Saturday Paper publisher to launch email newsletter
The publisher of The Saturday Paper and The Monthly is set to launch a free daily email newsletter aimed at providing subscribers with an at-a-glance understanding of the day’s news.
The new Schwartz Media offering will launch next Monday and will be produced by morning editor Alex McKinnon. It will aim to match the editorial standards set by the Monthly and The Saturday Paper.
Speaking to Mumbrella, The Saturday Paper’s founding editor, Erik Jensen said the new product was the result of analysing The Saturday Paper’s audience and their habits and needs.
“This came out of some deep surveys of the Saturday Paper’s audience and the realisation that a huge portion of our audience doesn’t read a lot of other news, they read only The Saturday Paper,” he said.
“We wanted to then find a means to bridge the gap between each Saturday and make sure that audience remains as informed as possible, but can continue the kind of journalism we produce on a cycle greater than once a week.”
Erik Jensen: The Briefing to be free of native advertising
Jensen said the product also aims to be a proper briefing of the morning news as opposed to a newsletter linking through to stories already sitting on a news site.
“It also came from looking at other offerings and other titles that deal with morning news and the fact that very few of them were agnostic about where that news came from,” he said.
“They seem often to be about the news outlet that they serve as opposed to the readership. So we wanted to find a way to put together a morning title that was about briefing an audience rather than just saying ‘Here are the stories already on our site’.
“That means what we will be trying to do is to write through the news, take people to interesting places and answer questions but to do all of that as if we were reading every single newspaper at once, not just a single one.”
The product is free, however Jensen does not have any concerns that it will deter audiences from subscribing to Schwartz Media’s other products.
“The more people read what we do, the more likely they’ll come and pay for what else we do,” he said.
“It seems people will pay online to read us once a week. This is about then saying ‘Having paid for that, this is a courtesy of keeping you informed on the days that we don’t otherwise publish our main title.'”
Jensen said The Briefing will be supported by advertising, however said that will not extend to native advertising.
“It will be a title with two functions: one that it will be added some for new and existing advertisers but it will also be a title that will ultimately drive subscriptions to our other products,” he said.
“There’ll be no native advertising, partly because the values invested in our print and online titles will be carried through to our emails. Even though this email is free, it will still have the exact same editorial independence and the same refusal of native advertising or of anything else that exists to trick readers.”
The Briefing launches on Monday.
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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Any word on when they will publish print circulation figures?
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It’s a credible newspaper. You should just take their word for it.
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Look forward to reading
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