Clockwise from top left: Christopher Sopher, CEO at Letterhead, David Skok, CEO and editor-in-chief at The Logic, George Monaghan, newsletters editor at The New Statesman, and Anna Jeys, director of audience at Reach, speaking at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference on 10 September 2026. Picture: ASV Photography for Press Gazette
Leading publishers shared their newsletter strategy tips at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference.
Christopher Sopher, chief executive and co-founder of newsletter management system Letterhead, said: “There’s two big things that we see happening right now that are very opposite from each other, actually, which I like. One is thinking a lot more about interactivity and how we can use polls and reader feedback and responses and people hitting reply and talking to the editorial team, leveraging that voice to create that interaction.”
He said these tools led to “really good performance” as they create both increased clickthroughs to a website and “a level of attachment to the product that can support monetisation from a subscription perspective, advertising perspective”.
Asked if the use of quizzes, polls, and commands like “hit reply if you like this” were gimmicky, he said it depended on whether it was a clear part of the product strategy.
“If it’s part of the offering, then that can be more impactful. We have customers who send very specific newsletters with just one thing in it, one story, one image, one whatever it is. But if that’s the promise you’re making to the reader, then great, it performs well.
“So I think what we’re seeing is that if it’s part of the strategy, we tend to see good results, and if people are just kind of tinkering, it takes some time to see what works.”
The second trend cited by Sopher was publishers looking to improve discoverability for newsletter content in AI engines.
“There’s a growing number of publishers who are asking us: ‘can we leverage our newsletter content for different kinds of ranking and performance on AI models?’
“And so there’s some really interesting stuff happening there as well because you have this kind of unique content type that is a bit different from what’s on the site and potentially serves a slightly different purpose.”
Asked for tips around whether to launch a newsletter is in such a busy market, Sopher said it needed to feel like something more than just an email.
“It’s like – this is a thing I’m offering you that you might be interested in… email is just a delivery mechanism.
“We see people experimenting with taking pieces of that and doing it on Whatsapp or on SMS or on social media, or it’s all named the same thing, or it’s a newsletter by a columnist… and email is just one way we’re distributing that thing.”
This also translates into the grabbiest subject lines, he said: “Just keeping it consistent with the promise of the product is what really resonates.”
Sopher told publishers to lead with something that shows the value of the newsletter: “If that’s in the subject line or preview text, that’s going to remind people ‘oh yeah, this email has good stuff.’
“So, generally, what we see perform the best is boring stuff. ‘These are the headlines that are in there. This is the news that’s in there today’… kind of the obvious stuff.
“There’s no tricks, I don’t think, that are more effective because the value is inside, and as long as that’s clear, the people who are interested are going to click on it.”
Canadian business and tech title The Logic: New professional tier bets on journalist briefings
David Skok, chief executive and editor-in-chief of Canadian business and tech publication The Logic, similarly emphasised the importance of making the newsletter a valuable product in its own right.
Several email providers including Google and Apple can now summarise people’s emails so they users can skip most of the contents and get a quicker digest.
Skok said some newsletters are more at risk from these changes than others: “If you’re doing a newsletter that’s heavily curated from other sources and it’s just an aggregation of other people’s work, you’re probably going to be in trouble because what value add are you bringing to it that’s uniquely yours?
“If you’re doing something that is original, that only your reporters can do, that is ten times better than everybody else… people still want that.”
The Logic, which launched in 2018, has a paywalled website model based on paying subscribers, with an individual subscription priced at $299 per year.
Earlier this year The Logic introduced a professional subscription costing $449 per team member, with a key perk being extra email briefings from its lead reporters in AI, finance, economics and Ottawa trade.
Skok said: “One way that we’ve tried to insulate ourselves a little bit from this is we just launched a new professional tier that is newsletter only, personality driven from our beat reporters on very particular subsets of our audience and subjects.”
He added that people had proved “willing to pay even more” and that average revenue per user was therefore higher.
Skok said The Logic has always treated newsletters “really more as its own product”, for example with a daily 4pm briefing treated as “the front page of our newspaper” with bespoke-written news and analysis rather than just a round-up email.
He noted that Meta’s continued block on news in Canada, which started in 2023 in response to legislation forcing major platforms to pay for publisher content , meant newsletters were even more key as a top-of-funnel acquisition channel.
But he said newsletters had been “part of our core DNA” since The Logic was founded, with readers unable to access any of its journalism without hitting a registration wall.
“We kind of feel like we were a bit ahead of the curve in that we have this direct relationship with our readers because we just decided very early on we weren’t going to build our business on the top of somebody else’s algorithm, and newsletters were a great way to do that.”
Skok added that they see newsletters as “part of a larger holistic approach” which means the metrics they look at, rather than just open rates, include whether subscribers are going on the website, downloading the app, or going to events. He said they had combined all this user data into one indicator for each subscriber.
At The Logic, Skok said, users who hand over their email address consistently choose to become a paying subscriber either within the first 48 hours or, if not in that window, then not until about seven to nine months later.
“There’s no inbetween there, and so when you think about that, how do you capture them in that first little bit and make sure that they understand the products, the value proposition?
“And then it’s also, okay, they’re not coming in now, what are you going to do over the next nine months without getting them to press the unsubscribe button? To keep them around enough that when they really do want to pay for you, they’re there?…
“I think you have to think about the funnel in newsletters very intentionally. Every email you’re sending: who, why, what…”
During those potential nine months, Skok said, The Logic is constantly seeking to demonstrate the value in a paid subscription and ask people why they have not subscribed yet, rather than pleading with them to do so.
“For us, as a business publication, we don’t play to people from a marketing perspective. We’re not charity. We don’t treat ourselves as charity. We don’t say, you know, ‘please help journalism survive’. I always cringe a little bit when I see that.
“We have to provide value to you. And so, for me, it’s what are you actually providing that connects me to this person’s life that’s going to help them make better decisions in their life or be smarter in their life?”
Reach looking at newsletters in ‘slightly different way’ after subscriptions launches
Also on the panel was Anna Jeys, director of audience at Reach, which has a large newsletter portfolio for its dozens of national and local newsbrands and has been diversifying its portfolio from being primarily curated digests of stories towards a greater mix of purposes.
Last summer Reach launched around 20 newsletters based on some of its journalists’ passions such as books, gaming, Formula 1, Liverpool FC and cricket, which were a mixture of paid and free. It used Substack for these both to reach audiences in new places and to use the platform’s community building tools.
In addition Reach has this year been launching paid premium website subscriptions for the first time, now across 24 brands from the Mirror and the Express to the Manchester Evening News and Derbyshire Live . Newsletters have therefore become part of the “subscriber pipeline”, she said, noting that these audiences have a good propensity to subscribe compared to non-newsletter readers.
“That really gives us another challenge to look at newsletters in a slightly different way. Whereas without having that subscription business, we may have been looking more about bringing people back to site.We’re also now having to think about what is the journey of a newsletter subscriber? How do we make sure that we’re giving them the best content, that we’re looking after them?”
Jeys said Reach is thinking about the potential threat from AI and “what in our newsletters could actually be summarised, and if they can be summarised, then how do we try and do something different? How do we add that value? And I think a lot of that is about the connection.”
She said personality-driven newsletters are successful when they are “adding value to content that you can’t get somewhere else” for example via a sports journalist on the ground with exclusive information, or through a tone of voice.
“We’ve got to lean into the things that we have that are unique that we can make sure we can really add value to and show people why they should be picking us.”
Despite this focus on personality-led newsletters, Jeys said digest emails rounding up links of stories are still a “large proportion” of the publisher’s portfolio because people are still interacting with them. “It might be that they want a digest that’s curated by somebody that they trust.”
Reach is also experimenting on other platforms such as Linkedin with an exclusive version of The Northern Agenda with weekly insights and analysis from the North that don’t appear in its main newsletter, going to around 1,690 subscribers on the platform.
“That’s because that’s where we felt there might be an audience for it. So I think really for us, it’s just about not limiting ourselves just to our own platforms,” adding that they needed to “figure out where the audience is” and the right experience “for that particular product”.
New Statesman to boost newsletter portfolio
Politics and culture magazine The New Statesman currently has two email link digests designed to send people back to its website: daily politics newsletter Morning Call and the weekly Saturday Read.
George Monaghan, who was appointed newsletters editor in July, is now working on expanding this portfolio and teased an upcoming culture digest curated by the culture editor.
He said a website homepage can be “a bit overwhelming” for someone who arrives looking for a particular genre of article but “the thing you can do with link list emails is exploit niches if you’ve got a good enough sense of who your audience is…
“Rather than going on the homepage every day and kind of digging around for the Rachel Cusk book, they can sign up to the link list controlled by the culture editor, who’s their sort of go-to person, and they can just receive all the articles that they’re going to be interested in. Occasionally, there can be a recommendation to other zones of content, but only in a tasteful amount. Often, the homepage I think is a bit like a wine list without a sommelier.”
Monaghan’s top tip for a winning newsletter was to “invest in the best writers in the world and make sure you’re projecting them”.
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