Michael MacLeod. Picture: Andrew Paterson
Edinburgh Minute founder Michael MacLeod has shared his newsletter tips for publishers.
The Edinburgh Minute was launched in 2023 on Substack and later moved to Ghost in 2025 as the newsletter gained more revenue through paying subscribers. In May 2024, MacLeod set up the London-based iteration, The London Minute , which remains on Substack. At £45 a year, the newsletter includes links to around ten news stories from other organisations with additional context and summaries also provided.
The ad-free newsletter is sent every weekday and has inspired imitators around the world, MacLeod told Press Gazette, including: The Glasgow Wrap, The Belfast Drop, The Bath Bee, The Melbourne Snap and two newsletters based in Tokyo.
While paid subscribers details are not shared, the Minute emails have doubled free subscribers every year since launch to 30,000 today.
MacLeod shared his insights for publishers on how to produce an effective daily newsletter.
How to identify a content gap for your newsletter
“ The Minute newsletter is free daily newsletter letter that arrives at 7am every weekday morning, and it exists to make it easier for people to find out what’s happening where they live with a mixture of all the original journalism that I can find each morning and a nice range of community notices that the readers send in too, and I spend time to verify or follow up or add some context too. I’ve been a journalist for 20 years and have a lot of contacts.
“The gap in the market was, I think, a fire in my belly. I was worried about people not reading local news, and the impact of that on falling turnout at elections still bothers me. And so I know that those two charts are falling in parallel.
“Loads of people have followed this sort of template, and I help others to do it. And there are more than 100 folks who I have helped copy this and around the world, and it’s so cool to see where they iterate on it, but I try and pass on those early principles I’ve stuck with.
“My advice to people starting a newsletter along these lines, is just do one thing really well. Keep it free, let people pay if they want, and give it time, be patient and figure out the best time that your audience might read it… for me, it was based around when I knew those stories were mostly on average going live…
“The Minute is the top referrer for most of the news sites up here now, so it’s solved that problem. And one of the editors up here tells me they see it every morning. They call it the Edinburgh Minute bump… So I’m not going to save local news, but I’m trying to help with a simple solution. And it’s definitely working for some of them.”
How to maximise click-throughs
“I’m super conscious of the Fair Dealing law… So sometimes I do just copy and paste the headline in, because it’s such a good headline…
“Or, I can add a bit of local knowledge that’ll be like, ‘it’s the fifth time that pothole’s opened up in a year!’ and ‘take care if you’re cycling through’…
“I try to explain in the link what you’re getting, what the added content or added value is of that work that they’ve done.
“I like to acknowledge, wherever I can, where you can really tell that a reporter has been there out on the street.”
How do you increase the open rate?
“The point of it is to stand out… you’ll always see The Minute at 7am and I want to make that the reason that you open it, not the fact that there’s news you need to know or it’s SEO-optimised, like new restaurants to go and visit that open this week… that’s not a game that I’m trying to play because I can’t win it… it’s more just the familiarity of seeing that brand’s name every day at the same time.
“The open rate is so steady, so reliable. It’s such a good audience – the people that have found it mostly found it through word of mouth. It’s been all organic growth. It’s pretty slow but steady.
“And I think that’s why it stayed consistent, because I didn’t need massive numbers. I need the right people to find it who actually will open something five times a week…”
He said the average email open rate is 60% (however open rates are hard to track accurately because of Apple privacy settings).
How much revenue do you make?
“I don’t publish the numbers of how many people subscribe because they’re not all the same. Some subscribed on 20% off discounts that are run occasionally, and some subscribed on the full price…
“To know that people will pay for it still blows my mind. Because it’s free, it’s pay if you want… I don’t take it for granted, a subscription could be cancelled tomorrow… It’s thousands of people who pay, but… I don’t feel as comfortable as I have like in a salary job… but as a journalist it’s the most I’ve ever earned by miles, and I’m lucky enough to be able to save money for the first time.
“The number of free subscribers basically doubles every year. This time last year it was on 16,000 so, 30,000 free subscribers now… a year before that, it was just under 7,000.”
How do you grow free subscribers?
“I just do the most basic promotion on social media, but the thing that I do, especially on Instagram, is I try and make it easy for those who are featured in it to let their audiences know that they were in it [through tagging in posts]. Promoting your thing to their audience exposes you to a new audience…
“Every single day has this massive cumulative snowball effect of new people discovering this thing…”
He also said that “word of mouth” was a big source of growth for the newsletter: “It’s unpredictable, but I think I can see by the reliable growth rate that it’s super effective for long-term engaged readers.”
The Edinburgh Minute’s Instagram showing tags to linked organisations etc. Picture: Instagram screenshot
How do you grow your paid subscribers?
“I do two to three promotions a year where you get a week to buy a year-long subscription for 20% off, which is £36 instead of £45, I tell people that that’s 10p a day instead of 12p a day… then a year later, they get a reminder that they’ll be moved on to the full price. And because it’s such a small amount… they stick with it, and the retention rate was like 89%…
“When someone emails to say, I’m sorry that I can’t continue my subscription because I’m a student again or I’ve just lost my job, I’ll just give them a full year free subscription… most of the time, they’re so happy, and that’s a hopeful brand sentiment idea that maybe they’ll tell people about it.
“It has the jobs section below the paywall… I’ll give you a free subscription for three months if you’re a job seeker and no questions asked, you don’t need to prove it. And most of those people stay subscribed.”
Paid subscribers get access to exclusive weekend ‘what’s on’ guides on Fridays, The Culture Minute on Wednesdays and the full archive. They can also post comments and join discussions.”
Which newsletter platforms are best, and why did you move from Substack to Ghost?
“I definitely recommend Substack as a good place to start… it found me a lot of subscribers to begin with, and I’m always grateful for that, but for growing a business, you get to the point where the cost of Substack is 10% of your income… But when it’s getting really serious and you’re like, I’m going to quit my job, 10% of your wage starts to feel like quite a lot… it was a five-figure cost every year, and I was like, hang on, I’m paying more than £10,000 to send emails…
“There was a recurring problem where readers were paying to subscribe and not receiving the email… that just never got fixed.
“Ghost is a completely non-profit foundation that makes it just as easy to run a newsletter… 100% of the newsletters that I have sent landed in the inboxes of the people that were meant to get it. It’s the one thing that I pay for and they were good enough to give me the first year for free, and after that, it’s only going to be about £1,000 to £2,000 a year.”
What are the major downfalls to watch out for?
“Deciding on a format for your newsletter and for your promotion and your social media presence is really important, otherwise you will just end up down multiple rabbit holes…”
He also said that dealing with the amount of inbound enquiries has become a nice problem to have.
“So, now I’ve partnered with a platform called Townspot, which helps make it easier for me to categorise the ways that people have got in touch, and it automates the things they send in to become events in the noticeboard… that was an unexpected pitfall – I didn’t expect it to be read or popular or to have this much inbound from people who wanted to be featured in it.”
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