Barely a week goes by without a new newsletter launch from a publisher spying an opportunity in a new area. As building audiences on social media has become more precarious, newsletters have emerged as a much safer bet to grow lists, direct relationships, and collect valuable first-party data.
But the New Statesman is bucking the trend. Rather than launching anything new, it has whittled down its newsletter portfolio to just two; a daily and a weekend edition. It is also distributing entirely through Substack.
Staff Writer and Head of Newsletters Harry Lambert told Press Gazette that its portfolio of newsletters for economics, culture, politics, world news and more was simply too many. “Instead of having a whole buffet of different newsletters and cutting the brilliance up into little segments, we just decided to give [the audience] one that we thought they’d like on Saturday and have the power of a big audience through one newsletter,” he said.
The newspaper experience
The magazine made the change in May, cutting all its newsletters except The Saturday Read and Morning Call. Talking to Press Gazette, Lambert made the comparison with a newspaper operation, with the Morning Call as the “daily paper” and the “big Saturday paper with The Saturday Read.”
The Saturday Read is currently monetised via sponsorships and advertising. Each weekly send drives around 10% of the New Statesman’s website traffic, and Lambert said that the aim is to have the newsletter as a key driver of magazine subscriptions in the future. There is also the potential to send a paid version of the email with free-to-read links as a stepping stone to a full website subscription,
The comparison with a newspaper or magazine is an interesting one. Bundling articles across all topics in one place each day is necessary for a physical product, where the economics of printing topics in separate products just doesn’t make sense. But does this strategy translate to the digital world, where readers are increasingly used to getting a much more personalised experience?
Mx3 (formerly known as What’s New in Publishing) Editor in Chief Jeremy Walters prefers a wide variety of newsletters so he can choose the most relevant to his interests. “The more general, the less I am engaged,” he commented.
So far, The Saturday Read – which launched on Substack in March – has accumulated 156,000 free subscribers. However it’s worth noting that new registered users on the newstatesman.com website are automatically subscribed to The Saturday Read, which has contributed to its consistent growth.
Because it’s just one email a week, “we thought that wouldn’t be too intrusive for registrants,” said Lambert. “And obviously, if you’re registering, you’re showing an interest in our content, and this is the best introduction to what the NS is doing each week.” He told Press Gazette that people “stick around”, with opens hovering near 50%.
Consolidating podcast feeds
Newsletters are not the only product being streamlined by the group. On Linkedin earlier this month, Executive Producer Chris Stone revealed that they have begun consolidating their podcasts into a single feed as well.
“For a long time I was firmly convinced that podcasts should run in a single-format feed: listeners like consistency, which builds habitual listening,” he said. “But we’ve been trying something different on the New Statesman podcast recently.”
The New Statesman has been running three podcast feeds: The New Statesman podcast, World Review, and Audio Long Reads. Between them, the feeds published five episodes a week. Although all were growing, Stone noted that the New Statesman podcast was by far their most popular feed “by 5-10x”. “This meant our effort was divided across three feeds, but the bulk of our audience – and revenue – was in one.”
Now, the podcast publishes four episodes a week, from a ‘Westminster Weekly’ discussion to ‘You Ask Us’ episodes on Fridays answering listener questions. Like the newsletter, they save the ‘magazine’ experience for Saturday, publishing an Audio Long Read of one of their reported features and essays.
The move is not without its risks. Stone noted on LinkedIn that he would be watching closely to see what impact it has in the long term. “Will existing listeners (who came for the politics coverage) appreciate the variety? Will additional coverage attract new listeners? Or will the volume of episodes overwhelm the feed?” he speculated.
To consolidate, or not to consolidate?
So is consolidation something other publishers should look at? That depends on a variety of factors, but there are three key questions I would ask:
- What is the purpose of the newsletter?
- Who is the audience for the newsletter?
- What is the advertiser demand for them?
A specialist B2B publisher with a number of newsletters for different verticals would clearly not benefit from rolling them all into one. Smaller lists may be more fragmented, but the more niche the topic, the more focused the people on that list will be. 1,000 construction professionals would be of far more value to the right advertiser than ten times that number on a more general list.
But for news publishers, consolidation may be a more tempting prospect. If advertisers are interested in reaching high volumes of people but are less concerned with their interests, then rolling newsletters on specific topics into a more general send, like the New Statesman has done, is potentially a good way of exposing readers to more of a publisher’s work.
It all depends on what newsletters are being used for. Another news publisher, the Wall Street Journal, has a very granular selection of over 50 newsletters available to subscribe to. In February, it even launched the WSJ News Debrief, a newsletter for people who only wanted to know when the biggest news events were happening, rather than on a regular schedule.
There is certainly a time and place for a general newsletter – and it’s not an either/or. But will former subscribers to the New Statesman’s more targeted newsletters miss the precision and focus? Almost certainly. Those numbers may have been smaller than a more general newsletter, but one lesson we should certainly have learned from the past decade is that niche audiences are far more loyal and valuable.
