A Newsletter About Newsletters?! Move over Zuckerberg, things are getting meta...

ALSO: I look at bots on Medium

I have this vision of myself, many years from now, wearing a straightjacket in a padded cell. “Newsletters,” I mutter under my breath as a forensic psychiatrist hired by the FBI is escorted in by armed guards. “Newsletters, newsletters, newsletters,” I screech, at an ever-increasing pitch, before finally yelling, with blood-curdling intensity: “NEWSLETTERSSSSS!”

If this sounds like an odd thing to write in a newsletter, then you are experiencing a small fraction of the cognitive dissonance that I have to endure every time I fire up the ol’ Substack. My natural instinct is to call out newsletters, to push the agenda of podcasts instead, and to do them down. So why did I start publishing a newsletter? The truth is that it’s very easy for me to do: right now I’m sat in my living room in South London, hammering this post out in Microsoft Word (I’m old school like that) and will shortly copy it all over into the Substack CMS and hit send. It’s easy. It’s also a very simple system for monetization, far cleaner than any of the paid subscription options for podcasting.

There was also the question of timing. If you can keep your pod when all about you are losing theirs and starting newsletters – well, you’re a stronger person than me, my son. The world has moved towards newsletters dramatically over the last few years. I’m sure I’ve told this anecdote on here before, but when I was working at the Spectator (a British current affairs magazine) they had an evening newsletter, the Evening Blend it was called, that they were very proud of. They were considering launching more. Having to be brought in to run the podcasts, I was loathe to big up newsletters – but I also fundamentally believed that this was antiquated technology that would be stupid to invest in. But the editor was determined that newsletters should be part of the publication’s future, and they now have 14 different titles (including Lunchtime Espresso, a midday version of the evening email). On a purely industrial commitment level, I was wrong.

In last week’s edition of Future News, Ian Silvera’s excellent newsletter about the news, he spelled out the fact that the BBC is planning to enter the newsletter race. The BBC has the financial firepower, as well as in-house expertise and talent, to compete with the private market in any sector it chooses. Frankly, I’m just pleased that they’re taking a break from podcasting – no company or organization has done more harm to the UK’s podcast market than the BBC (in my opinion; other opinions may exist). The BBC’s newsletter head honcho “will utilise the expertise of thousands of journalists across the world, as well as examine the impact of the big stories from North America on other regions,” a spokesperson told Future News.

For the Beeb, it’s another no-brainer. They already have everything they need to make a newsletter work – talented (and salaried) correspondents and, er, massive marketing infrastructure – so not doing it would be, to some extent, a dereliction of professional duty. That’s unless you believe, like me, that part of the responsibility of a publicly funded broadcaster is to nurture, and not stifle, a competitive private market (but that’s a subject for a different blog and another time).

But at the same time as I was thinking about the BBC news, I saw this tweet, from my old colleague Stephen Bush, pop up on my timeline.

Stephen is what you’d call a newsletter pioneer, at least in the UK. He cut his teeth working on Benedict Brogan’s email at the Telegraph and now writes a morning email for the FT. We worked together at the New Statesman where he launched Morning Call, an email that has gone on to be one of the NS’s most valuable pieces of property. And even though we worked together on the podcast (which is very popular and which he was co-host of for several years) I don’t think it’s unfair to say that his first, and deepest, love was his newsletter.

Stephen’s tweet highlights a Press Gazette article which, to summarise, looks at a new nature newsletter based in the UK, called Inkcap journal. It launched in May 2020 as a free newsletter and later added a paid option. It now has, according to Press Gazette, 6000+ subscribers including 800 paying ones. Membership costs £40, £50 or £100 a year, depending on your level of generosity so, for argument’s sake, let’s assume that, on average, those subs are paying £45 a year. That’s £36,000 or $43,500. It’s a salary, for sure, though not a huge one, especially if you’ve got commissions as part of your outlay.

Anyway, more striking (and what Stephen was calling BS on) was the 70% open rate. The article doesn’t specify whether that open rate is for all subscribers or just for paid subs (people who pay for a newsletter are, unsurprisingly, much more likely to open the email) but it’s a high figure. As a compare and contrast, this newsletter (which, I should say, has far, far fewer than 6k subscribers) usually has an open-rate of about 50%. If you’re reading this, you’re part of that figure (and thank you). If you’re not reading this, well, eat dirt.