Nytimes newsletters
It has been so successful that Twitter bought newsletter platform Revue earlier this year, and Facebook has recently launched its own version of Substack called Bulletin. Substack, which has wooed top writers and journalists, has become a top platform for independent writers who want to retain editorial control and monetize their work while growing their audiences. Perhaps the most obvious reason for paid newsletters is they are the shiny new toy. After the first year, that price increases to about $200 a year. Digital subscribers to The Times will be able to access the newsletters online for about $1 a week. Some newsletters will remain free.Īccording to Bloomberg, existing newsletters that will go behind a paywall include “Parenting,” “Smarter Living,” “Watching,” and “On Soccer with Rory Smith.” In addition, The Times will add seven new newsletters to the mix, including a few written by well-known journalists like Kara Swisher, Jay Caspian Kang and Peter Coy. The newsletters will cover a variety of topics including everything from politics and economics to technology and lifestyle. Eighteen newsletters – including existing newsletters and new ones – will go behind a paywall. Bloomberg reports that The Times currently produces about 50 newsletters that reach about 15 million readers weekly.
is investing resources into paid newsletters, allowing the legacy media organization to compete with services like Substack, Twitter and Facebook. The Times recently started featuring a signup widget for one of its most popular newsletters, Morning Headlines, on its homepage, and a few months ago, the Times started embedding a newsletter signup widget in Interpreter columns, which changes its offer based on who reads it on a desktop computer: If the reader hasn’t subscribed to the Interpreter, the widget offers that newsletter if that reader is already subscribed to the Interpreter, the widget will offer the reader a different one on a similar topic and if that reader’s subscribed to more than two newsletters, the widget won’t appear at all.The New York Times Co. Product innovation has played a role too. Vietnam ‘67, which launched in May, has an open rate over 80 percent, and Goodridge said she expects that, if it succeeds, it’s a model that other parts of the newsroom may copy.
Nytimes newsletters series#
But it’s also created some surprises too, like Vietnam ‘67, a limited-run newsletter that was created in an attempt to recreate the success of Disunion, a series that the Opinions section ran several years ago about the Civil War. Goodridge’s work has yielded some obvious local projects, like NYT Australia. Instead, she spends time connecting with “dozens” of audience and bureau teams, looking for ideas. Goodridge, whose current title is editor of newsroom newsletters, doesn’t have a set team. That work is being led by Elisabeth Goodridge, a nine-year Times veteran who most recently served as a digital editor for the paper’s metro desk. Instead, Breskin pointed to efforts to source the entire Times newsroom for newsletter topics and ideas. It launched the week of Trump’s inauguration, a contributing factor.īut Breskin stressed that newsletter growth had started to perk up before Trump was even a Republican candidate, let alone the current president. Nicole Breskin, the director of editorial products at the Times, noted that the Interpreter, its conversational explainer newsletter about foreign policy, exceeded earlier expectations for signups and engagement. Like every digital media growth story of the past year, President Trump’s election played a role. (They also read twice as many stories per month as the average Times reader.)
According to the Times memo, that growth matters because newsletter subscribers are twice as likely as regular New York Times readers to become subscribers, the primary area of focus for the publisher.