You've got mail: j-school alumni and faculty shaping newsletters   

Journalistic newsletters have grown in popularity in the last couple of years, and some of the School of Journalism’s alumni and faculty are writing and producing them.

Michal Stein, a 2019 graduate of the School of Journalism, is an audio editor for The Globe and Mail’s daily show The Decibel and a producer for the Toronto Star’s bi-monthly podcast, It’s Political with Althia Raj. She is a producer for Vocal Fry Studios, where she works on shows like The David Suzuki Podcast and Indigo's Well Said. She also writes a weekly podcast industry newsletter for Vocal Fry Studios called Vocal Fridays (external link) .

She says that 2021 was a big year for Vocal Fry’s projects, and their team started to think about how to communicate that to an audience. To add more value to their newsletter, rather than only listing their new episodes, they decided to include podcast recommendations, resources for freelancers, and other tools or workshops that would be useful for those in podcasting. 

"It feels like a fun outlet,” Stein says. “It's different from what I work on the rest of the week. It's a different kind of brain exercise.”

She works as an aggregator and pulls together things she finds within podcasting, adding that it's also a group effort, as she says others within Vocal Fry post articles that they see in their Slack chat. She then goes through them and decides what to talk about from there. 

"It's our hope that people that work in podcasting will find value in it, but that it's not so niche that other kinds of freelancers or students or whoever will also get value from it,” she says. “It's written with a podcast audience in mind, but hopefully not so narrow that it only speaks to them." 

While Stein writes the newsletter, It was with Emily Latimer, a 2020 School of Journalism graduate, that the concept of a newsletter came together.

Stein says that the more she realized that people liked her personal writing style in the newsletter, the more she leaned into it. “It's a bit of a double-edged sword because I write it a little bit like my diary,” she says. “But it's useful for me as a brand exercise because they kind of get to know me." 

Stein says she wouldn't be where she was today if she hadn't done her master's of journalism at the school. She credits learning the technical aspects of podcasting at the school and says her time with the Review of Journalism as the podcast producer in 2018 and 2019, as well as her internship with TVO, helped get her to where she is now.

Sierra Bein, a 2017 graduate of the School of Journalism, writes two newsletters: the climate newsletter from The Globe and Mail, and The Supplement (external link) , an audience-driven newsletter, alongside Samantha McCabe and Alex Nguyen

The Globe’s climate newsletter is a collection of all climate-related news from the week. Bein says she usually starts the newsletter off with something a little lighter, quirky and fun, then she goes into something noteworthy from their reporters or freelancers. And then the Deep Dive of the newsletter usually highlights something from their staff, or a story or issue that will come up again.

Bein says she first pitched the climate newsletter to The Globe in 2019 before she was a permanent staff member. She says there were a lot of people within The Globe who thought it was a good idea, but they weren't sure if they had the audience for it. Then after the pandemic began in 2020, they started to circle back to it more seriously because the government was pushing for a green reopening. 

"We saw that as an opportunity to watch this thing because, all of a sudden, there was so much interest from policymakers and government and businesses wanting to reopen and people were also disconnected from the outdoors,” she says. “I think that played a role in the public's wanting to find reconnection with nature." 

Bein, McCabe, and Nguyen launched The Supplement in October 2020 with a goal to fill in the gaps of other mainstream news by shedding light on a story that has been confusing, looking at an angle that has gone unexplored, or addressing a topic that hasn’t gotten enough airtime, according to their site.

Bein says the three of them met through The Globe’s summer program, and that they recognized that there was a lack of explanatory journalism, specifically in Canada, so they wanted to create something that was engaging and connected with a large audience that ranged from avid news readers to people who may only read headlines or tweets.

Bein adds that she likes that newsletters are a really direct way to connect with a reader and that it’s your chance to go straight into their inbox. “You have flexibility to use that connection, whether that's writing a bit more conversationally or making reference to previous newsletters or other stories,” she says. “It can be a bit more colourful and guide them through coverage if they maybe didn't have the time to sift through.”

Angela Misri, a contract lecturer at the School of Journalism, is the digital director at The Walrus. Her job includes writing and producing The Walrus’ weekly newsletter (external link) .

The newsletter talks about everything The Walrus published within the previous week, she says, and because of analytics, they know which stories they published that are doing well and how well they've travelled across the internet. They might use a story that people are engaging well with and commenting on social media, but they mainly try to include everything that they've published, whether it's a podcast episode, story, poem, or a Walrus Talks. She says they then organize it from most engagement at the top, then down to what people haven’t heard of yet.

“It's a big picture of everything that The Walrus produces and everything that we're excited about,” Misri says. “It represents the full Walrus."

The newsletter existed before Misri started working at The Walrus, but she says she modified it quite a bit to respond to what the audience wanted. She asked their audience questions to determine the time of day the newsletter would be released, content type, frequency, and if they wanted to see everything from The Walrus or just editorial content. 

One thing Misri says that she especially likes about producing newsletters is testing and experimenting because it's a good space to do that in. She says they've tested changing either the subject line or the content of the newsletter for two different groups of recipients to learn what the audience responds to.

"You're trying to connect with people on a level that they're trying to connect with,” she says. “Newsletters land in people's inboxes and they can interact with it in any way they'd like to. There's an engagement and interaction in it that you sometimes can't get from social media." 

Moving forward, she thinks personalized newsletters are the future. She sees it as one newsletter having the capability of catering to many individual readers based on their interests or by their news-consuming habits. "I want to give people what they're interested in at the time that they're interested in it,” Misri says. “I don't want to make 20 different newsletters for The Walrus, I want to make one newsletter that looks different and delivers different things to different people.”