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Welcome to Fusion of Journalism, a podcast from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

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I'm going to be any kind of leadership development at the Institute.

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It is a special series of our podcast and is dedicated to the Digital News Report.

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2022. Over seven episodes with diving into the most comprehensive piece of research on news consumption around the world.

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In this episode of the series, we're joined by lead author of the report.

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Nick Newman was written a chapter on email newsletters.

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We look at findings on how many people use this medium to news audiences who find

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the most popular and the appeal of the format to users and publishers alike.

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Nick, welcome to the podcast. Very good to be here, Fredricka.

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So we tend to think of e-mail as being all fashion and low tech,

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but getting news directly in your inbox seems to be having an enduring value, at least to some news agencies and news organisations.

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Firstly, what are some of the headline figures and how many people use email newsletters?

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It sort of varies across countries, but it tends to be somewhere around a 10th to a quarter who get a newsletter weekly.

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And obviously many of them are also getting them daily highest in countries like the United States.

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So about 22% say that they get a newsletter, a weekly and interestingly, about half.

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So it's their main source of news, but they're much lower in in countries like the UK.

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But I think that kind of really interesting bit is the people who it's the it's the type of people who are using email newsletters.

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They tend to be people who are very interested in news, tend to be people who pay for news and who new who use the news most regularly.

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So in that sense, you know, this group of people is absolutely critical for the sort of sustainability of many news organisations,

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whether you're, you know, ad supported or or subscription based.

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I guess the other thing to say is, you know, we think of as a lot of focus on email.

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We think of email newsletters maybe as growing, but actually they're not really growing.

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And part of the reason is that they're facing huge competition in terms of access points from other types of media.

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So social media in particular, which has grown very substantially mobile alerts, mobile aggregators, we've also seen sort of significant growth there.

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And so in that sense, it's quite interesting that the email newsletters actually in terms of weekly reaches have stayed pretty

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much the same so that you can see that sort of success in the face of these other growing forms of access.

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For those who actually don't use email newsletters and are not very familiar with them, can you outline what are they like, how they're structures?

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What are the broad categories they fall into? That's a really hard question.

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Federico, thank you so much. And we haven't attempted this this this time to sort of really categorise them into into buckets.

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But I think some of it some of the differences come out in general responses.

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So we ask people to tell us what kind of emails they access, and then we sort of put those in different buckets.

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So I think you have you have general news roundups.

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So these are often curated these days. And I think the sort of intention of media companies doing this is to save people time.

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Quite often they've got links to websites within them.

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So the aim is to sort of attract attention, if you like, and get people to go to those websites.

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So you'll be familiar with formats like Five Things You Need to Know Today.

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They became very widespread during COVID pandemic they've they've sometimes because the ones on so on Ukraine for example organisations

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like the BBC and CNN have really sort of adapted these formats and actually taken them from email to to websites as well.

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So you see these formats elsewhere as well.

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You have Axios. I would I would call that as a real pioneer in this.

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So they've developed this idea of smart brevity, explicitly trying to be careful with your time.

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So they tell you how long this email is going to be. So curating round ups in specialist areas as well as general news,

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then you have I think another category is articles that are designed to be read in your email.

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So these are often personally authored articles.

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Effectively, they might have links within them, but they're not trying to push you anywhere else with links.

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You know, the main business model is to spend time.

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We can sell that time for sponsorship or in some cases subscription.

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So that's where, you know, we start to see individual journalists making money out of emails that appear in your inbox.

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And then the final category I would call out is breaking news or breaking news alerts.

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So these these are, I think, have become less popular over time.

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But in a previous report, we actually found almost half of email users subscribed some kind of breaking news email as well.

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So that's sort of broadly the kind of buckets that we that we find.

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I'm going to add a funny one. Which one do you use? I, I get about I get about ten or I use all of those.

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I probably get about 20 emails a day. So mainstream round ups from BBC, Politico,

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the times I get a huge bucket of of ones about the media as one I really like by Matt Deegan on audio

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sort of beautifully written always on sort of one or two subjects Nieman Lab of Reuters Institute,

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of course, fantastic curated section A Substack one.

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Casey Newton I think a lot of people subscribe to that, which is about developments in Silicon Valley.

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That's a that's a subscriber one. And I get a couple of really interesting political ones as well,

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which I've subscribed to recently, said one by Margaret Cox Richardson on U.S. politics,

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there's a UK one called The Ruffian by Ian Leslie, which is always interesting, lands in your email box on the Saturday morning.

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So, you know, a lot of diversity and you know, I think that's bringing in a lot of new perspectives and as well as sort of saving time.

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So it's probably illustrative of the types.

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You mentioned in the ones you just mentioned, a mix between news organisation and actually solo journalist.

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I'm curious what the report says. What are the most popular sources of email news?

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Right. Yeah. So so we divided it up into mainstream media, then specialist publications that you might subscribe to for your work.

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I just talk about my media, for example, or it might be about passions, you know, things like sport or arts.

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Then alternative outlets, which which we kind of think of as almost anti mainstream media, some might be political.

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It might just be, you know, different kind of perspectives. And then individual journalists working on their own,

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some see overlaps between that and split those with the categories and most categories in most countries,

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we find that the majority of emails that people say they get are from big mainstream media companies in every in every country.

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So more than 50%, about a fifth say they get newsletters from specialist organisations for their work,

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etc. Same for alternative media and then a smaller percentage from individual journalists.

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But what's what's interesting about that is the country differences.

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So in the US, 18% of email subscribers say they get newsletters from an individual journalist and that's just 4% in the UK.

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So I think that just speaks to, you know, the so-called Substack Revolution where you've got individual journalists now getting paid

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for what they do and charging money that's gone much further in the U.S. So we see we see,

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you know, a lot of substack newsletters. Substack, I think, took about 1 million people who are now paying for their newsletters,

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the vast majority of those in the U.S. and it hasn't gone nearly as far in countries like the UK.

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I'm going to stay on differences between countries.

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Aside from the sources are coming from.

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Have you seen any reason why newsletters seem to have a very different prominence in some countries Tibet, other, the U.K., for example,

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and notably at the bottom of the list where people accessing news through email at less than half the rate seen in the U.S.

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How do you explain these big differences? I think it's partly about supply and demand where media companies have really sort of focus their efforts.

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So US publications have been into email for a very long time.

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They invested them consistently. For example, The New York Times now produces, I think, 50 different emails read by.

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They claim 15 million people a week. But you also have a sort of very, very large market.

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And I think that's really encouraged this sort of entrepreneurial journalism and

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some of the developments we're seeing in paying for individual emails as well.

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So it's partly about the larger market.

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It's partly about that that really helps the sort of commercial incentives to produce a format that now has a business model.

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And if you compare that to smaller markets like Norway, for example, very close to the bottom of the list,

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you know, lots of interest in news, but quite low email subscription.

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And I think that's partly because they have much stronger and more confident brand connexions.

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So, you know, they've got people who in our research are much more likely to go directly to websites and apps.

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Subscription rates are pretty high, so maybe publishers don't feel as much need to push content to audiences through through email.

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Are there any demographic factors, influences influencing what rate people use email newsletters?

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Absolutely. I mean, there's a huge geographic demographic split.

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So email is mainly valued by older, richer, more educated news consumers.

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I mean, there are a particularly interesting group of people for for many news organisations and this is true across countries,

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about one in, in the US, just like in the US, about one in seven of over 55 say email is actually their main way of accessing news.

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So it's really important to that older group, partly because they spend a lot of time in email and they don't really use social media so much.

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But if you compare that to the younger youngest, groups are under 25,

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just 3% of them say the emails Hemingway of accessing news in the US compared

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with you know four in ten say social media is their main way of accessing news.

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So you can see that that that that difference is not surprising because you know young people

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generally don't spend a lot of time in email that they're mainly in communication apps.

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And so if you want to reach younger people, if your strategy is to do so, email's probably not your best.

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But right. Email newsletter via WhatsApp or something like that.

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What it is that readers say they enjoy about newsletters?

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I think in terms of the benefits, again we sort of got at this through three sort of open questions and then and also survey response.

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And fundamentally people tell us it's, it's about convenience, you know,

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the way in which email brings together a package of information in a format that's easy to consume.

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So 65% say that's why they like email newsletters.

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And then beyond that, diverse perspectives.

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So that sense that you're hearing views or analysis that you won't get anywhere else in the mainstream media,

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for example, that might be just different types of voices. It might be an inside track on something.

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And then closely related to that is the idea of unique content 24%.

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So you can't get it anywhere else. And this is particularly interesting when it comes to getting people to pay for content.

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This is where, you know, I was talking about Casey Newton and his platform, a substack email.

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So where you can when you've got something that's truly unique, then you can start to charge for that kind of content.

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So, you know, authorial voice is another really important one for people as well.

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And that's a trend that we've seen grow over time.

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So email newsletters used to be about just links and now increasingly they're about the personality of the author as well.

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That's another reason why people say that they enjoy the emails.

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What do you think that curated nature of some of these newsletters, the very human and personal tone says about how news is traditionally delivered?

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Do you think this is a response to being too much news out there to navigate, for example?

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Yeah, definitely. I think that sense of convenience and we know elsewhere in the world what people talk about being overwhelmed by the news.

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I think that idea of convenience and saving time, which is the dominant reason why people are using these email newsletters, is part of it.

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But I think what we've seen is the growth of these sort of curated emails where you have a personality.

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And that's partly because digital has really struggled to engage people in the way that media like television or radio was able to do.

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And therefore, you know, you're not really getting the time with with media.

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And so I think the curation aspect is trying to build that connexion, build that loyalty that media companies really are after.

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And and I mean, just to give one example, The New York Times, which used to have a sort of morning roundup,

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which was quite sort of cold and cynical, added this authorial voice.

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And David Leonhart, who's a Pulitzer Prise winning journalist, has been curating the morning email from The New York Times for several years now.

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And he sort of brings a more relaxed tone. But but there also are risks around that because, you know, you bring a more human tone.

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It can risk injecting, more bias or polarising opinions.

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And Bradley himself was criticised over his COVID coverage.

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So, you know, the sort of trade offs and we also see sort of some of the rebels trying to be the opposite of that and saying,

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you know, what we're going to be is completely unbiased and we're just going to give you the links and you can make your own view.

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So emails like 1440, for example, stress the impartial curation of more than 100 sources, but still that same convenient package saving your time.

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This is a probably a broad question, but what value do you think news organisations see in email newsletter?

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What does an email offer that a website can?

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I mean, we're not going back to when I was working on on websites for the BBC.

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One of the frustrations was, you know, we're producing all of this content and we only have a front page.

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So you would have these huge arguments about what you put on the front page.

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And I think email kind of helps to solve that problem because it allows you to create other front pages that, you know, may have a, you know,

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a topic focus or they may have a personality focus,

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just different ways of curating all of that content and resurfacing that content in different ways.

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So in the absence of amazing personalisation technology, which we've been waiting for for about 20 years,

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I think email is actually kind of the best way or another great way of giving you a front page into all of the content that you have.

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And you know, I think that from a news organisations point of view, but also for consumers point of view, that's one of the key advantages.

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We look at consumers and we look at what it is in in newsletters for news organisation.

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We shouldn't forget an important point which is the business model,

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how our newsletters are part of their news organisation, business models and amendment.

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I think increasingly, you know, it used to be that the core aim of news organisations when they were mainly ad supported was about,

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was about reach and about clicks. But I think increasingly now it's about loyalty, it's about getting people to come back more often.

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It's about demonstrating that an email is, you know,

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probably the most important tool in in the armoury now about driving more frequent visits for many media organisations.

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And you know, the data shows that people are much less likely to churn,

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i.e. to unsubscribe if they are, if they've signed up to one or more email newsletters, for example.

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So still, this rather old fashioned technique of, of getting people to sign up to an email is,

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is the most effective way of keeping people engaged on a regular basis and then acquisition.

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So getting new people to sign up.

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So that's, that's another part of it, you know, via a free newsletter, you get that email address and you can start to build a relationship with them.

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So it's important for acquisition, it's important for retention,

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and I think for subscription publishers, I think we're seeing a bit of a shift right now.

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So, you know, it was primarily seen as marketing in the past,

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but I think we're we're seeing many more organisations bundle their emails in with the subscription product,

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so only available to subscribers as a way of locking people in more, I guess.

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So The Wall Street Journal, for example, has bundled its ten point morning briefing, which used to be free into its course subscription product.

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New York Times has recently converted about a dozen of its newsletters,

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which were again free into subscriber only products and added a few a few new ones.

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So, you know, at the moment, the media industry is really worried about losing their subscribers because of the cost of living,

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crisis and email in a really critical way of sort of tying people in more closely added value.

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Yeah, absolutely. Nick, thank you so much for joining us for the podcast today.

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It's a pleasure. Our guest today was Nick Newman, lead author of the Digital News Report.

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Thank you all for listening to this episode of The News Report 2022 Podcast Series.

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You can catch up on other episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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If you want to read a report in full, you can find it online and Digital News Report August 20, 22.

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And if you want to see any news from the Institute,

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you can subscribe to our very own weekly newsletter by clicking the link on our Twitter bio or on our home page.

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Dissociative Journalism A podcast by the Writers Institute. I'm a cherubini and will be back soon.