[Amber Samdahl] 12:01:12
Welcome, everyone. My name is Amber Samdahl, and I'm the Director of Design and Innovation at PBS Wisconsin. I also co-lead Public Media Innovators alongside my colleague Chad Davis.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:01:23
And for those of you not familiar with Public Media Innovators, we are a national peer learning community for public media professionals. We are facilitated through NETA, so big thanks to NETA for all their support.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:01:35
And today's webinar is a collaboration between public media innovators and current. And I'm excited to be co-hosting today with my colleague, Mike Janssen from Current.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:01:45
And just to briefly set the stage, I'm going to open up a poll for you all to fill out as we kind of go through our introduction here. So let me get that launched.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:01:57
All right. So hopefully that… It's up for everybody, short little poll for you all to to kind of take a look at. So it gives us a sense of who our audience is as we're as we're diving in today.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:02:09
So, as you know, we're here today to talk about newsletters, and at a time when social platforms keep changing the rules on us. Newsletters are one of those few places where you can really better own our relationship directly with our audience. So today we have several experts joining us from different stations across public media.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:02:27
who are each doing really unique and interesting, creative things with newsletters in a lot of different ways. So I'm looking forward to diving in, learning from all of them, what they've built, the lessons they've learned along the way, and really appreciative of all of our guests today.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:02:42
And finally, one last quick housekeeping note before we start. Please do drop your questions in the chat as we go. We'll have time for Q&A at the end, and we want to make sure we get to as many questions as we can with the time. So feel free, as the webinar goes along, to drop those.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:02:59
Questions in the chat. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Mike.

[Mike Janssen] 12:03:05
All right, thank you. Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar, and thank you for joining us. I'm Mike Janssen. I'm digital editor for Current.

[Mike Janssen] 12:03:13
Um, and to build on what Amber was saying, new platforms and tools are always popping up, but the Humble newsletter is a constant, and it's still a great way to connect directly with audiences. They're in their inbox, it's personal, it's reliable, and it's a one-on-one relationship. Our panelists today have focused on making the most of that connection, and I'm really looking forward to hearing their insights and sharing them with you.

[Mike Janssen] 12:03:33
Today, we'll be talking with Madeleine King. She's newsletter Product Manager at Iowa Public Radio.

[Mike Janssen] 12:03:39
Chanelle Berlin Johnson, Director of Audience Engagement for LAIST, and Brianna Lee, Senior Producer for Community Engagement at LAIST.

[Mike Janssen] 12:03:46
Jenny Peek, newsletter editor at Wisconsin Public Radio, and Autumn Widdoes, marketing manager for Vegas PBS.

[Mike Janssen] 12:03:55
So let's just take a look at the results of the poll before I get started here.

[Mike Janssen] 12:04:00
Looks like we have a good number of you who already have multiple newsletters.

[Mike Janssen] 12:04:06
A very small number who don't have a newsletter at all, and it looks like nearly a third of you are rethinking or rebuilding your newsletter strategy.

[Mike Janssen] 12:04:14
So, um, especially for those of you in that category, I think today will be very helpful, but I think everybody can find something to take away from it. So, let's get started with Madeleine. She is the newsletter product manager at Iowa Public Radio.

[Mike Janssen] 12:04:30
In 2023, her team at Iowa Public Radio won an online news association award for Excellence in newsletters.

[Mike Janssen] 12:04:37
They have 5 newsletters, each with a different focus. And Madeleine, you want to share one of those with us as we get started here on your screen?

[Madeleine King] 12:04:45
Yeah, we… I'll show you guys my… our, like, flagship newsletter, which is our daily newsletter that started initially along with my job.

[Madeleine King] 12:04:59
during the pandemic, we just wanted a way to can you see that? Okay.

[Mike Janssen] 12:05:05
Mm-hmm.

[Madeleine King] 12:05:06
I wanted a way to be able to obviously share important COVID-19 updates and daily numbers from the state of Iowa with folks, and that quickly evolved into, you know, including other information from our reporters, and then we leveraged this.

[Madeleine King] 12:05:23
beginning newsletter into the five that we have now. Um, so this is kind of just our daily basic news breakdown from our reporters. Um, so all of this is just daily spots that we then post on a live blog on our website, and then shorten down even more.

[Madeleine King] 12:05:41
more for our newsletter. Um, we include weather because people want statewide weather, and then we do share from the NPR network as well. This is often just reporting from NPR, but if I see… articles that I like or think would be interesting to our audience that are from other member stations as well. We'll link out there. Um, but that's usually just if I find it. And then we have a couple reporting partners that we work with, including the Midwest Newsroom and Harvest Public Media. Um, so we include their work as well.

[Madeleine King] 12:06:12
Um, since a lot of times that does… It's either written by one of our reporters, or have it has an impact on our audience.

[Madeleine King] 12:06:21
Many farmers in Iowa, so… and then, um, one of our favorite things about this newsletter is the Sunnyside. We always have a bit of good news at the end of the day, um, and that can be something that we report on, or from a different outlet, but we started that with the very first newsletter and have been doing it ever since.

[Madeleine King] 12:06:41
So we're very proud of that. end the day with a bit of good.

[Madeleine King] 12:06:47
And then we do have… Oh, goodness, several more.

[Madeleine King] 12:06:53
We've got an arts newsletter, we've got politics, we've got our weekly arts and culture. We run the full gambit.

[Mike Janssen] 12:07:01
Yeah. Um, yeah, those are really great looking newsletters. Um, so you do have 5 newsletters, as you mentioned, each with a different focus, and how have you decided over time which topics to focus on beyond just your daily flagship?

[Madeleine King] 12:07:14
Yeah, I mean, um, we're a small shop, like many, and can't really do everything we want to, so the biggest thing is just making sure that we have a consistent… it's a beat that we own, and we have consistent content coming from it. So some of them are. We have one bike weekly. Most of them are weekly, and that's just kind of based off of what we know we'll be able to provide in that amount of time.

[Madeleine King] 12:07:39
Um, and I… my rule of thumb is never base it off of one person's job. So, although we do have an arts and culture newsletter and an arts and culture reporter, um, that newsletter isn't fully sustained by her wonderful reporting. We also pull in content from our talk shows and from a film contributor that we have, so it's.

[Madeleine King] 12:08:00
a good mix, and that way, you know, if somebody's out, or plans change, or anything like that, we're always secured in terms of coverage.

[Mike Janssen] 12:08:08
Yeah, definitely. Um… And you have a newsletter about music, as you showed us, you also have a newsletter about gardening, um, and you mentioned to me that those have a regional appeal that goes just beyond Iowa, even. Um, how do you find and connect with an audience when you're considering it's an audience outside of your state?

[Madeleine King] 12:08:25
Yeah, um, both of those, especially when we launched them, we put a lot of concerted effort into trying to make sure that we were reaching audiences elsewhere. For the gardening one, it's tied to a legacy gardening show that we have on air and have had for about 40 years, so… Um, we end a podcast of the same name. Um, so we definitely promoted on air, but we've also done some, like, organic reaching out to Facebook gardening groups and, um, other kind of community organizers that we know might be interested, and we do… that one's tied with our university as well, specialists.

[Madeleine King] 12:09:00
It's there, so they do some good communication on our behalf. The music newsletter, we have a pretty impressive music scene here in Iowa where we get a lot of national acts, and that means we get a lot of interviews with national acts. So we've been really fortunate to find a lot of organic growth in our reporting and.

[Madeleine King] 12:09:20
We have put some paid money behind marketing for it, but not, you know, a terrible amount. I think it's really a testament to the interviews that our team is getting. Obviously, we have, like, robust sign-ups, and we do, on our website, and we also do pop-up campaigns as well, so I think all of that is tied into the growth we've seen there.

[Mike Janssen] 12:09:40
I saw a question pop up here in the chat or a request to mention the title and department of each guest, and I will recap that as we move on to each of you. But just to recap with Madeleine, for anyone who missed it, she's the newsletter product manager at Iowa Public Radio.

[Mike Janssen] 12:09:56
Could you show again that, um… uh, feedback requests at the bottom of one of the newsletters that we were looking at. I wanted to ask you about that.

[Madeleine King] 12:10:02
Yes. Yes. So we had chatted about how so for our daily newsletter, we actually just retooled a little bit. Sorry, I'm trying to speak and look for the button at the same time. We just retooled kind of how we.

[Madeleine King] 12:10:19
Just as looks, just a few aesthetic things. We didn't really change anything about the content that's in it. But whenever we do that, I want to get some feedback on whether or not I'm going the right direction. So at the end of our newsletter, we have.

[Madeleine King] 12:10:34
Just just at the very end, we have an ability to share your feedback. I like it. I don't like it. I'm unsure. And these are all tied to pre-filled Google Forms. So it's already filled out when you get there.

[Madeleine King] 12:10:48
Just by clicking that button, we do get an automatic response, which is great. If they go on to fill out the rest of it, that's great for me as additional feedback, but… A lot of what I'm doing in the newsletter space is self-taught and kind of going with my gut. So it's nice to get a vibe check in the form of these surveys, and we have done this for a while. We used to do a face pile version.

[Madeleine King] 12:11:17
which essentially was… having, like, a smiley face or, um… a frowny face and letting people decide that. So there's this is our old layout, but we just have.

[Madeleine King] 12:11:30
these versions. So if you don't like it. That'll let you know quickly.

[Mike Janssen] 12:11:36
Right? Um, and have you found ways to, you know, respond to that feedback, to build on it? Have you made changes based on what people have told you?

[Madeleine King] 12:11:44
Yeah. I mean, again, a lot of it is kind of just making sure that we're on the right track. But we are able to quickly look at how people are feeling, love that they like it. This is the results from the latest one. So we just launched this new.

[Madeleine King] 12:12:02
template about 2-3 months ago, I want to say, so we're getting a decent amount of responses. I mean, this is showing that people are scrolling to the end of the email, which is nice.

[Madeleine King] 12:12:12
Um, but mainly, I just like to make sure that people are able to read it. Um, generally, like, the layout. Obviously, they're going to be naysayers for every product that you put out, but I just like to make sure that I'm not.

[Madeleine King] 12:12:25
overwhelmingly making a wrong choice or going in a wrong direction, because those are honestly really easy to change, especially if you're seeing a pattern. So I have not take dove into this too much yet. I am planning to. It's on my list for this next month, but.

[Madeleine King] 12:12:42
Obviously, we'll make changes as we need to.

[Mike Janssen] 12:12:44
Yeah, yeah. Um, what advice would you offer someone in a station who's trying to refine or develop a newsletter strategy based on your experience?

[Madeleine King] 12:12:55
Um… start with what you have, right? Like, don't try and reinvent the wheel.

[Madeleine King] 12:13:02
Personally, I think caring about aesthetics and checking for accessibility is really important. Just make sure it looks good, but then also make sure you can read it on dark mode, and that it's mobile friendly, and all those kind of things, and just test as much as possible, and.

[Madeleine King] 12:13:18
I always get, like, a little test group at Ipr if I'm doing something different, I'll make sure to send them different emails, um, ask them to check it on different devices, and just make sure that I'm.

[Madeleine King] 12:13:28
you know, not missing anything, and send it to a variety of, like, age groups, and, you know, because everyone has kind of their own readability.

[Madeleine King] 12:13:38
And so I just like to test, basically. The second thing I would say, add a voice. We have, uh, we call them top notes at the beginning of every newsletter. I think that's pretty standard, but just making your reporters or staff members.

[Madeleine King] 12:13:52
be human is really good. It sets authority, but also just reminds them that we're just people. And it usually starts the newsletter off on a really good tack, which is nice, unless there's a really bad news day, and then I get really serious.

[Mike Janssen] 12:14:09
Yeah.

[Madeleine King] 12:14:10
And then I always suggest breaking up the holy wall of text.

[Madeleine King] 12:14:15
Everybody has so much coming to their inbox, you know, try and make sure there are graphics that it's laid out really clearly. Use bullet points, use formatting, bold things. Just make sure it's because they can just go to your website, too. But you're reaching them in their inbox. They've asked you to reach them there.

[Madeleine King] 12:14:33
and use the tools that you have at your disposal to make it stand out in a different way.

[Mike Janssen] 12:14:39
All right, that's great advice. Thank you so much. Next, we're going to talk with our guests from LAist, Brianna Lee is LAist Senior Producer for Community Engagement, and Chanelle Berlin-Johnson is their Director of Audience Engagement.

[Mike Janssen] 12:14:51
LAS offers a number of newsletters, and some of them experiment with different formats in really interesting ways that we're going to get into. First, I want to ask something actually both to the latest panelists and to Madeleine because they share something in common, which is that they have newsletters focused on politics.

[Mike Janssen] 12:15:06
that don't continuously run, they take breaks, which I thought was interesting. LAist has one called Make It Make Sense. And actually, if you guys are able to throw that one up on the screen, you can go ahead and share that now. It's a limited run newsletter that pops up after local elections to explain the results.

[Mike Janssen] 12:15:24
Um, and then it goes away for a while and comes back after the next election. And Iowa Public Radio has political sense, which runs when the state legislature is in session, but has off time as well. So I'd like to ask you both, starting with LAist, how do you handle that downtime, and what have you learned about retaining audience during those periods?

[Brianna Lee] 12:15:42
Sure, so I just started sharing a little bit of Make It Make Sense, which is our post-election newsletter. So just a little bit of a recap. We decided to launch this newsletter because we noticed there were a couple of things that we were dealing with at LAS. One was that we were really good at helping people prepare for election season, but after ballots.

[Brianna Lee] 12:16:04
after like election day was over, our audience would kind of fall off a cliff, and that didn't mean things were over, uh, we still had, like, a really long ballot counting period. It lasted, you know, 2, 3, even 4 weeks. Um, and so there was a lot of confusion during that time, so we thought a newsletter would be.

[Brianna Lee] 12:16:22
A good way to kind of, like, unpack the ballot count. So this is a little bit of what it looks like, um, just kind of going how many votes were counted, how many more there to go, what results do we know? What do we not know yet? And so, for the question of, like, how do we retain audiences, because this really is just a pop-up newsletter, it only shows up after the election. It goes for about three weeks tops, and then it goes away until the next election.

[Brianna Lee] 12:16:47
cycle. So, we've done this for about three election cycles so far. We're heading into our fourth right now. I think one thing that we have learned is we don't have to worry too much about really about the audiences going away and not coming back because they have come back. So, for example, the first time we ever.

[Brianna Lee] 12:17:04
We launched this in the primary season of 2024, and so, you know, we promised we would come back for the general election, and then we came back, and we have a sign-up on our website as people are looking for election resources, so people do come back if they fall off, you know, from… from one election to the next, because they do want to come back, they do want to research the next election.

[Brianna Lee] 12:17:24
And the sign up is right there for them again. So even as signups or, like, subscriber numbers have kind of gone up and down in between cycles, on the whole, they have generally increased.

[Brianna Lee] 12:17:40
One exception is that we had a big email list purge across the board last year, so our numbers were kind of cut down because of that, but I fully expect that they are going to bounce back in this election cycle. We have a sign-up on our website right now as we are heading into election season, and we're.

[Brianna Lee] 12:17:55
So I hear we're getting, you know, uh, lots and lots of subscribers right now.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:18:01
And I'll say, too. Yeah, I'll say, too, just to add on part of the reason we're not as worried about the drop off to is because this newsletter was really made for people who are highly engaged on this topic. So you know, and and we fulfill our promise. We say up front, once there's no more news to report about this election cycle, we'll leave you alone.

[Mike Janssen] 12:18:01
Madeleine, what do you see with that? Oh, sorry, go ahead.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:18:19
We do that. And so that's also over the last few cycles, built up some trust as well.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:18:24
where it's like, alright, you do exactly what you'll say, I get all the information that I want, you go away, and then when I'm curious about the next election cycle, here you are again. So I think both making that promise clear up top and then fulfilling it also really helps with not losing people in the middle, because they're getting what they asked for.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:18:40
And we are staying true to what we told them we would do, and that is, and it's so that highly engaged audience doesn't have a reason to leave as well.

[Mike Janssen] 12:18:49
Madeleine, what do you see?

[Madeleine King] 12:18:50
I mean, honestly, I feel like I'm doing it as serious here because ours is also politics, which is just like a very avid base. You know, they like people who are into politics want whatever they can get. So ours is about our legislative session. We only report during that time period. And then I will pop in every once in a while for election results or important election coverage.

[Madeleine King] 12:19:13
Really, we haven't seen a drop-off. Um, our open rates are slightly lower, but our list has also grown significantly since it started. It's… You know, somewhere around, like, 45% every time, which is awesome. Um, so yeah, they just, they want the content. We were also really upfront that it'll end. We give them a little warning when it will, um…

[Madeleine King] 12:19:35
And we deliver on that.

[Mike Janssen] 12:19:39
And while I have you, I wanted to ask, because I've seen this come up in the chat, excuse me, a couple of times.

[Mike Janssen] 12:19:44
People want to know what platforms you all are using, and Madeleine, it looked like you're using MailChimp, right?

[Madeleine King] 12:19:49
Correct.

[Mike Janssen] 12:19:50
And at OAS, what are you guys using?

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:19:53
We're using Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

[Mike Janssen] 12:19:55
Okay? And I'll make sure to ask that of the other folks we talk to as well, and maybe we can get into that a little more during the Q&A.

[Mike Janssen] 12:20:03
So, Brianna, you told me that you're looking at you make it make sense as a testing ground for a bigger or more expansive election product. And can you just talk a little bit about what that might be, or what that might look like?

[Brianna Lee] 12:20:17
Yeah, so, you know, um, as I mentioned, it's very active in the three-ish weeks after Election Day, right? And so it's really about, like, what are the results? What are they going to be? And then what is this going to mean for your life? And then we kind of go back… go away until the next election season.

[Brianna Lee] 12:20:34
I think what is really needed, and I've noticed that, you know, we could add a lot of value in between elections, especially since often there's two years between, is that people often forget, you know, what they voted on, you know, maybe even a few months after Election Day, because there's so many down ballot races that we cover as well.

[Brianna Lee] 12:20:54
And so we're really trying to experiment with turning this into more of a full-fledged election product, where we not just tell you what the results are, but we check in from… check in on the measures that were passed and the people that were elected to office regularly. So we are… actually, next week, we are going to be trying that out for the very first time.

[Brianna Lee] 12:21:14
We're going to do a week-long series about some of the things that we voted on in 2024. Even though we're in the 2026 election cycle and everybody's talking about 2026, it's still worth it to kind of check in on like, hey, remember these things that we passed? You know, not not even two years ago.

[Brianna Lee] 12:21:29
How are they doing? We sent out campaign surveys at the time where people gave us specific campaign goals or promises. How have they lived up to them so far? So we're just going to do that this time around. I think the idea would be that we could build this out if people respond well to it.

[Brianna Lee] 12:21:46
Then we can build it out so that it's not just, like, a ballot counting type of newsletter, but it's really one that is about everything that happens post-elections. Like, you know, what are the results? How did the results turn out? How can that prepare you for the next election going forward? So, um.

[Brianna Lee] 12:22:01
I think that'll help fill in some of the gaps that I think we've noticed over time.

[Mike Janssen] 12:22:07
All right. Well, I also wanted to ask you about building your block, which is an interesting newsletter you do that's a course, so it's like a seven-issue email series about the issue of the housing crisis in LA. Can you show us that? Do you have that ready to share?

[Brianna Lee] 12:22:14
Yeah.

[Mike Janssen] 12:22:23
If not, it's not a big deal. Okay.

[Brianna Lee] 12:22:23
Yeah, let me go. Yeah, let me throw that up here. Yeah. So this is a newsletter that was made as a 7 day newsletter course that somebody would sign up for, and then they would. I'm just going to show you the 1st.

[Brianna Lee] 12:22:40
Issue right here. So this is the first issue. It's about… the way this came about is because, you know, we report on housing all the time as the biggest issue in Southern California. It is the biggest issue in California in general, just the housing crisis.

[Brianna Lee] 12:22:55
And yet, like, learning about it comprehensively is really difficult. It's really, like, like learning about what's happening on a day-to-day basis, um, you can find lots and lots of resources on that, but every time… I mean, my experience has been that every time you learn about one aspect of the crisis.

[Brianna Lee] 12:23:15
You realize that there's a whole other aspect that you do not know about and was not explained in that one article. And a lot of this cannot really be explained in any one kind of article, or maybe not even, like, a whole series. And I can share, I can share the link to this full sign up if people are interested as well.

[Brianna Lee] 12:23:33
Um, and so the idea came about to do this as a newsletter course, because then you could sign up and get this series, like, one chunk a day, and you could build on things that you learned previously. Whereas, like, if you just.

[Brianna Lee] 12:23:49
web series for this, like, you would try to… it would be easy to kind of, like, stop and then forget that it was there, and then, you know, drop off, or, like, or not be able to absorb it at once. There's so many different aspects to the housing crisis. So we really built this around.

[Brianna Lee] 12:24:04
Common questions that we heard from people about housing development, like, from people in our audience, from community members in general, we started out with a survey saying, like, when it comes to housing development in Los Angeles, like, what are some of the big questions that you have? What do you wish you understood better? And then we built issues around those questions.

[Brianna Lee] 12:24:21
And it's a… this is like an evergreen newsletter. We only had to produce it once, and it was very bird's-eye view. It was very, like, you know, um, what are we actually… what are people actually arguing about when they're arguing about housing? Because when you get into the actual arguments that are happening on the ground, they get very in the weeds. They're about this, like, regulation and this code and, like, whatever. And it's like, it's hard to really understand, like, what's the actual.

[Brianna Lee] 12:24:45
tension here. Um, and so this really zooms out and is able to kind of talk about it from, like, from a faraway view, um, about not only, you know, how do you understand the points of tension in the housing debate, but what… where are the points in which you, as a community member, where can you actually take action? Where's your voice heard in this process? And what can you do to push for whatever housing future it is that you want?

[Mike Janssen] 12:25:10
All right. Yeah, that's a really interesting format, and I think some other stations do similar things, so I just wanted to highlight that. Thank you. Chanelle, I wanted to ask you, when we spoke before, you highlighted the importance of having a clear voice in your newsletters, and can you tell me about how LA's approach to that has evolved?

[Mike Janssen] 12:25:26
Over time with your newsletter strategy.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:25:28
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the newsletters that are in our portfolio now kind of evolved because of specific needs, like in the case of Make It Make Sense or Building Your Block, but some of them even just based on emergencies, right? So what is now, for example, our daily newsletter for the AM and PM like those started out.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:25:44
Um, one of them during COVID, just as like a, here's what we know today. And then we had to evolve it. What we saw is that, like, initially, because they kind of had similar voice, like, here's a leadership person in the organization telling you what we know, then they pivoted to just contributors from our audience engagement team.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:26:01
or reporters, and that's we saw opens and CTR kind of plateau or start to slowly decline over time. And what we found, or we started to see, too, is that people just didn't have a personality to latch onto. I think with newsletters, one commonality with something like social.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:26:16
Is people are looking for not just the authority of a brand, but to really connect to a personality, have that human touch, um, and form a relationship with that person. So for our dailies, we pivoted back. We went, okay, we need to find the right voice to lead these, um, make it make sense, and building your block are all the same voice, and they have been for the past few election cycles with Bree.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:26:35
Those are performing really strong with those highly engaged audiences. So we basically brought that approach back to our dailies, too. And when we started it, which is still pretty recent, we brought in an associate newsletter editor around November, and when he started, we were at 2.5 or 6% CTR, and we've slowly seen the dailies go back up. They're now over 3%, both of them, 3.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:26:56
1-2% is for the last 30 days that I looked at. So we're seeing people come back, form that relationship with our daily newsletter writer, Anthony Schneck, and he has a voice that's really funny, really warm, brings you into the news, and that also helps for when you want to experiment with those. It allows him to just message that to people. Hey, we're trying this. What do you like about it? You can tell me. We can sort of have a conversation.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:27:16
Um, and that builds a strong relationship, even with that daily audience that's getting all kinds of news, depending on what's happening in our community.

[Mike Janssen] 12:27:23
All right, well, thank you. Let's turn to Jenny Peek. Jenny is Wisconsin Public Radio's newsletter editor. And Jenny, your station recently revamped its daily newsletter, which was formerly hands-off.

[Mike Janssen] 12:27:35
Powered by an RSS feed, no, like, you know, human intervention. Um, and now you're curating the newsletter's content, and you write a personal note for each one, like what we've seen so far with our other examples. Why did your station decide to make that shift?

[Jenny Peek] 12:27:50
Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's been mentioned here already, but newsletters are like an owned content stream. They're not privy to algorithms and whatnot that you're seeing increasingly across social media. And I think that we kind of realized we were a little bit late to the party. You know, we have a statewide network with a ton of amazing content.

[Jenny Peek] 12:28:10
But we really wanted to work on building relationships with our community members. We are a legacy institution. Wpr has been around for 100 years, and we've got a ton of members. And so we thought that really connecting them to somebody who's creating content would be a good way to build that community.

[Jenny Peek] 12:28:28
Um, and also, you know, we've been exploring just this growing distrust in media and how.

[Jenny Peek] 12:28:36
Pivotal it can be to, like, introduce people to the people making the news, and so whether that's having our reporters on social more often, or having, like, a behind-the-scenes aspect, and this newsletter, like, it comes from Jenny Peek, so I'm showing up in our people's inboxes every morning.

[Jenny Peek] 12:28:53
My intro oftentimes stays newsy, but sometimes it's like… We're going to the county fair this weekend with my toddlers, like, what's your favorite county fair in Wisconsin? And people will email and say, like, this one's my favorite, I've been going to it for this longer. I show pigs at this one, also Midwestern Wisconsinite.

[Jenny Peek] 12:29:13
And so it's been really fun to see how many people will actually send me emails, and I always respond, and it's this kind of great relationship that we're building and working to build. And just to kind of jump back, we launched in June, so we're coming up on a year from this new model.

[Mike Janssen] 12:29:33
And before I forget, since Google wanted to know, what platform are you on?

[Jenny Peek] 12:29:36
Uh, we use MailChimp as well.

[Mike Janssen] 12:29:38
Okay, and you were using that before also, like, before the revamp?

[Jenny Peek] 12:29:43
Yeah, so we use MailChimp with the RSS feed-based one that basically just scraped our homepage and had, you know, the top 5 or 6 headlines every day, and it went out in the morning and at night. Now we just do a morning newsletter once a day, five days a week.

[Mike Janssen] 12:29:43
Okay. Right.

[Mike Janssen] 12:29:56
Gotcha. Um, so you told me that when you were redesigning the newsletter, you subscribed to a bunch of newsletters from other public media outlets and from news organizations for some inspiration. Um, what stood out to you when you did that, and how did that influence the strategy that you adopted?

[Jenny Peek] 12:30:12
Yeah, definitely. I'm just gonna pull up my newsletter here. More interesting than my face. Yeah, so I mean, I subscribe to a bunch of the daily newsletters of the people that are on this call here. You know, Iowa Public Radio, KCUR.

[Mike Janssen] 12:30:14
Yeah, please.

[Jenny Peek] 12:30:28
WBEZ, NPR, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, all of these things, and I knew going into it, so, like, you can see here, I have my little intro.

[Jenny Peek] 12:30:38
I knew going into it that we were going to have a top story that was going to highlight kind of, like, the biggest news of the day, something with a good photo. We have an incredible photojournalist at WPR, and so I knew this would be a nice place to highlight some of her work.

[Jenny Peek] 12:30:53
And this is just like easy right away. You get what's going on that day. And I also knew we were going to have this like in the news section that would have these other kind of bullet point news features that people need to know to keep abreast of what's going on in Wisconsin.

[Jenny Peek] 12:31:09
Because we are a radio station, wanted to point people to some of our best audio. So we have this short must listen section.

[Jenny Peek] 12:31:17
But then below what I'm going to call the fold in this newsletter, it was where I really had fun reading other daily newsletters to figure out how people were showcasing information in a way that was a little bit more creative. So some things that I really liked were.

[Jenny Peek] 12:31:35
I'm going to come back to only in Wisconsin, where, like, a poll quote or a way to showcase a statistic. So I built this quote-unquote section, this by-the-numbers section, and those are just ways to show like regular news stories that we have, just in a different way. And it's been fun to kind of write around that.

[Jenny Peek] 12:31:55
And then one of the things we promise in our newsletter for subscribers is that like if you read this newsletter, you're going to get the news you need to know, be informed about Wisconsin, but also about the joys and quirky things that make Wisconsin Wisconsin.

[Jenny Peek] 12:32:11
And so this only in Wisconsin section, I try to focus it on something that's like a little bit more lighthearted and really kind of gets at the culture and sense of living here. And it's another opportunity where I'll, like, pull in some media.

[Jenny Peek] 12:32:28
Jumping back to our amazing photographer, twice a week we highlight a snapshot from her. And so these are kind of a fun way for her to be out in the community and showing some of her future photography. But yeah, I mean, I think.

[Jenny Peek] 12:32:42
We also highlight a podcast that is kind of new to us, um, every Friday.

[Jenny Peek] 12:32:49
But I just really loved, like, looking primarily at the really creative ways that different stations are highlighting different news.

[Mike Janssen] 12:32:57
Yeah, it looks really great. Um… Also, among the goals you set for the revamped newsletter was to grow your audience from 9,000 to 15,000 subscribers, and you've almost made it there, which is amazing. What tactics have been most successful in achieving that growth?

[Jenny Peek] 12:33:14
Yeah, so we're only, like, 71 people away from 15,000, so if y'all want to subscribe, that would be really great. Um, no, but, you know, we… One of the things that we found by far and away the most successful was, like, direct email asks. So when we relaunched the newsletter in June, we sent an email to everyone who'd been getting the daily RSS feed and said, like, something new is coming.

[Jenny Peek] 12:33:42
And we definitely saw a drop off, which isn't unheard of, you know, it was different than what people had gotten. And so as we were trying to build back, we sent emails out to every WPR member. So like our station's full email list, it's about.

[Jenny Peek] 12:33:59
you know, 100,000 people and asked, like, this is what you could get, here's a fun perk, and um… Anytime we sent out a direct email, we would see a bump of, like.

[Jenny Peek] 12:34:12
a thousand subscribers or more. So that was for sure the easiest. I think anytime that there's a lower barrier to entry, so all they had to do was, like, click a link, and they could be subscribed. If you have, like, a lot of steps, I think you see more people drop off. So if you say, like, go to Wpr.org slash newsletters.

[Jenny Peek] 12:34:30
They have to go to that URL, then they have to put their name in, then they have to press subscribe. You kind of see a drop off.

[Jenny Peek] 12:34:36
The other thing that we found really useful was having a pop-up on our home page. So this doesn't happen all the time, but when we're in… when we're not in a member drive or something like that, we'll have on the home page, if you go to Wpr.org, a pop-up will.

[Jenny Peek] 12:34:51
come up that has a space to put in your email address right there that says like, you know, the news you need, subscribe to our daily newsletter kind of a thing. And that was also very helpful.

[Mike Janssen] 12:35:04
And Wisconsin Public Radio has also raised about $14,000, you told me, from the newsletter since relaunching it, uh, since the relaunch through the end of 2025. And what was effective in soliciting gifts through the newsletter? How well did that work?

[Jenny Peek] 12:35:18
Yeah, totally. Um, and that number was actually, like, from when we relaunched in June to December, so I don't even have, like, updated data, but it kind of went above and beyond what we were expecting, and so I'm going to go back to what I was sharing.

[Mike Janssen] 12:35:25
Right.

[Jenny Peek] 12:35:33
This newsletter is just from this morning, and we are doing kind of a digital only Earth Day drive right now. That was a three-day drive. And so I'll kind of just walk through the various places that we kind of do a call out for giving.

[Jenny Peek] 12:35:49
Um, and just to be clear, all of our newsletters are free, all of our content is free, we don't do any, like, paid subscriptions at this point. Um… And so when we're in drives, I have this banner ad at the very top, and so there's a space where, like, right when you open the email, our graphics department will design these for me, and it's kind of like right in your face.

[Jenny Peek] 12:36:13
And as you scroll down. every single newsletter.

[Jenny Peek] 12:36:18
far kind of halfway through has… you'll see it's the same ad. Um, has another space for, like, a call to action ad. And then at the very bottom.

[Jenny Peek] 12:36:29
Which is kind of buried. We have a tile ad and this donate button. So the tile ad, the donate button, and the call to action in the middle are in every single issue.

[Jenny Peek] 12:36:39
And they do fine, you know, we'll get a click here and there, a donation here and there, but what we've noticed is that if you'll see right here in my intro for today is, like, it's this call from me saying there's time to join this. If you join, you're helping us get here.

[Jenny Peek] 12:36:57
Um, for this particular ask, we did the first 40 newsletter subscribers got a special, like, sticker pack, and so that was kind of a fun incentive. That was newsletter-based only, and it's the first time we've done that, so we're not quite sure how successful it was yet.

[Jenny Peek] 12:37:12
But just like a little bit of a more of an incentive, specifically in the newsletter. But so of those donations that we got that were the 14,000, you know, half of them came from people giving directly at this link.

[Jenny Peek] 12:37:29
That is in the intro. So when I am personally saying, hey, support this work, or please become part of our community and support the work that is so important to us and important to you. And, um, what we do to make sure that we're doing… that we… that we're able to track that is.

[Jenny Peek] 12:37:46
all of these calls to action or donation buttons have a unique Google tracking link so that we can say the intro was by far the one that led to the most GIFs versus the donate button versus the tile ad.

[Mike Janssen] 12:38:01
All right, well, uh, congratulations on that success, and thank you for your tips there. Last but not least, we're going to hear from Autumn Widdoes. She's the marketing manager for Vegas PBS.

[Mike Janssen] 12:38:12
Um, and Autumn told me about how she had become an avid reader of newsletters on Substack, which really is more than just a newsletter delivery platform like MailChimp, but it has elements of social media facilitates discovering, uh, other newsletters that you may not know about.

[Mike Janssen] 12:38:30
So Autumn, you started a personal substack, and then you decided to use substack to promote Vegas all in, which was a digital first video series from Vegas PBS. Could you… let's start by, can you show me Substack? Um, kind of like the.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:38:44
Sure. Can… Yes. All right.

[Mike Janssen] 12:38:46
What you would see is that, from the back end, we…

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:38:54
So, you should be able to see this. This is — let me go to the dashboard. So this is the way the page looks, um, if you're, like, in an… in… you can have it on your app, so it's also on a website. It's like a… Very interesting platform. You can have an app, you can have it, um, on your phone, you can just…

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:39:14
deal with it in your emails. Some people are not even on the platform, but they receive… they receive newsletters, so they're not… they're not actively on there, but they're receiving newsletters, so you can use it to actually get people who are not on.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:39:30
Substack to subscribe, so they don't have to be at all. So that's… sometimes people ask that, do I have to be subscribed? Just like the way Facebook or Instagram? It's not a closed system like the other social media platforms are. Um, and this is the way it looks like if you're looking at it from your website and you're.

[Mike Janssen] 12:39:40
Right.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:39:48
Um, this is not the behind the scenes, this is the way somebody would see it, and they could interact with it. And then it'll show up also if you're in they have this thing called notes, which is their social side, and you can promote.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:40:01
Your newsletter on there, but… but really what works over there in driving people to your… to your newsletter is not the promotion of the newsletter itself. It's weird, the algorithm over there doesn't favor the promotion of the newsletter. It favors more, like, snippets from the newsletter that are more like talking.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:40:16
Talking points, getting people to talk around, and then they might go, let me see, and click on, so it works that way.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:40:24
And people who are on that on Substack kind of bemoan this because most of us are making most of most people are over there are creating newsletters, right? And they wonder why the algorithm favors us. I don't have the answer to that. Sorry. And then behind the scenes.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:40:42
This is… this is the way ours looks. We don't have hundreds of subscribers, mainly because this was an experiment around a particular content vehicle, and I do have some things I know you're going to ask me about, like, what.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:40:55
What we could do differently. But this is the way it looks like behind. So you… when you put out a… when you put out a post, you can actually look at the post itself and see how many people you had 28% recipients, how many people, what pe who actually looked at.

[Mike Janssen] 12:40:59
Okay.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:41:14
who actually looked at this? How many times they looked at it. And this is really helpful, too, because you understand who is engaging the most with.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:41:23
With that particular, um, post, or that particular newsletter. And then this is the amount of time that people watch the video. So not all the posts are videos, but these particular ones that we put out in 2025, the second year of.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:41:39
The show we used Substack changed and continues to add things. So they added this ability to do posts that were not specifically essay driven, were driven, but also video driven, so video content.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:41:54
But when we first launched it in 2024, it was primarily not they didn't have they didn't have the ability to embed and actually.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:42:03
create the post around the video. They also have other things like live. So you can actually do live live interviews on that and it drives a lot of engagement. That seems to be right now the thing that's most rewarded on notes and on that platform.

[Mike Janssen] 12:42:16
Yeah.

[Mike Janssen] 12:42:21
So why do you think stations should consider Substack as a platform for doing this rather than just MailChimp or the typical email newsletter that goes into your inbox?

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:42:32
So it's really interesting. I think what, um… I do… I don't… I don't know if they should get away from actually having an, like, a MailChimp newsletter. I think that's really important, but this is a different thing. It's actually something that can be, um, done separately. Um, it is.

[Mike Janssen] 12:42:43
Mm-hmm.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:42:51
more like… a combination between social and a newsletter, and so it is driven in some ways, um, by the algorithm, if you want to compete on… compete on Substack. So they have leaderboards over there, and the leaderboards, the more.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:43:08
the more engagement you get, the more your, um, you're rewarded. So there is the kind of gamification on Substack. It wasn't like this when I first started. It was, in some ways, because it's a brand new platform, they're going along the… those who run stuffstack are going along and tweaking it as people are joining.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:43:27
It is… one of the… one of the reasons why I've been pushing it is because there weren't a… there wasn't a lot of competition on there, but there was a lot of engagement.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:43:35
So that's really important, because by the time you get into a platform that's already pretty much saturated, it's really hard to get an audience.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:43:46
like, an audience that really cares about what you… it really is hard, because their eyeballs are… they're looking everywhere, and it's the engagement game, right? Like, it's like the attention economy really just kicks in. And I think.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:43:58
for PBS and NPR stations, we're not just putting work out that's just, like, clickbait, right? We actually putting substantial work out into the world that requires people to actually think deeper about subject matter.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:44:13
And so, to try to play the attention economy is actually goes against what we do, right? But that's why I like Substack, because I noticed when I was doing my own work, like, research on there, I'd been on there since 2022 writing, but hadn't.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:44:29
I'd actually been reading things on there prior to that, like 2020, that it seemed much more in-depth, much more about education, educational topics, much more about intellectual conversations than any other platform that I had been on.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:44:43
Recently, like, it just was not the attention economy. It was the opposite. It was that people were really hungry for conversations around ideas, and I thought, well, this is what PBS and NPR do. We do this. We actually do engage deep deeply in subject matter.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:44:58
And we do want communities to feel connected, so I felt like this might be the platform that aligns most best with our missions.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:45:11
So that's why I thought that would… it would be a good one. So, but there is… there are challenges, because now it's become quite… it's… there's a lot of people who have jumped on. They were originally Substack, people were kind of put off by it.

[Mike Janssen] 12:45:12
Yeah.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:45:23
They don't want to build another thing on another platform. They also didn't like certain things that Substack had taken pretty much a hard line on not censoring people on there, and there was a lot of, like, like, uh, hesitancy to jump, like, to be on a platform that.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:45:41
basically had a laissez-faire approach to that, um, and I can understand that. But now there's a lot… there are a lot more people and a lot more organizations on there. So it is in some ways much more difficult, but at the same time, I still feel that people are.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:45:58
very hungry over there for connection, for learning things, and for discovering. And actually, like, connecting, as Chanelle had said, connecting to people, not just to organizations. So one of the things I think we could do better for the Vegas all in one is to actually think twice about doing it around content.

[Mike Janssen] 12:46:02
Mm-hmm.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:46:20
But around subject matter and around the people and voices, like cultivating writers, cultivating, um, the… not just the clips from a show that we… content we've created, but who's behind it? Who is actually, like, what they've done, why they're thinking about… so, like, behind-the-scenes things, or talking more in depth about what went into the creation of.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:46:47
this, or even deciding to niche around, um… something happening in your town, or something happening in your city that is very interesting in which you, your organization, can really, really stick with and build out, and make it its own thing.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:47:07
I don't one of one thing that I've discussed over here is whether or not we should put.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:47:13
at around our… our brand, the Vegas PBS. And I don't know if that would work, and I think you're probably going to ask me the third question, so it'll… We can talk about why why I wouldn't, why I wouldn't suggest that.

[Mike Janssen] 12:47:23
Well, actually, I think…

[Mike Janssen] 12:47:27
Great. Well, I actually think we should go to some questions from the audience now, because there are so many, and I've just, like, it seems like people want to know so much, I wish we almost had double the time to talk with everyone. But let's, uh, take some time now. Amber, if you want to jump in and throw out some questions, uh, it looks like people have a lot that they would like to know about.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:47:29
And we wanted. Okay.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:47:46
Yeah, yeah, great questions in the chat. A lot of engagement. Thank you, everyone, for for sharing. There was a lot of questions initially around will these examples be available after the webinar? If you all have links to share or things like that.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:48:02
Um, would you be, you know, up for sharing those? We can even put in the… I know there's examples in the chat, too, so we could share that out as a document afterwards for everyone with the recording.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:48:12
So everyone is excited to see it and experience it themselves. Just to answer that, there are some questions around autumn, you talked about Substack, but what about the other platforms? Are there pros and cons that you all have found, um, with the various platforms you're using?

[Amber Samdahl] 12:48:26
And how much time are you spending? A lot of questions about the amount of time it takes to put together these newsletters.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:48:37
Maybe you want to… Madeleine, do you want to start?

[Madeleine King] 12:48:40
Yeah, I can tag in. It really depends on the day. I was wondering about Jenny's as well, like with the different sections that she has, if she's including each one of those every day or if it kind of changes depending, I'm guessing it's the latter. But it can take anywhere from one hour if I'm being really focused to several, depending on kind of the news that's coming in.

[Madeleine King] 12:49:03
I did shoot myself in the foot a little bit in terms of the good news section, um, because I am determined to include that every day, but goodness gracious, if they're not days where I can't find anything. So, um, that… sometimes it's just kind of a sourcing the outside material that takes us the longest, but we've really streamlined that process, especially turning in all of our reporters on air spots into a live blog.

[Madeleine King] 12:49:27
Um, that helps streamline our process for the daily quite a bit.

[Jenny Peek] 12:49:34
Just to jump in, and I saw this question in the chat too. Yeah, so basically every newsletter has the intro, top story, the news blurbs, and the must listen section. And then everything below the podcast is once our politics podcast goes in once a week.

[Jenny Peek] 12:49:50
The photo goes in twice a week. And as for the like quote or by the numbers and the only in Wisconsin section.

[Jenny Peek] 12:49:56
I always try to have at least one of those in every issue.

[Jenny Peek] 12:50:01
Sometimes two, rarely all 3, just with based on the amount of content we have, and sometimes you really feel like you're trying to squeeze something to fit into that model, or into that content type, which isn't always… doesn't always do it a service, so I would say that the time input is similar to what Madeleine suggested. It's, like, about an hour if I'm really cruising, can be more, depending on, um, what's in each issue. Also, it's just.

[Jenny Peek] 12:50:30
a lot of times the work happens toward the end of the day, because that's when our stories are coming in, so it's a mad dash at, like, 4 p.m. And sometimes I'm up at 6 making sure that little things have to be changed if stuff happens overnight.

[Brianna Lee] 12:50:48
I'll say for hours, I mean, ours are a really different kind of format in their pop-up. So for the election newsletters, we start writing as soon as the ballot count drops at like 5 p.m. And then we're kind of writing and like figuring out the format as we go.

[Brianna Lee] 12:51:05
So I would say typically, that's about maybe like two and a half hours of work. And we have, we've traditionally had two writers and one editor kind of all doing it, and we'll like break up sections and we'll assign sections out. And so maybe in about two and a half hours, we'll kind of be done for the day. And then in the morning, because stuff could change overnight, we'll check in again and like put any last minute changes before we send it out. So that's not a typical.

[Brianna Lee] 12:51:28
Make it make sense send. For building your block, we really… it took me a couple of months to put it together, because there were so… it was so much to synthesize. Um, it was… it was quite a lot of work, but I only had to do it once. After I did that one time, I… kind of let it go, and then the newsletter, people could subscribe and get it whenever they wanted. I've updated it once, um, and that one update didn't really take very long, I had to update a couple of numbers, and I had to, like, maybe one of the issues, there was a major legislative change, but all, you know, it's not, uh, the main dynamics in housing don't change very much year to year. So the main.

[Brianna Lee] 12:52:04
Uh, themes were pretty much the same.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:52:07
I think with building your block in particular, you know, the other thing that allowed for when we did sort of that refresh, Bri added the updates in there, what probably took more time was thinking about how do we sort of re-promote this thing that's been around for a while to people. So we came up with ways to amplify it again. And that was where the bulk of our time went.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:52:24
with, um, getting back into that newsletter course, because a lot of it, the content itself didn't have to change.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:52:34
And are there specific pros and cons to the platforms? I think a lot of people are curious to, you know, what platform they're on and what you're on and what the benefits are if people are thinking about shifting. Are there specific benefits or strengths and weaknesses of the platforms you're using that you think would be good for others to?

[Amber Samdahl] 12:52:51
Learn from you.

[Madeleine King] 12:52:57
MailChimp's super easy. It's very drag and drop. It's intuitive and user friendly. I have gripes that I could go on for hours about the analytics that they keep on changing, where they are and what they mean and how they pull them.

[Madeleine King] 12:53:14
overall. So I do a lot of our annual analytics manually, but overall it's really easy platform to to use and get started on.

[Jenny Peek] 12:53:22
One thing we like about MailChimp, and granted, that's all I've used, so we didn't transfer, but they have some really great web.

[Jenny Peek] 12:53:32
tie in. So the pop-ups that I was talking about, we use MailChimp's pop-up builder, and that allows people to enter their email address right on the pop-up, and that's been really helpful. Their Gravity forms are really nice, and it works well with wordpress, which is the CMS that Wpr.org uses. So that's why we've kind of stuck with Mailchimp so far.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:53:54
Great. Another question, well, a series of questions around metrics. Some people are asking if you could share your general average open rates, click-through rates.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:54:07
Um, you know, what are… what are your goals when you're going into, you know, newsletters? What kind of metrics are you looking for, and how is that going for all of you?

[Amber Samdahl] 12:54:19
Anyone want to jump in? Otherwise I can go in reverse order. Autumn. Do you want to talk about that?

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:54:26
Oh, um, so that was. So we've put this on pause, so I don't know if that's I can really answer this. So yeah. So we're not really focused on that right now. We're trying to go back to the drawing board about.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:54:41
Whether… how to relaunch. Our presence on Substack and in a way that is not around one particular content piece, so that, like, this was around a show.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:54:54
And it's around a show that always, for now, has only two years worth of episodes, right? Five.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:55:01
5 each per year, so that's not a lot of content to drive on for a weekly newsletter. So that was one thing I was going to say, is thinking about that, thinking about what your topic is going to be, and how you can sustain. You don't have to write weekly on Substack either to actually have a lot of engagement.

[Autumn Widdoes] 12:55:17
You can do it maybe twice a month. So yeah, yeah.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:55:27
Any others? How are you thinking about metrics?

[Jenny Peek] 12:55:31
And like Madeleine said, like MailChimp keeps changing what their stuff is. So when we first launched, our open rate was like solidly around 50%, but that didn't necessarily take into all of the like bot filtering that MailChimp now does.

[Jenny Peek] 12:55:47
So, it looks like our open rate is much worse at like 26%. But one thing that has maintained really good is our clicks per unique open, which I look at more than just straight up click rate. And one of our goals when we relaunched was to maintain that.

[Jenny Peek] 12:56:05
Click to click to open rate because now our newsletter gives users more information before it was just a headline and a photo. And so you really had to click on it to get any news out of it. But now, if you read the blurbs, you don't necessarily need to click on a link.

[Jenny Peek] 12:56:23
And we have been able to maintain it, and it's almost increased a little. So before it was like 16%, and now it's like 23%. And so that click to unique open has been really encouraging. I don't know why people are still clicking, but they are, so that's exciting.

[Jenny Peek] 12:56:40
Um, but I think what we did is when we decided we were going to relaunch, we picked three goals and we were part of the pointer Challenge grant or we had a pointer challenge grant, which was a really great opportunity. And they kind of helped us do these.

[Jenny Peek] 12:56:54
Goal setting. So our goals were to increase subscribers to 15,000, to maintain our click-to-open rate, and then we had a revenue goal, which I don't remember what it was, because I think it was, like, absurdly optimistic. But kind of setting little goals like that, I think, can be really helpful, where.

[Jenny Peek] 12:57:13
you know, at 6 months at a time, you're kind of looking like, well, we want to do this, and then you can focus your efforts on, okay, well, if we want to build subscribers, what can we do to do that? If we want to increase our open rate, what can we do to do that? Play with subject line? Should we play with, like.

[Jenny Peek] 12:57:29
The grabby sentence that's at the very top, or the preview text, and things like that.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:57:35
Got it. And Laura had a clarifying question in the chat. So by adding blurbs, clicks increased. Did I hear that correctly? She was asking.

[Jenny Peek] 12:57:44
I guess. I mean, it's hard to say. I haven't, like, pulled the audience or anything like that, but I think we I expected to see the click to open rate decline just because people were getting more information just by reading the newsletter on its own. And that didn't happen, so… Maybe it's the personalization of it, maybe it's that we have a more engaged user and people that kind of skimmed and deleted have unsubscribed, and so I, you know, I wish I could have better… a better answer as to as to what's driving that.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:58:18
Mm-hmm. There are some questions around looking at the audiences. How are you cleaning up segmenting your audiences? Are you only sending newsletters out to people who've opened or signed up for your emails within the last six months, the last 12 months?

[Amber Samdahl] 12:58:34
Are you regularly looking at that list?

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:58:38
Brianna mentioned this for LAist, but we did a big purge towards the end of last year. So we had done some amount of list cleaning over time, but it had been really long since we had really, like.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:58:49
Who's inactive based on what time period. We looked at a couple different intervals. We looked at 3 months, 6 months, a year. And then what we ended up landing on was people who had not opened or clicked on newsletters for 6 months or more. We would purge all of them to basically get back to, here are the active people and really operate based on what they were clicking on, what they seemed to want.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:59:10
And that really helped. And that's the cadence that we're going to do from now on is every six months, get rid of the people who have gone completely inactive. We also did like a warning campaign too, just in case, you know, because some people, they kind of ebb and flow with how often they're clicking on a newsletter. So for a couple of months.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:59:26
We sent out warnings like, hey, we are going, you haven't clicked in a while. If you haven't opened this one and you want to stay, please click, and then you'll stay on this list. If not, we'll quit bothering you. And that way we're always just talking to the people who really want to be there and are engaging with our newsletters and then making decisions based on their behavior, and not.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 12:59:45
constantly trying to re-engage people who might just be completely tuned out, not even looking at their inboxes anymore, whatever the case may be.

[Amber Samdahl] 12:59:52
That's super smart. Well, we are about at the top of the hour. I'm just gonna, if everyone's okay to stay on for another like five minutes here, just to get through a few more questions, because we have so many good ones.

[Amber Samdahl] 13:00:04
Um, we'll just go a little over here to try to get some of these addressed. There's questions around your own inspiration. Are there places? I know a lot of you shared when you were starting and researching. Are there other inspirations that you suggest to our audience today that you think they should check out? Besides, of course, having everyone subscribe to all of yours?

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:00:32
I can say for Elias, it comes from a couple different places. So we look at newsletters and stuff that we really like, what's engaging us about them, and just sort of send that back and forth to each other, see what we can learn. But then also, like, a huge part of it in terms of when we decide to test a new newsletter product, just comes from the audience. What are they asking us for? A lot?

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:00:49
Especially if they're already subscribed to a list. One, for example, one thing that we're still working on is the best way to serve Orange County, because we get a lot of people who are like, hey, I love LA's coverage.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:00:59
If possible, I would really love to see more coverage for Orange County more regularly. And so that's what we're sort of thinking about right now is what is the right product to spin up for those people? How can we engage that audience? Do we have enough content to serve them consistently the way that they want to? And if not.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:01:14
What do we have to change that's happening in the newsroom to make that possible?

[Madeleine King] 13:01:21
I signed up for like so many newsletters. It's disgusting, but I try and make sure it's not just public media because there's obviously a lot bigger outfits that have a lot more resources than us that we can still emulate, even with, you know, limited staff and time. So I try and make sure to sign up for bigger outlets and.

[Madeleine King] 13:01:40
Keep it outside the public media sphere sometimes too.

[Amber Samdahl] 13:01:46
Great. There is a question about AI. To what degree, if any, are any of the panelists using AI to scrape newsletter content or using it in your workflows?

[Amber Samdahl] 13:02:02
I see a zero. I see some head shakes.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:02:04
Yeah, we're not using it at all yet. We've started to explore what could be possible there, but we're not using anything regularly. We haven't committed to AI for

[Amber Samdahl] 13:02:16
Okay. Good to know. Do you have any tips or advice for getting newsroom staff on board, particularly with shorter pieces of writing for newsletters or breaking up big blocks of text? Some of the notes around how to format newsletters.

[Amber Samdahl] 13:02:32
How do you kind of bring those two worlds together?

[Jenny Peek] 13:02:39
you know, I think at this point like I am primarily writing everything in our newsletter, but that comes from or I'm like synthesizing paraphrasing all the things that are in our newsletter coming from the work that our reporters are doing, and.

[Jenny Peek] 13:02:55
if it's a really complicated topic, or sometimes that top blurb, if it's a feature that doesn't have an easy lead to jump in there, maybe it's more feature-based. I'll just work with the reporter in Slack, and we'll go kind of back and forth and say, this is what I wrote up.

[Jenny Peek] 13:03:11
Is this getting out what your story is about, or would you rather have it say something different? Sometimes I will go to their radio scripts and pull that, because it's quick and snappy, and that's another really easy way to get at, like, the nut.

[Jenny Peek] 13:03:25
of a story. But yeah, at this point, like, the reporters aren't the ones that are writing stuff for the newsletter.

[Amber Samdahl] 13:03:35
Yeah, there's a lot of. comments around being a small team or a team of one. So do any of you have advice for these public media stations out there who have smaller teams?

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:03:36
Right.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:03:45
a missed opportunity. I didn't know he was coming.

[Amber Samdahl] 13:03:48
tackling this work.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:03:50
I've kind of speaking kind of to the the last question and this one like working with reporters, too. It's sort of seeing what is in their story that is unique about that they can bring something unique to the newsletter. So sometimes what we've done is you've written a story. Tell me about how you got that story. And then, you know, it sounds interesting and be like, Hey, do you want to just write me.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:04:10
like 200 words that you can do sort of a takeover in our newsletter, where it's, like, from your voice talking about your future. That's really helpful. So when we either don't have the bandwidth to write the entire newsletter, or just want to give people a little bit of variety, just to make it a little interesting, try out a different voice and see how that performs.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:04:27
And then also, I would say something that we have learned, and part of why we were willing to try something like make it make sense or building your block is to not always think about, oh, we have to build a product that is going to serve everybody daily. What is it that the audience actually needs? And I think.

[Chanelle Berlin Johnson] 13:04:42
making a consistent promise is more than trying to fulfill just like, oh, it has to be something that you send out every day. I think that consistency and what you can do is most important so people know what to expect from you.

[Brianna Lee] 13:04:53
Yeah, and just starting out with proving out small experiments, I think has been really helpful because in the beginning, it was not reporters who were writing make it make sense. It was like me and I had another colleague, some former colleagues who were doing that as like a small team outside of the reporting the reporters group.

[Autumn Widdoes] 13:04:54
3.

[Brianna Lee] 13:05:12
And then I think once it turned out to be pretty successful, and, like, people really responded to it, then it was easier to get reporters on board the next time around, especially if we had, like, staff turnover and we really needed somebody to help write with, um, write the newsletter.

[Brianna Lee] 13:05:27
But showing the numbers like, hey, we got, you know, 4,000 subscribers just by doing something for three weeks, like, you know, um, let's try it again and like, and then once they had the experience of actually writing it and they knew it was only going to be time-bound, they found out it was really fun. And I think, like, because you can inject so much more of your personality than you can in, like, a straight news story, for example.

[Madeleine King] 13:05:49
I would say like for the smaller stations that might not have as consistent of content, trying to figure out, obviously like to what sort of cadence you can promise, but also decide on like one or two components that you can promise every single time you send it, and then, like.

[Madeleine King] 13:06:05
3 to 5 that are gravy on top, the way that Jenny's adding in photos, or a quote or something like that, a lot of our newsletters utilize that. We use, um, Airtable to organize what content we're gonna put in. I love Airtable. But that kind of helps us have, you know, a template of… we have all these different options, and you can look at what you can fill in this day versus this day, and.

[Madeleine King] 13:06:27
Um, that really helps us kind of keep everything organized, but have your core content, and then add sprinkles on top when you can.

[Jenny Peek] 13:06:37
And then definitely making sure that other people know how to build your product. So, you know, I'm the only newsletter editor at WPR. It's my primary focus, but I need to not work sometimes. And so our digital team, we've got.

[Jenny Peek] 13:06:54
like a bench of four people who can all write the newsletter, and then it comes from them on those days, and I think that's also kind of fun and exciting for our subscribers to get to know Liz, or get to know Alyssa, or Nate, you know? So…

[Amber Samdahl] 13:07:13
Good note. All right. Autumn, anything you want to add on that note of of working with the small team?

[Autumn Widdoes] 13:07:20
Oh, so I… like most people who are on small teams, um, I'm sure all of you who are, you have more than one role, and you're not just, like, editing one newsletter, or editing only newsletters, and that's… I'm… I actually don't do the newsletters over here.

[Autumn Widdoes] 13:07:39
social media, and I was the lead of the of events as well, and so this was a project that I thought would be interesting in a test. Um, so I understand that, and I understand being pulled in so many directions and what can happen. And I think I agree with Chanelle, um, again, about.

[Autumn Widdoes] 13:07:58
being, um, in some ways gentle on yourself in terms of, like, the expectations, like, if you were a one-person team, you're not going to be able… and you have, like, other things you're doing, like running events, and also all the social media. You're not going to be able to produce quality work.

[Autumn Widdoes] 13:08:14
Um, daily. You're just… it's just not fair to put that on you, or… or, um, because burnout is real. And, um.

[Autumn Widdoes] 13:08:22
And I think maybe once a month is good. If you can put out quality work once a month on something, and yes, I know people are like, attention economy, attention, but if you're doing really quality work.

[Autumn Widdoes] 13:08:32
people who will find it if you promote… if you spend more time on promoting it, rather than churning out and churning out and churning out. And I know with AI, it's going to be more and more, like, we're racing against AI as human beings, and it's not going to be easy.

[Autumn Widdoes] 13:08:48
To do just the churn, so quality work will actually rise. I do believe that it will rise, um, in a sea of, like, AI slop. So just thinking about that and not thinking about… not trying to put too much on your plate.

[Amber Samdahl] 13:09:04
It's a great note. Great note to end on. Quality will rise. Well, big thank you to all the panelists. This has been fantastic conversation. There's a lot of great comments in the chat. We will share a recording transcript as well as the chat log as well. And then we'll get together a list of of all the examples that have been shared so people can check those out.

[Amber Samdahl] 13:09:26
But a big thank you, and I'll turn it over to Mike if you want to wrap us up.

[Mike Janssen] 13:09:31
Yeah, thank you, everyone. This has really, really been great. Good to see so much interest, and I wish we could go even, you know, have more time, or even do another one. But, um, thanks for joining us, and I just wanted to say, uh, you can sign up for Current's newsletter at current.org and get the latest in public media news, and also we announce these webinars that we host on a quarterly basis in.

[Mike Janssen] 13:09:50
In collaboration with public media innovators in the newsletter, so if you're on our list, you will be sure to be aware of those. So thank you.

[Amber Samdahl] 13:09:58
Okay. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.

[Madeleine King] 13:10:00
Thanks