Josh Sternberg, the executive editor of Morning Brew, writes on LinkedIn about how its Healthcare Brew newsletter reached 100,000 subscribers in less than a year.
Sternberg writes:
But here’s the really cool thing: these subscribers are the exact right subscribers; the right audience.
This is what, I think, differentiates what we’re doing.
We aren’t playing for scale; we’re not racing to the bottom of the news commodity barrel. There’s no horse-race journalism, no pageview-chasing journalism. Just good ol’ fashioned reporting relevant to our reader.
We ask ourselves, “how will this piece of journalism help our reader?” It’s why we cover process stories – how companies do a thing – instead of “news.” If everyone’s covering the same thing, why should we? When we do cover news, it’s through the lens of that publication’s audience. Internally, we call this “contextualizing the news.” This helps our reader understand the news in relation to their industry/job; not just the event itself.
I like to joke that my parents subscribe to all of our publications, which is nice, but ultimately worthless (both editorially and financially) as they are retirees. We don’t write for them.
Read more here.
