Newsletters and podcasts have a lot in common. As well as being low-cost, they can be intimate and personal; perfect for building lasting relationships with readers and listeners.
Neither format is new, but as it becomes increasingly more challenging to reach and engage people online, publishers are seeing the opportunities they offer for more sustainable audience-building. That’s one of the reasons we put on a dual-stream Podcast and Newsletter Summit aimed at publishers in London last month.
This special episode in collaboration with journalism.co.uk brings out some of the key lessons and learnings from the Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summits. There are clips from some of the stage sessions, as well as exclusive interviews with Jon Young, Publisher at Reby Media, Sarah Ebner, Head of Newsletters at the Financial Times, and Rosalind Erskin, host of The Scotsman’s Scran podcast.
Lesson 1: Newsletters are ‘sacred’ as they generate lucrative partnership opportunities
There was one really inspiring talk on the day which really sets the tone for the discussion. Black Ballad is an independent lifestyle publisher written by and for black women. It’s been going for nearly a decade at this point, a proof of concept that bootstrapped organisations can make it if they remain focused on mission and audience, instead of getting distracted and following the money. They’ve got a little under 1,500 paying members to date, which grants all sorts of early access and perks from events to partnerships.
But more than anything, Black Ballad exists to serve a void that many black women feel hasn’t been properly addressed in the mainstream. Co-founder Tobi Oredein noted at the Newsletter Summit that “people build connection with humans, not brands,” and that black women have always felt unseen and under-represented in media.
The newsletter is really the driving force of Black Ballad. There’s a Friday night edition for members that rounds up the key articles, new partnership offers and updates within the organisation. The Founder’s letter is a weekly personal musing by Tobi where she says no subject is off-limits, it’s what black women need to hear this week or what she is personally feeling.
There’s really high engagement on the founder’s letter, which is makes potential partnerships here really valuable – but she needs to be incredibly choosy because her reputation is on the line. “The Founders Letter is sacred,” Oredein noted. “I turn down quite a bit if it isn’t right.”
Lesson 2: Opt for quality over quantity when you’re a specialist title
Quality unquestionably matters more than quantity when you have a specialist audience. That goes for the types of content produces as well as the volume of your membership or readership. This holds true for another publication called Reby Media, another decade-old indie title which has five different trade or experience-specific podcasts, from the brewery industry to pregnancy.
Publisher Jon Young told us that the demand for these specialist titles starts with looking at the state of the market. And that allows him to hone in on specific commercial partners.
“We look for industries where there are more potential customers than a sales guy can reasonably get round in a year or so, and then also check that they’re underserved,” Young explained. “So when brewing hit around 2,000 breweries, that one sales guy who sells malt grain, he can’t get around 2,000 breweries in a year. So now there’s a market for him to buy advertising to try and get his message across.”
In starker terms, Young says that audience growth really isn’t a high priority. Instead of going for scale, he wants to make sure he reaches the right audiences. By doing that, he can guarantee commercial partners get their messages landing in the right places. “Brewers Journal gets probably around 2-3,000 listens an episode, but when there are only 2,000 breweries in the country, we could be looking at more than 100% of the potential market,” Young noted. “[Growth] is great to achieve…but actually our entire focus is quality.”
But how do you guarantee that quality? It’s in a more simple podcast format. “If you adopt the documentary style, then you can do the same as we all do when we’re back in our feature writing days,” he said. “You can sit there crafting and reshaping until you’ve got it perfect… but the [interview] format is cheap, it’s quick to put out, but you have to be really, really good in order to make that work.”
Lesson 3: Pivot at speed with newsletters to fill market gaps
In both cases, newsletters and podcasts are great ways to go direct to audiences, whether that’s straight to their inbox or earbuds. Another similarity between the two mediums is that they’re great for developing superfans. Both of these hold true for publishers of all sizes.
But another striking comparison is that they are powerful niche offerings. We are seeing this with specialist and independent publishers, as well as the larger ones to go deep into verticals, or doing pop-up products around events like the Coronation or election.
“I tend to look for gaps where I think there should be a newsletter,” The FT’s Head of Newsletters Sarah Ebner told us. “So we didn’t have a US markets newsletter. Now, we have the award-winning Unhedged. We didn’t have a UK politics newsletter, now we have the award-winning Inside Politics. The same with fashion…I looked for the gap where we can fill things in.”
The FT has 50 newsletters at this point in time, and it allows them to experiment by deploying them as premium or standard newsletters, or even as newsletter courses. “We know newsletters are really good for engaging our B2B audience,” Ebner noted. “And we also want people to subscribe to the FT. So we want to offer them [other] things that we think they might like.”
Lesson 4: A specific, local podcast can attract a much larger, international audience
Daily news publication The Scotsman is another great example of a larger, legacy title trying to broaden its international appeal through podcasting in particular. Its Scran podcast goes local into the Scottish food and drink scene. It was launched in 2019 as part of the Google-funded Laudible podcast project to diversify its audience. What it’s found is that this has sparked tourist appeal in the US market. It’s also interesting to note the Scran brand has since extended into newsletters and awards too.
“Over the last 10 years in Scotland as a whole…people have evolved and are more interested in the provenance of food,” Rosalind Erskin, host of The Scotsman’s Scran Podcast said. “But there’s also huge tourism in it. The Scotsman has an American and overseas audience, so we’re tapping into telling the stories of your local farmer, your local baker, or a well-known whiskey distillery for the local population of Scotland, but also tourists as well.”
Once again, we’re seeing very targeted advertising in this podcast, you’ll hear lots of food and drink brands in the ad breaks. So what you’re getting is that recurring theme: a specific podcast, and a specific commercial opportunity spinning out of it. That doesn’t happen by accident; the Scran podcast has built its appeal by hitting the road to get close to the food and drink scene.
“It’s important to us to go places and meet people face to face, that was always the point of Scran,” Erskin explained. “It’s just more natural, and you can get a sense of environment, you can record some music, some chat…get a sense of place. It adds to the experience.”
Lesson 5: People are willing to pay for premium, but premium is a big investment
The US appeal is probably the last major talking point of the day and it’s really significant. What we’re hearing is that the US market is an early indication of trends to come. That comes from Ben Youatt, Head of Podcasts at Immediate Media, which has a wide portfolio of magazines and podcast shows. He says that US podcast listeners warming up to paying for them, and that’s an encouraging sign for the rest of the industry.
“We’ve actually seen much more engagement in [podcast] subscriptions becoming popularised in the US in comparison to our UK listeners,” Youatt said. “I think it’s probably an early indicator that as slightly more hesitant attitudes are starting to thaw, hopefully globally, people will be more accepting of paid-for solutions as things like Patreon or YouTube Premium become more popular globally.”
He’s also optimistic that the appetite for podcast subscriptions will grow. But publishers will need to invest to see the growth. “The worst thing you could do as a publisher is start to make users feel penalised for just trying to engage with your content,” Youatt said, explaining why paywalling existing or previously free content is difficult. “One of the things that we always say internally is that if you’re going to take subscriptions seriously, you have to offer more for more, not less for more.”
Missed the Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summits? You can access the session videos of each Summit on-demand here.
Thanks to Jacob Granger at Journalism.co.uk for joining us at the Publisher Podcast & Newsletter Summits and putting together this episode with us. Check out the Journalism.co.uk podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud and Spotify.
