At a time when search and social are losing steam as drivers of audience growth, and when more and more excellent opinion journalism is appearing daily on Substack, Globe Opinion has turned increasingly to newsletters as a core strategy for disseminating our commentary. In the past three years, our small team has launched five newsletters, more than doubling our output. These newsletters have opened new avenues for reaching readers beyond our subscriber base, outside our paywall. They have given columnists license to employ different voices and focus on new topics. And they have provided platforms for us to cover standard beats in new, more appealing ways.
Three of these newsletters are written by columnists: Mira by Marcela Garcia; Outtakes by Renée Graham, and Arguable by Jeff Jacoby. (A fourth columnist, Kimberly Atkins Stohr, writes The Gavel newsletter about the federal judiciary; we have submitted that in the single newsletter category.) These newsletters are intended to be extensions of the writers’ newspaper columns, but in a more intimate form. Each includes personalized items such as their musical interests, the books they have read, their pets. The design of each is also intended to reflect the interests, tastes, and personalities of each of them. But most important, the lead essays generally reflect their most abiding interests, whether it be immigration, race and gender, history, politics, music, cooking or TV sitcoms.
Our other two newsletters are more beat oriented. Are we there yet, written by our deputy editorial page editor Alan Wirzbicki, started out as a short-term newsletter about a transit shut down in 2023. But readers engaged with it so enthusiastically that we decided to keep it going, expanding its writ to include all forms of transportation. Similarly, our politics newsletter began as a way to cover the 2024 primaries (it was called, appropriately enough, Primary Source.) But it too proved popular enough with both writers and readers that we decided to rebrand it Right, Left, and Center, and extend it into 2025 to cover the start of the Trump administration and the Boston mayor’s race.
Notably, these newsletters have become passion projects for the writers. Our team is very small, meaning everyone is doing double duty, whether editing pieces or writing columns in addition to producing these newsletters. Yet every week, they appear in readers’ inboxes like clockwork, carrying deeply reported and lovingly written essays along with quizzes, recipes, conversations with letter writers, and musical tips. That our writers hate the idea of missing even one week reflects how their newsletters have bonded them to their audiences in new and profound ways.
