Building the largest local newsletter network in the country
While I often write about COURIER’s unique approach to social-first news reporting, I wanted to take a moment to highlight COURIER’s email newsletter vertical, which has become a hugely impactful part of our work.
Over the past several years, our team has quietly built one of the largest local newsletter networks in the country, recently surpassing 1.8 million email subscribers across 11 state-based newsletters. Using a blend of community happenings, lifestyle tips, and news about local politics and government covered by our on-the-ground reporters, these newsletters aren’t spammy political mass emails; they are highly engaging products that hundreds of thousands of readers rely on each week. Despite being sent +5x per week in each state, our newsletters maintain sky-high engagement benchmarks, including an average open rate higher than 50% - which is far above the industry average.
We’ve been hard-pressed to find many other media companies that publish locally focused news and lifestyle newsletters with comparable reach—certainly none in the progressive media ecosystem. Patch, which uses AI to publish thousands of hyperlocal emails, has one of the largest (if not the largest) local email subscriber bases. It is followed by AXIOS local, which publishes 31 city-specific newsletters. COURIER is close behind.
In several key COURIER states like Arizona, the size of COURIER’s local subscriber base dwarfs most other competitors. Here’s a look at how our local newsroom, The Copper Courier, compares to other prominent newsletters in the Grand Canyon State:
Email is a critically important channel for us for several reasons. For one, we are able to “own” our audience and directly communicate with them without the interference of social media algorithms - or increasingly, censorship. Separately, our newsletter authors build relationships with their subscribers through regular reader surveys and email responses, which helps improve our content strategy and creates trust with our readers. We have heard time and time again from our readers how much they appreciate our newsletters and our reporting and we have seen unique grassroots donations grow by 18% to over 20,000 in just four months.
Here are a few recent email replies we’ve received:
“The best and only news source I read every day. And when I had a story to share, you guys jumped into action. I can’t thank you enough!”
“Thank for providing great information on a daily basis. . . We are new to NH and the information is extremely helpful.”
“Thank you for all that you all are doing, wish I could do more! I am new to AZ and finding you all has been so important given the social/political climate.”
I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge what we suspect is a big reason for the high retention and engagement rates we continue to see across our newsletter program – and one that is core to our very raison d’être at COURIER - our local newsletters are and will always remain free for our readers, unlike most paywalled local and national reporting today. This also enables us to reach and earn the trust of less wealthy and non-college-educated Americans who are far less likely to pay for news and more likely to be reached and influenced by disinformation and misinformation online, where they access news and information for free.
By delivering good, relevant local reporting that matters to our audiences directly to their inboxes for free every day, we have proven that we are earning their trust and even shaping their opinions in the process.
One of our biggest priorities this year is to rapidly expand our newsletter program in both existing and new markets, including developing more niche, talent-driven newsletter products in key geographic and demographic areas.
Over the past six years, our team has developed an incredibly cost-effective recipe for meeting news-avoidant Americans where they are with our local lifestyle and news reporting, leading them to subscribe to our newsletters and enabling us to keep them informed year-round. We can’t grow this program without the support of this community, and I would love to share more with you about these plans. Please reach out to me directly if you want to learn more, and make sure to subscribe to one or more of our local newsletters if you’re in one of our COURIER states, or pass this on to a friend who is - you can find our local newsrooms at this link.
Have a restful weekend,
Tara
More news from COURIER
Speaking of newsletters: This week, COURIER’s national team launched Grave Injustice, a new national newsletter sharing key updates about the Supreme Court and the legal system – and explaining exactly what you need to know about them. Written by my dear friend and longtime SCOTUS expert Lisa Graves, it’s a follow-up to our “Grave Injustice” podcast we released last spring. With new SCOTUS rulings fast approaching this June, you won’t want to miss this newsletter. You can subscribe to the new newsletter here.
A major shoutout to our Michigan team at The ‘Gander, who swept the Michigan Press Association awards this week. Our talented reporters and staff brought home 9 (nine!) awards across newsletter, reporting, web, and video categories. The ‘Gander also brought home 3rd place for “News Media of the Year.”
What I’m reading this week
Trump's attempt to defund NPR and PBS is right out of the authoritarian playbook (MSNBC, 5/5)
“At a time of acute distress in American media, Trump is attempting to quash some of our most valuable news sources.”
Trump Might Already Be Losing Low-Information Voters (Intelligencer, 5/6)
“New polling shows that the very voters who powered Trump’s return to office are now abandoning him. And if that trend holds, it could upend assumptions about how much campaign messaging and elite discourse really matter”
Swing state journalists were trained to avoid the worst kinds of political coverage. Did it work? (Nieman, 5/6)
“None of this transformed content really matters much if newsrooms can’t get it in front of all kinds of audience groups,” Robinson said. “We must figure out a way to talk across our differences so that we can govern together using a shared set of facts,” she added. “We are very far from that right now.”
How the Radical Right Captured the Culture (The New Republic, 4/17)
“Blame Hollywood’s “unwokening” and the extraordinary rise of right-wing podcasters on slop: intellectually bereft, emotionally sterile content that’s shaped by data and optimized for clicks.”
They’re funny, they’re viral, and they’re coming for late night (Rolling Stone, 4/30)
“Digital talk-show hosts are taking comedy to the streets — and reinventing classic TV formats for an extremely-online age”
Voice of America will carry One America News programming (WaPo, 5/6)
“[Kari] Lake, a senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the government body that oversees Voice of America, announced that the agency agreed to provide “newsfeed services” to Voice of America, as well as to the Office of Cuba Broadcasting and Radio Martí, which distribute news into Cuba.”
Analysis: Trump is trying to chill the investigative journalism that holds him to account (CNN, 5/3)
But Trump and his aides are now actively trying to impede this reporting and intimidate news outlets, creating a bleak backdrop to the UN’s recognition of Saturday as World Press Freedom Day. The chilling effects, while hard to measure, are evident after Trump’s first 100 days in office, according to press freedom groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.