Who Loves Email Lessons?
Good morning!
No preamble this week. We’re going to get right to it.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week off with news of layoffs at Bleacher Report. Awful Announcing reported on Monday that Bleacher Report was shutting down its longform publication, B/R Mag, in order to reallocate resources to its more profitable video and social-specific content. With the shut down of B/R Mag comes layoffs to 10 staff members. Notable among those who were laid off are beloved veteran NBA writer Howard Beck and former Grantland staff writer Jonathan Abrams— who covered multiple sports and published two of my recent favorite works of non-fiction, Boys Among Men (about the prep to pro movement in the NBA) and All The Pieces Matter (an oral history of The Wire).
To balance that bad news with a bit of good news, yesterday, Ben Smith of the New York Times wrote a piece looking at the launch of a new media organization called Brick House. The organization is led by Maria Bustillos, an experienced journalist who currently edits the website Popula (I’m a subscriber). Bustillos was a key member of the Civil platform, which folded this year, and Popula was one of their core publications. Bustillos has been running Popula ever since and is now making it part of Brick House Media, which will offer access to a suite of publications for a subscription fee of $75 per year. If you follow Bustillos on Twitter, you know that she is an outspoken advocate of independent news organizations that do not rely on advertising dollars or on Facebook (she is known to frequently tweet “quit Facebook”). I’m excited to see what happens with Brick House.
There are new developments in the Publishers vs. Apple battle that has made news over the past few weeks. First, the New York Times pulled out of Apple News and then, as I covered last week, publishers took issue with Apple’s new system updates that push readers from Safari into Apple News. Now, a group of news publishers including the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, among others, have sent an open letter to CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, asking how they can receive better deal terms for subscriptions that are purchased through Apple’s app store. As the Wall Street Journal reports, currently publishers “pay Apple 30% of the revenue from first-time subscriptions made through iOS apps; that commission is reduced to 15% after the subscriber’s first year.”
As I covered last week when looking at Digiday’s media predictions, many media organizations are figuring out what to do with their event budgets. Do they keep them for 2021, use them for virtual engagements (including new video series), or do they create a mixture of both? Poynter ran a story on Monday looking at how several publications are still maintaining their events programming, but in virtual formats, and how many are still bullish on events revenue in the coming year even amid the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m not as bullish as a lot of the professionals quoted in the piece, but I don’t have near their experience. And I do find their counterpoints to my prediction interesting. It’s something I’m definitely going to be paying attention to.
In a pretty big development, last week Vox Media settled a class-action lawsuit over a case brought against the company over their misclassification of contributors to their SB Nation network of sports blogs as contractors instead of full-time employees. The multiple plaintiffs will only see an average pay out of a few thousand dollars, which isn’t a lot of consolation based on how they were taken advantage of. For full context on the story I recommend reading an excellent Deadspin investigative piece from 2017.
Last Thursday, Gannett, which is the largest newspaper publisher in the country, released the findings of their internal diversity report across newsrooms. The report was done to show the company’s commitment to improving diversity in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police and the ensuing reckoning the entire country has faced. NiemanLab collected the findings and broke them down even further so you can dive deep into the figures. The top-line stat is that 74% of employees across Gannett’s newsrooms are white and 54% are male.
Margaret Sullivan, the legendary media columnist at the Washington Post, published a piece last week looking at NBC News and their inaccurate and misleading coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s nomination of Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention, which was a matter of procedure and protocol, rather than the inflammatory political statement NBC’s coverage packaged it as. Sullivan’s piece looks at what happens when a news organization gets something wrong, the damage it does and leads to as other outlets pick up the story and package it for their own ends (aka traffic and ratings), and how any kind of apology or correction feels insufficient. For anyone interested in ethics and transparency in journalism, this is an excellent read.
Last week, I noted how much I enjoyed McKinsey & Company’s in-depth interview with outgoing CEO of the New York Times, Mark Thompson. This past week, Digiday ran a long profile of the new CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. It’s a fascinating look at Kopit Levien’s rise and her ability to find revenue streams and make big operational changes throughout her career. I, for one, didn’t know she led many of the branded content and advertising changes at the New York Times in the middle of the 2010s, specifically at the T Brand Studio.
Speaking of revenue, Digiday also ran a story last week looking at the launch of two new content verticals at Group Nine that have been paired with brand partners: DodoWell, which has Petco as its sponsor, and NowThis Kids with Cheerios as its brand partner. In each case, the partnership was driven by the editorial team at each outlet under the Group Nine umbrella identifying a “white space” or opportunity for expanding coverage, giving that to the sales team, who then searched for a brand partner. This is the ideal scenario for any kind of brand partnership—editorial leads, gives the idea and opportunity to sales, and then sales packages it and finds a match. But they are hard to come by. Each deal is reported to be in the low seven-figures and requires a lot of investment up front by the underwriting brands. Again, this kind of partnership is very hard to come by. However, as someone who has been involved in a lot of brand conversations (many failed, and a select few successful) I find this development very heartening as this kind of synergy between editorial judgment, data research and audience understanding, and sales acumen is very rare and truly is the dream. I guess that what happens when you have video content and franchises that can generate billions of views.
Meanwhile, over at New York Media, on Monday the company announced that Vulture would be doubling their coverage of podcasts. The tentpole will be a new newsletter from Nick Quah who has already built the very successful Hot Pod newsletter, which was the first of its kind in terms of covering the podcast industry.
Over the weekend, OneZero (part of Medium’s suite of original publications) ran a great Q&A with Casey Newton who is the Silicon Valley editor at The Verge and who runs one of my favorite newsletters The Interface. Newton covers a whole range of subjects but if you are interested in coverage of the tech industry, his thoughts on how that part of the journalism world are definitely must-read. My favorite quote is on the nature of how Google and Facebook have changed publications: “..it has robbed publications of their individual identities. So, every website is just a version of every other website, and I think that has kind of undermined trust in the press generally because there’s just kind of a sameness to it.” This is something I’ve felt for a long time. I rarely regularly visit publications anymore, even the ones I’ve historically loved like The Ringer. So many sites feel the same. And even using Twitter for link referrals seems to have some kind of diminishing returns. Maybe this is all why newsletters feel so appealing—though this bubble or wave is going to reach its saturation point someday soon. This feels like something I might dive into in another issue.
On this note, I want to give a shout out to Kaitlin Phillips’s piece in Spike last week. If you haven’t read it, I won’t give anything away. The essay received a lot of praise across media circles on Twitter last week. Though, as Study Hall pointed out in their digest this week, it felt a little like New York City “inside baseball.” And part of me felt the writing was a little “too cool” for my tastes. But overall, the piece reminded me of what I loved about reading the internet (read: The Awl) back in 2008-2012. It seemed like you could do anything and be as weird as possible and write about nothing in a way that was compelling and endlessly entertaining. Maybe the stakes and the quality have changed for the better. I don’t know. This piece just made me wish I could read more stuff like this every week.
What I’m Engaged With
I’ve gone a little bit long in this space the last few weeks, so I want to keep it brief here and just spotlight a recent audience development initiative I came across that I thought was really smart.
This past week, I came across a new email offering from the Wall Street Journal called “The Money Challenge.” The newsletter has a six-week limited run and is an example of what is called a newsletter “lesson.” In this particular product the Wall Street Journal promises to give subscribers “a greeting from one of us, a warm up exercise to get you in the money mood, and a detailed step-by-step challenge.”
Based on the language of the sign-up page, this newsletter is aimed at a broad audience, but also claims to have tips that maybe even those who are more experienced and comfortable with personal finance will find interesting. Overall, this is a play to get non-paying user information so that the Wall Street Journal can then target the newsletter subscribers to pay for its digital subscription offerings. Using a six-week time box makes the content feel somewhat urgent, even if it is evergreen, and restricting it to email only delivery makes it feel premium. And it has the bonus of feeling like a new product for any existing Wall Street Journal subscribers.
This kind of email lesson is super interesting to me, but it’s nothing new. I first stumbled across the idea of email lessons in Dan Oshinsky’s newsletter Not a Newsletter. Other notable publications, such as Curbed, have also offered newsletter courses in the past. Curbed sent out a limited-run email called “The Small Fix” back in 2018 that was a “four-week newsletter challenge made up of realistically achievable projects to lift the look of your home, whether you live in a studio apartment or a four-bedroom house.” Again, the packaging suggests targeting a broad audience. But in Curbed’s case, since Vox Media doesn’t have a subscription offering, it was probably meant to re-engage readers or reach new audiences to drive traffic for ad revenue.
What I like about email courses is that they can be used for a variety of audience or potential revenue goals. And it both allows an editorial team to be both creative in terms of coming up with the packaging and framing of the series, as well as create potential reusable evergreen articles or resurface existing evergreen pieces from a rich content library. It’s also something that brands who want to get creative can utilize to generate both B2B and B2C leads. I’m actually surprised I don’t see them offered more often. Or maybe they’re out there and I’m just missing them somehow. If you’ve seen any email courses that you found interesting feel free to send the examples my way.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Margo Price’s That’s How Rumors Get Started (2020)
Jenny Lewis’s On the Line was probably my favorite record of 2019 (or at least tied with Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising).
Each of the songs on On the Line was full of hooks and inspired vocals from Lewis. The record was perfectly sequenced, recorded and produced. It was a great album—sturdily made, a comprehensive listening experience, and one that channeled the sounds of songwriters from the peak of album oriented rock (AOR) such as Tom Petty and Warren Zevon, without ripping them off. And ever since On the Line came out, I’ve been looking for an album that had a similar effect.
Margo Price’s latest record, That’s How Rumors Get Started, is the closest an album has come to matching the feeling I get any time I put on On the Line. That’s How Rumors Get Started is Price’s third record. I first saw her perform on TV supporting her debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, back in 2016 and was immediately a fan of that record, which sounded exactly like a country rock album released from 1970-1976.
That’s How Rumors Get Started still has some of that prime country rock feel, but Price’s range of sounds and influences have expanded. The title track, and opening song of the record, feels like one of Stevie Nick’s polished compositions from Tusk. And the second song, “Letting Me Down,” has all the hallmarks of classic Tom Petty, which makes sense when you consider Benmont Tench played on the album. “Prisoner of the Highway” has the same kind of production and feel as Bobby Bare’s “On A Real Good Night.” And “Stone Me” has a melody that veers very close to Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” but manages to sidestep feeling like a rip-off; it’s a wonderful song to listen to right now, as August segues into September.
Overall, I can’t say that That’s How Rumors Get Started is as good as On The Line, but at a tight 36 minutes long it's one of the most purely enjoyable albums I’ve listened to so far this year.
The Action I’ve Taken
For the next few weeks, and maybe months, I’ll conclude each newsletter with a brief list of actions I’ve taken each week to help end police violence and to support an America that is free of racism. This isn’t meant to virtue signal or pat myself on the back—it’s merely meant to show my commitment to change. I won’t share any donation figures here but can provide them upon request.
Contacted local officials in Kenosha and Wisconsin to demand that the investigation into Jacob Blake’s shooting be completed in a timely manner and that justice is delivered.