Why The New Yorker is using more ‘voice’ in its daily newsletter

The New Yorker switched up its daily newsletter, rolling out a voicier and more editorialized approach for readers’ inboxes. The idea is to infuse a bit more personality and original content — a newsletter strategy The New Yorker is now bringing to its daily product.

The Daily, which is free to read and publishes seven days a week, now begins with the biggest story of the day, followed by sections containing The New Yorker’s news and analysis, culture and essays, humor and cartoons and puzzles and games. At the end, a “postscript” links the news of the day or a moment in history with The New Yorker’s nearly century-old archive, according to an introductory post by Jessie Li and Ian Crouch, who are now co-authoring the flagship newsletter (Li has been responsible for that task for the past two years, while Crouch has been with The New Yorker for over a decade in a variety of roles).

Here’s a look at the old version next to the new version:

Digiday spoke to Jessanne Collins, The New Yorker’s director of newsletters, to see what’s changed in the daily email and why the team decided to go beyond a straightforward curation of The New Yorker’s top stories, to give Li and Crouch the space to communicate to readers directly.

The New Yorker has 18 newsletters in total. This week, in conjunction with The Daily’s new look, the New Yorker also announced it would increase the publishing frequency of its crossword puzzle newsletter to five days a week.

The daily newsletter has nearly 2 million subscribers, according to a spokesperson, a 16% increase from a year ago. The newsletter has over 1 million daily opens. Newsletter visitors are twice as likely to subscribe to the New Yorker compared to site visitors overall, the spokesperson added.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why did The New Yorker want to change up its daily newsletter?

We want to redesign it primarily because we just saw a lot of opportunity to make the newsletter more editorially robust and in line with everything The New Yorker is in its editorial and stylistic identity. Previously, it was a pretty straightforward collection of links that we had full editorial curational control over but we didn’t have the ability to include original material or packaging. We’ve introduced capabilities on the technical side to let us have a lot more elasticity in how we can package materials now. It always was edited and curated by a human but my sense was that you wouldn’t necessarily know that by looking at it. But the newsletter space, in general, is where personality, identity, the voice of the writer and the media entity can really come to life — so it felt like …read more

Source:: Digiday