Barron’s Schafer on creating a relationship with readers

Josh Schafer

Meredith Klein of Meredith & The Media interviewed Josh Schafer, newsletter editor and investing personality at Barron’s.

Here is an excerpt:

You’re a versatile multimedia journalist. At Yahoo Finance, you produced segments for Yahoo Finance Live, anchored Market Minute, interviewed executives, and wrote business stories. And now, you’re a newsletter editor and investing personality at Barron’s. Tell me more about your role at Barron’s.
I edit a newsletter called View From the Circle, which is for Barron’s Investor Circle members. Barron’s Investor Circle is a new subscription add-on for Barron’s. It’s intended to take a lot of the things that Barron’s has done for years—engaging with the community, providing important market analysis and stock picks—and delve deeper into that process.
We have a full team of analysts and people who have worked on Wall Street in addition to an in-house market technician and CMT. As the investing personality, I am the liaison.
I write a weekly newsletter that offers a market analysis angle from me, and then from there, I delve into some of our recent picks, whether it be picks that we made six months ago, that are in the news.
From a multimedia standpoint, I’m hosting a live Q&A every Wednesday at noon with subscribers. We go live with subscribers, and I’ll host one of our analysts who just recently picked the stock. We’ll answer questions on that week’s stock pick, and we’ll also answer questions on the market.
At the core of what we’re trying to do with Investor Circle is create a constant relationship with the readers and subscribers and build a community where we’re engaging with them on a daily basis.
We’ll continue to focus our coverage and the work and research we do on what the audience is telling us they’re interested in—which feels like where media is headed.