Casey Newton’s Four Rules for Building a Great Newsletter
This article was originally published on Not a Newsletter: A Monthly Guide to Sending Better Emails.
Casey Newton’s newsletter was born from a simple question: Was there a better way to report on the impact of social networks on modern life?
Newton, The Verge’s Silicon Valley editor, had been reporting for the site since 2013, covering platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But after the 2016 election, he started to rethink his beat.
“I felt like I had clearly been missing a big part of the story, maybe even most of the story, which was that the social networks have these huge unintended consequences,” he told me.
So Newton spent a few months trying to figure out how to approach his beat in the post-election era. How could a reporter best cover the intersection between social networks and democracy? Where could a reporter like him carve out space to report and discuss the issues on his mind? And that’s when he realized: There might be an opportunity for a newsletter.
“I’m spending two or three hours a day reading anyway,” he said. “What if I just sent out a list of links to people who also follow this space, maybe adding a little bit of my own commentary? Maybe that would be a useful thing.”
He pitched it to his bosses, and they gave him the green light. In October 2017, The Interface was born, and quickly found an audience. Every day, Newton writes a short column about the news — but more specifically, about the space where social networks and democracy meet — and then shares a roundup of a dozen or so links. The Interface isn’t just a briefing, though. It’s a destination product that delivers original reporting on the tech industry. If you care about the role that Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey have on our society, it’s a daily must-read.
But here’s the crucial thing: Newton produces this as a newsletter, not a daily column. It’s email that makes it such a powerful way to deliver this work to his readers.
“I think one reason why newsletters are having a resurgence is because people are tired of endless feeds,” Newton said. “There’s something really calming and comforting about a media product that has a finite ending. If you can find someone you trust to say, ‘These are the only things that matter today,’ that has a lot of utility. And I think utility tends to be undervalued in the media, generally. We want to make products that have big impact, but we don’t always think about making things that are just useful, and I think a good newsletter is really useful.”
Revue’s been a part of the The Interface from day one. Newton needed a product that made it easy for him to save tons of links, and then add those stories to his newsletter. “Once you’re ready to build your newsletter, you can just drag and drop them into place,” he said. “And there was something about that workflow that just felt so fast to me.” To Newton, Revue was clearly built for editors like him, not marketers, which made it the best choice for his ESP. “Half of the newsletter is just figuring out what to put in it,” he said, “and nothing else has made it as easy as Revue.”
Even with Revue helping streamline the process, The Interface still takes most of the day to produce. Luckily, Newton’s got help from Zoe Schiffer, another reporter at The Verge. (Schiffer’s an excellent reporter, too. She broke the big story on the workplace culture at Away in December.) Newton and Schiffer tackle the links section together, most of which are links to other websites, and then Newton works on the column portion of the newsletter. They send it every day at 5 p.m. Pacific time — timed so it’s the last thing San Francisco-based tech employees see before they head home for the day. That timing also helps build habit — readers know when to look for it each evening. (One of Newton’s sources confessed that at their tech company, the first person to get the newsletter will shout out across the row of desks, “It’s out!” to announce when The Interface is in their inboxes.)
The newsletter doesn’t have nearly the audience that his online columns do, and it doesn’t always drive significant traffic back to The Verge, but Newton doesn’t mind. For him, the thinking is clear: If he builds a loyal audience for his newsletter, he can create a business around it.
“My hope is that if we circle back in five years, The Interface will have a thriving events business around it. It might have a podcast around it. Who knows, maybe there will be a paid subscription version of it,” he said. “And that can help a media company grow and find new and sustainable sources of revenue. To me, that’s just so much more interesting than, ‘Let’s build the biggest list we can and use it to drive a set of clicks to a website.’”
Casey Newton’s Four Rules for Building a Great Newsletter
1.) Find an undercovered niche — Here’s Newton’s recommendation: Find a subject, and then add a twist to it. “Autonomous cars is probably not niche-y enough to do a newsletter around,” he said, “but autonomous vehicles in Arizona would be a killer newsletter, because that’s where all the autonomous vehicles are testing.” With that focus, you can build a loyal following, and then grow from there.
2.) Focus on cadence + framing — “It turns out that almost everyone wants to do the same newsletter, which is, ‘Here’s five fun links I saw this week.’ And it’s just not useful, right? None of us are hard up for links. We all have enough links.” So find that unique frame — your subject plus the twist — and then decide how frequently to send the newsletter. Newton’s advice: You probably won’t want to send a newsletter more than once a week, but you should definitely send it at least once a week.
3.) Build a platform to help you build sources — Some of Newton’s biggest stories, like his piece on the secret lives of Facebook moderators, have come via tips from readers of The Interface. Newton said that the newsletter gives him a way for sources from networks like Instagram and YouTube to discover him, get to know him, and eventually establish the relationships needed to feed him scoops and story ideas. But something Newton’s learned: He doesn’t typically ask new sources for tips upfront. “If you want to develop relationships, it’s typically more useful to ask them about something really innocuous just so you start to develop a relationship and build some trust with people,” he said.
4.) Reply to every reader — “I really do feel like I’m making a thing just for the people who subscribe,” Newton said. And part of that means that when readers write back to him, he needs to continue the conversation. He gets 15 or 20 emails a day, he said, and he replies to just about every one. He encourages others to lean into that conversation — especially since it’s often a discussion that doesn’t happen elsewhere on the web. “The most common kind of comment that I get is people will say, ‘Thank you. This was a great newsletter,’” he said. It’s the kind of feedback Newton never sees in the comments section on The Verge, or elsewhere on social media, and when readers say thanks, he always takes the time to write back.
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