Saturday 5th September: My Media Roundup by Mark Schiefelbein, The Week in Newsletters, Revue

“Publishers will need to step up the personality and stickiness of their digital news products if they are to compete with platforms and aggregators,” says Nic Newman, author of the Reuters Digital News Report, in this article for NiemanLab. And that’s exactly what makes newsletters and podcasts so successful. It’s not about reach, but engagement in a community of loyal readers. Building personal connections will help greatly to convert readers into paying subscribers.

A lot has been said about daily briefings by publishers as well as about the wave of indie publishers starting their own paid newsletters. But maybe this more recent format of salaried reporters writing newsletters under their own name is the winning combination for both publisher and journalist. Max Wilens has the details for Digiday and  I’ve seen several great examples, including Sarah Ebner, head of editorial newsletters for The Telegraph, who writes The Good News Newsletter and Steve O’Hear who covers European startups for Techcrunch in London and also publishes the In the Know newsletter.

Ben Thompson was one of the first indie authors to be successful with a paid newsletter when he started Stratechery in 2013. He recently started a podcast called Dithering and wrote this great post where he contrasts the open / paid-for model that’s worked so well for him with the closed / free model of social media. The openness of email, blogging and podcasting has made it possible for indie authors to succeed as long as they can convince subscribers to “pay for the regular delivery of well-defined value”.

Privacy is another issue where we see the pendulum swing back. After years of happily sacrificing privacy for the convenience of social media, users are now demanding changes. Third-party cookies are disappearing and it looks like mobile device identifiers are next. The Markup is a publisher that is fully embracing this trend and decided to send a newsletter with all tracking turned off. Here’s why and how.

Are you intrigued by this whole newsletter thing? It can be a bit daunting to take the plunge, so you might like this exercise, complete with Google doc template, that helps you think through a newsletter project on one page. You’ll answer questions like “Who are your newsletter subscribers?”, “Where does this audience hang out?” or “What does success look like in 6 months?”, and feel much more prepared afterwards.