Millennials Are Taking a Liking to Newsletters

Weisberg and Zakin followed up the book39s publication with a 10city book tour In November theSkimm opened both a popup boutique in New York and an ecommerce site for holiday shopping All of this took place the same month that Business Insider reported that theSkimm was seeking a buyer or new round of investors amid reports of declining user growthNotwithstanding the Business Insider report in all it39s been quite an ascent for Weisberg and Zakin since they left their jobs as producers at NBC with quot4000 to their namequot in 2012 to start their company In the time since they were on the receiving end of an 8 million funding round led by 21st Century Fox in 2016 as well as a subsequent 12 million round led by Google Ventures in 2018 theSkimm39s newsletter the Daily Skimm released once daily Monday through Friday is charmingly written with plenty of personality and the occasional touch of lipAlthough frequently on the receiving end of killjoytype criticisms accusing theSkimm of infantilizing its audience for presenting the news in the quaint tone that it does these tired criticisms such as those put forward by Nneka McGuire at The Washington Post miss the point theSkimm does an excellent job of making the news engaging while at the same time resisting the usual companion of descending into overt and overwhelming political biasThere have been other millennialtailored newsletters that have achieved smaller but still respectable degrees of impact One is Morning Brew which was similarly started by two 20somethings Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief By most accounts Lieberman started the businessthemed newsletter mostly on a lark while killing time during his last semester of college The Morning Brew which registered its millionth subscriber in early 2019 brands itself as providing a range of businessrelated news to young professionals who may not be overwhelmingly committed to a single career path Therefore unlike daily email newsletters such as The Hustle which is geared specifically for the tech industry Morning Brew provides a range of news across the business spaceUnlike Weisberg and Zakin Morning Brew39s cofounders did not come from a media background per se and admittedly theSkimm39s presentation of the news appears at times more comprehensive This is living confirmation of Zakin39s comments quotI think the number one thing that has been instilled in us and the number one thing that we care about at our company is to have journalistic integrity and make sure that our factchecking process is truly indepthquot However Morning Brew is still replete with interesting and sourced business insightsAnother recent addition to this space is The New Paper which was recently launched by two businessbackground young men one of whom John Necef served as the head of growth at The Hustle until the summer of 2018 The New Paper39s focus amp8212 like that of many other media projects amp8212 is to aim to provide news including political news without the partisan slant that marks so much of the current news landscape Unlike Daily Skimm and Morning Brew which have a clear target audience The New Paper instead opts to target an amorphous group of Americans who may or may not be looking for an alternative to political bias in reporting However The New Paper will likely encounter what similarly oriented media projects have already found People like to say they want unbiased news more than they actually indeed want it To quote the Canadian filmmaker Maziar Ghaderi quotThe thing about partisanship though is that it pays You can make a lot of money telling people what they want to hearquotIn any event the success of companies such as theSkimm and Morning Brew offer a few lessons The first is that amp8212 despite the Slack craze amp8212 email is still king and there remains little digital substitute for the degree to which email dictates one39s day and workflow From a monetization perspective newsletters including Morning Brew have been able to master native advertising matching the style of advertisements to the format of newsletters to a tee And then there39s the retention point as John Necef suggested when he was at The Hustle retention rates of email subscriptions tend to be quotunbelievably highquotAlso the publishing frequency of the Daily Skimm and Morning Brew ie once daily further suggests that news bombardment does not need to be 247 As a partial answer to the growing body of literature on socalled quotnews avoidancequot which I have touched on previously this publication frequency underscores the reality that for most of us amp8212 with the exception of congressional staffers and day traders amp8212 it39s perfectly acceptable to wait until the following morning for the next helping of news from a favorite outletI can still recall the first time I was shown theSkimm and being instantly struck by the distinctiveness of its personality Before long I considered it amp8212 along with Vox amp8212 to be perhaps the project in news that most successfully accomplishes what it sets out to do So with the popularity of newsletters such as the Daily Skimm it39s little wonder that more established news brands would also be so widely touting their own daily email subscriptions whether it be CNN39s 5 Things newsletter or The Washington Post39s The Daily 202Click the social buttons to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Millennials Are Taking a Liking to Newsletters

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Erich J. Prince

"About That with Carl Mayer": Involved Media Connected Audience Fall 2024 Report (Episode 5) - By Carl Mayer

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Millennials Are Taking a Liking to Newsletters

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Erich J. Prince

"About That with Carl Mayer": Involved Media Connected Audience Fall 2024 Report (Episode 5) - By Carl Mayer

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