Over the last eight months, The Boston Globe has spun up several newsletters built to engage and serve readers: from Beyond the Gilded Gate, a limited-series newsletter on the increasing housing crisis in Greater Boston, to Winter Soup Club, a fun and light-hearted newsletter about soup.
Each is part of a larger effort to serve new audiences and innovate in the newsletter space. Globe readers can experience beautiful designs, engaging sections, and deeply reported stories without having to be a paying Globe subscriber. The Globe also listened to feedback along the way, tweaking based on what readers said they wanted and needed.
Through this newsletter-first approach the Globe is seeing higher reader engagement from paying subscribers and non-subscribers alike. They say they are thankful for the various communities and accessible spaces we’ve been able to create via newsletters. This new strategy was developed by Jacqué Palmer, our senior editorial director for newsletters, who works across multiple teams in the newsroom to ensure its success.
