Welcome to Fusion of Journalism, a podcast from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
I'm going to be any kind of leadership development at the Institute.
It is a special series of our podcast and is dedicated to the Digital News Report.
2022. Over seven episodes with diving into the most comprehensive piece of research on news consumption around the world.
In this episode of the series, we're joined by lead author of the report.
Nick Newman was written a chapter on email newsletters.
We look at findings on how many people use this medium to news audiences who find
the most popular and the appeal of the format to users and publishers alike.
Nick, welcome to the podcast. Very good to be here, Fredricka.
So we tend to think of e-mail as being all fashion and low tech,
but getting news directly in your inbox seems to be having an enduring value, at least to some news agencies and news organisations.
Firstly, what are some of the headline figures and how many people use email newsletters?
It sort of varies across countries, but it tends to be somewhere around a 10th to a quarter who get a newsletter weekly.
And obviously many of them are also getting them daily highest in countries like the United States.
So about 22% say that they get a newsletter, a weekly and interestingly, about half.
So it's their main source of news, but they're much lower in in countries like the UK.
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.
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.
So in that sense, you know, this group of people is absolutely critical for the sort of sustainability of many news organisations,
whether you're, you know, ad supported or or subscription based.
I guess the other thing to say is, you know, we think of as a lot of focus on email.
We think of email newsletters maybe as growing, but actually they're not really growing.
And part of the reason is that they're facing huge competition in terms of access points from other types of media.
So social media in particular, which has grown very substantially mobile alerts, mobile aggregators, we've also seen sort of significant growth there.
And so in that sense, it's quite interesting that the email newsletters actually in terms of weekly reaches have stayed pretty
much the same so that you can see that sort of success in the face of these other growing forms of access.
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?
What are the broad categories they fall into? That's a really hard question.
Federico, thank you so much. And we haven't attempted this this this time to sort of really categorise them into into buckets.
But I think some of it some of the differences come out in general responses.
So we ask people to tell us what kind of emails they access, and then we sort of put those in different buckets.
So I think you have you have general news roundups.
So these are often curated these days. And I think the sort of intention of media companies doing this is to save people time.
Quite often they've got links to websites within them.
So the aim is to sort of attract attention, if you like, and get people to go to those websites.
So you'll be familiar with formats like Five Things You Need to Know Today.
They became very widespread during COVID pandemic they've they've sometimes because the ones on so on Ukraine for example organisations
like the BBC and CNN have really sort of adapted these formats and actually taken them from email to to websites as well.
So you see these formats elsewhere as well.
You have Axios. I would I would call that as a real pioneer in this.
So they've developed this idea of smart brevity, explicitly trying to be careful with your time.
So they tell you how long this email is going to be. So curating round ups in specialist areas as well as general news,
then you have I think another category is articles that are designed to be read in your email.
So these are often personally authored articles.
Effectively, they might have links within them, but they're not trying to push you anywhere else with links.
You know, the main business model is to spend time.
We can sell that time for sponsorship or in some cases subscription.
So that's where, you know, we start to see individual journalists making money out of emails that appear in your inbox.
And then the final category I would call out is breaking news or breaking news alerts.
So these these are, I think, have become less popular over time.
But in a previous report, we actually found almost half of email users subscribed some kind of breaking news email as well.
So that's sort of broadly the kind of buckets that we that we find.
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.
I probably get about 20 emails a day. So mainstream round ups from BBC, Politico,
the times I get a huge bucket of of ones about the media as one I really like by Matt Deegan on audio
sort of beautifully written always on sort of one or two subjects Nieman Lab of Reuters Institute,
of course, fantastic curated section A Substack one.
Casey Newton I think a lot of people subscribe to that, which is about developments in Silicon Valley.
That's a that's a subscriber one. And I get a couple of really interesting political ones as well,
which I've subscribed to recently, said one by Margaret Cox Richardson on U.S. politics,
there's a UK one called The Ruffian by Ian Leslie, which is always interesting, lands in your email box on the Saturday morning.
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.
So it's probably illustrative of the types.
You mentioned in the ones you just mentioned, a mix between news organisation and actually solo journalist.
I'm curious what the report says. What are the most popular sources of email news?
Right. Yeah. So so we divided it up into mainstream media, then specialist publications that you might subscribe to for your work.
I just talk about my media, for example, or it might be about passions, you know, things like sport or arts.
Then alternative outlets, which which we kind of think of as almost anti mainstream media, some might be political.
It might just be, you know, different kind of perspectives. And then individual journalists working on their own,
some see overlaps between that and split those with the categories and most categories in most countries,
we find that the majority of emails that people say they get are from big mainstream media companies in every in every country.
So more than 50%, about a fifth say they get newsletters from specialist organisations for their work,
etc. Same for alternative media and then a smaller percentage from individual journalists.
But what's what's interesting about that is the country differences.
So in the US, 18% of email subscribers say they get newsletters from an individual journalist and that's just 4% in the UK.
So I think that just speaks to, you know, the so-called Substack Revolution where you've got individual journalists now getting paid
for what they do and charging money that's gone much further in the U.S. So we see we see,
you know, a lot of substack newsletters. Substack, I think, took about 1 million people who are now paying for their newsletters,
the vast majority of those in the U.S. and it hasn't gone nearly as far in countries like the UK.
I'm going to stay on differences between countries.
Aside from the sources are coming from.
Have you seen any reason why newsletters seem to have a very different prominence in some countries Tibet, other, the U.K., for example,
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.
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.
So US publications have been into email for a very long time.
They invested them consistently. For example, The New York Times now produces, I think, 50 different emails read by.
They claim 15 million people a week. But you also have a sort of very, very large market.
And I think that's really encouraged this sort of entrepreneurial journalism and
some of the developments we're seeing in paying for individual emails as well.
So it's partly about the larger market.
It's partly about that that really helps the sort of commercial incentives to produce a format that now has a business model.
And if you compare that to smaller markets like Norway, for example, very close to the bottom of the list,
you know, lots of interest in news, but quite low email subscription.
And I think that's partly because they have much stronger and more confident brand connexions.
So, you know, they've got people who in our research are much more likely to go directly to websites and apps.
Subscription rates are pretty high, so maybe publishers don't feel as much need to push content to audiences through through email.
Are there any demographic factors, influences influencing what rate people use email newsletters?
Absolutely. I mean, there's a huge geographic demographic split.
So email is mainly valued by older, richer, more educated news consumers.
I mean, there are a particularly interesting group of people for for many news organisations and this is true across countries,
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.
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.
But if you compare that to the younger youngest, groups are under 25,
just 3% of them say the emails Hemingway of accessing news in the US compared
with you know four in ten say social media is their main way of accessing news.
So you can see that that that that difference is not surprising because you know young people
generally don't spend a lot of time in email that they're mainly in communication apps.
And so if you want to reach younger people, if your strategy is to do so, email's probably not your best.
But right. Email newsletter via WhatsApp or something like that.
What it is that readers say they enjoy about newsletters?
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.
And fundamentally people tell us it's, it's about convenience, you know,
the way in which email brings together a package of information in a format that's easy to consume.
So 65% say that's why they like email newsletters.
And then beyond that, diverse perspectives.
So that sense that you're hearing views or analysis that you won't get anywhere else in the mainstream media,
for example, that might be just different types of voices. It might be an inside track on something.
And then closely related to that is the idea of unique content 24%.
So you can't get it anywhere else. And this is particularly interesting when it comes to getting people to pay for content.
This is where, you know, I was talking about Casey Newton and his platform, a substack email.
So where you can when you've got something that's truly unique, then you can start to charge for that kind of content.
So, you know, authorial voice is another really important one for people as well.
And that's a trend that we've seen grow over time.
So email newsletters used to be about just links and now increasingly they're about the personality of the author as well.
That's another reason why people say that they enjoy the emails.
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?
Do you think this is a response to being too much news out there to navigate, for example?
Yeah, definitely. I think that sense of convenience and we know elsewhere in the world what people talk about being overwhelmed by the news.
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.
But I think what we've seen is the growth of these sort of curated emails where you have a personality.
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.
And therefore, you know, you're not really getting the time with with media.
And so I think the curation aspect is trying to build that connexion, build that loyalty that media companies really are after.
And and I mean, just to give one example, The New York Times, which used to have a sort of morning roundup,
which was quite sort of cold and cynical, added this authorial voice.
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.
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.
It can risk injecting, more bias or polarising opinions.
And Bradley himself was criticised over his COVID coverage.
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,
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.
So emails like 1440, for example, stress the impartial curation of more than 100 sources, but still that same convenient package saving your time.
This is a probably a broad question, but what value do you think news organisations see in email newsletter?
What does an email offer that a website can?
I mean, we're not going back to when I was working on on websites for the BBC.
One of the frustrations was, you know, we're producing all of this content and we only have a front page.
So you would have these huge arguments about what you put on the front page.
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,
a topic focus or they may have a personality focus,
just different ways of curating all of that content and resurfacing that content in different ways.
So in the absence of amazing personalisation technology, which we've been waiting for for about 20 years,
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.
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.
We look at consumers and we look at what it is in in newsletters for news organisation.
We shouldn't forget an important point which is the business model,
how our newsletters are part of their news organisation, business models and amendment.
I think increasingly, you know, it used to be that the core aim of news organisations when they were mainly ad supported was about,
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.
It's about demonstrating that an email is, you know,
probably the most important tool in in the armoury now about driving more frequent visits for many media organisations.
And you know, the data shows that people are much less likely to churn,
i.e. to unsubscribe if they are, if they've signed up to one or more email newsletters, for example.
So still, this rather old fashioned technique of, of getting people to sign up to an email is,
is the most effective way of keeping people engaged on a regular basis and then acquisition.
So getting new people to sign up.
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.
So it's important for acquisition, it's important for retention,
and I think for subscription publishers, I think we're seeing a bit of a shift right now.
So, you know, it was primarily seen as marketing in the past,
but I think we're we're seeing many more organisations bundle their emails in with the subscription product,
so only available to subscribers as a way of locking people in more, I guess.
So The Wall Street Journal, for example, has bundled its ten point morning briefing, which used to be free into its course subscription product.
New York Times has recently converted about a dozen of its newsletters,
which were again free into subscriber only products and added a few a few new ones.
So, you know, at the moment, the media industry is really worried about losing their subscribers because of the cost of living,
crisis and email in a really critical way of sort of tying people in more closely added value.
Yeah, absolutely. Nick, thank you so much for joining us for the podcast today.
It's a pleasure. Our guest today was Nick Newman, lead author of the Digital News Report.
Thank you all for listening to this episode of The News Report 2022 Podcast Series.
You can catch up on other episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
If you want to read a report in full, you can find it online and Digital News Report August 20, 22.
And if you want to see any news from the Institute,
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