You’re reading the first issue of Newspackr, a new media newsletter from me, Ryan Sager, founder of Montague Street Media.
The goal of this newsletter is to give practical ideas, tips, and tools to today’s media makers — the people in the trenches building news products and creating profitable, sustainable, meaningful media organizations.
The last decade saw the big media companies give away virtually all of their power — over their audiences, over their revenue, over their existence — to Big Tech companies that have hollowed out our free press and our democracy.
I believe that we are at the beginning of a new media renaissance, in which creators and entrepreneurs can take back control of their businesses — building not on social-media or commoditized-advertising models, but on channels where they have far greater control of their fates and much closer relationships with their audiences.
Leading off this month’s issue are two topics I hope you’ll enjoy:
1) Email subject lines: As we depend more on email for distributing our content, it’s more important than ever to understand how to stand out in the inbox. See below for my best tips — based on thousands of A/B tests.
2) Finding your audience on Flipboard: Flipboard is one of the more publisher-friendly platforms. But it lacks a map for where to find readers interested in what you cover. With the help of some new data from
Parse.ly, it was possible to put together a map of which topics on Flipboard generate the most traffic. See below for the top 1,000 topics — and use this list as a map to your future readers.
Also, don’t miss the best stories of the last month to help you Grow, Engage, and Monetize your audience — plus some other helpful tools below.
Email. Newsletters. Subscriptions. Memberships. Events. Whatever model you’re pursuing, hopefully something in this letter will help you do your job a little bit better.
And I’d love to hear from you about what you’re working on… You can reply to this email, or shoot me a note at: ryan@montaguestreetmedia.com.
Let’s build a better media!