My newsletter has given me more journalistic freedom

Published in

Revue

6 min readJul 2, 2019

Revue’s note: This post is part of a series on secrets by newsletter experts. It was written by Arjen van der Horst. Arjen is USA correspondent for Dutch public broadcaster NOS and TV news program Nieuwsuur. For the NOS he writes the Trump Weekly newsletter.

If there was something that did NOT cross my mind on Wednesday November 9, 2016, it was starting a newsletter. It was the day after the American presidential election. I was completely exhausted covering one of the craziest elections in American history. But it was exactly this exhaustion that led to the creation of my newsletter, the Trump Daily.

You see, in the four year cycles of American politics, the three months between Election Day and Inauguration Day are traditionally a quiet news period. This is an ideal time for political hacks and foreign correspondents alike to recharge the batteries after a gruelling year of reporting.

Of course, there was nothing normal or traditional about the election of Donald J. Trump and the three months that followed. The chaotic transition of the president-elect who never expected himself to be president. The constant stream of outrageous tweets. The appointments of unusual secretaries. Scandals were in the making even before Trump entered the Oval Office.

Recharge the batteries? Forget about it. We knew that from day one.

An email to get a grip on the chaos

The appetite for Trumpian stories from my Dutch news room was in those months (and years) understandably enormous, but this also created problems. The time difference with The Netherlands is six hours. By the time I would wake up at 7am in Washington DC, my inbox would be full of requests from our different news departments. A lot of them made sense, but many did not. We spent a lot of time swatting away bullshit suggestions, while we preferred to spend our (depleted) energy on stories that really mattered. After all, not every Trump tweet was a story.

I wanted to get a grip on the chaos, so I decided to send every night (American time) an e-mail to some colleagues at the foreign desk. What could they expect the next day, which stories are important, which one can be safely ignored. That kind of stuff. The tone was casual, sometimes tongue-in-cheek. I hoped this would give me a head start. When my colleagues arrived in the morning at their desk in The Netherlands and open their e-mails, they would have a good sense what was happening on the other side of the pond. It gave me a chance to influence the decision process and saved us a lot of time and energy.

A newsletter that almost writes itself

What started as a daily e-mail for just a bunch of colleagues at the foreign desk became an official newsletter two months later. One of my bosses suggested publishing my daily e-mails online. I was hesitant at first. Would people be interested enough? We decided to jump the gun, picked Revue as our platform and the Trump Daily was born. We started two weeks before Inauguration Day. Within a month we had more than thirty thousand subscribers.

My news organization had no experience writing newsletters whatsoever, nor had I. It was all work in progress. So how to decide what’s a good topic and what’s not? In the beginning it was easy. I wrote a daily newsletter for the first hundred days of Trumps’ presidency. At first I was worrying that I wouldn’t have enough material for a daily newsletter, but there was no need to worry. The occupant of the Oval Office was a virtual news goldmine. Trump’s presidency was so unusual and unprecedented (or “unpresedented” as Trump would say himself), that the newsletter almost wrote itself. I could easily write a couple of thousand words a day. I just had to describe what happened.

Finding the right topics for a newsletter

Writing a daily newsletter on top of all your other work as a USA correspondent is quite a challenge though (and yes, you do need a family life as well). After the first hundred days I converted it in a Trump Weekly, to be published every Friday morning. This gave me a new challenge. If you want to follow political news from the United States, there are dozens of newsletters that meet your demands, from Politico’s Playbook, to the daily newsletters from the New York Times and Axios. The Trump Weekly had to be more than just describing what happened in political Washington that particular week.

So the newsletter became a mixture of things. Plain reporting and analysis are still an important part. It’s also crucial to know your audience. My followers are (mainly) Dutch people who have a more than average interest in American news. They know a lot about the United States, but don’t take things for granted at the same time. The newsletter proved to be very useful in explaining complicated issues. Trump started using executive orders a lot, so I dedicated a newsletter about what executive orders mean. When impeachment became a regular topic, I explained the whole impeachment process.

The newsletter is a platform for true discussion

A newsletter is a different form of journalism that gives you more journalistic freedom in many ways. Don’t take yourself too serious. Mix the hard news with lighter notes (a popular fixture of the Trump Weekly became the ‘Bullshit du Jour’). Don’t shy away from making it personal. Telling about personal experiences can be a very effective way about explaining what’s happening in the news. Last summer I was reporting in the Texan border town of McAllen about Trump’s zero tolerance policy on migration that led to the separation of children and parents. I compared the experiences of the migrants with the stories of members of my own family and my wife’s Irish family when they migrated in the past century to North America. After seventeen kids were shot to death at a high school in Parkland, Florida I wrote about the regular “active shooter drills” my five year old son gets in his kindergarten. This example sounded crazy for Dutch ears, but it is standard practice in American schools. It gives an insight in the American way of life.

My final advice: listen to your readers. The Revue platform gives readers the invaluable opportunity to leave comments or send e-mails. In the beginning I was highly surprised by the responses I got. I received anything from 200 to 2000 e-mails every week. Unlike Twitter, where people rather scream than listen, the newsletter offered a platform for true discussion. Comments could be anything from praise, to criticism or plain corrections. But most of all: readers ask questions. It gives me a great sense of what people actually wanted to know. This interactivity really has shaped my newsletters. In that way it has been more rewarding than my traditional work on radio and television.

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Looking for more advice?

This post is part of a series on secrets by newsletter experts. You might also want to check out: