes on to explains why we shouldn't overly rely on email as a distribution mechanism. TLDR - Gen Z hates email, platforms are set for a crack down, email is a chore and it's really hard to build an email list to scale.

Meanwhile, over on his blog, Adam Tinworth is explaining why his email newsletter is crap (his words, not mine). Adam says we're all still trying to figure out what makes a great newsletter, but the four things he's thinks his newsletter has lacked at points are regularity, structure, value proposition and audience focus.

Read these two pieces and develop your own killer newsletter strategy.

This report from Kevin Roose highlights how Facebook’s obsession with managing its reputation is getting in the way of attempts to clean up the platform. Executives have clashed over how much data can be shared from its CrowdTangle analytics tool and Roose says, "Team Selective Disclosure won". That means they've headed off the risk of exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage The Social Network's reputation (such as it is).

This is a sponsored post on Digiday but if content's worth reading it's worth reading. It's no surprise that data-connectivity business LiveRamp is making the case for first-party data but I particularly like the focus on addressing old-school audience need in data strategy. It says the critical question to ask is, “How can I help this person with what they need?” not “How can I get this person to convert?”

InPublishing editor James Evelegh is talking to Jim Bilton on the magazine's podcast about the findings of his recent mediaONmedia survey. There are insights on the media books and movies that media people love the most and a bonus round on the most influential people in the industry. Be warned, they imagine a Zuckerberg-Murdoch mashup and it's actually quite terrifying.

This week's episode:

This week we hear from Marcela Kunova, Editor at Journalism.co.uk. We talked about what she’s hoping to achieve with her new newsroom innovation mentorship programme, how she translated Newsrewired to a virtual event, and why it’s so important for the site to support freelancers.

Are you a fan of the 'gram? We're looking to do a bit more from our account @mediavoices, so follow us for interview quotes, guest sneak peeks and occasional puppy/baby pictures.