Recode’s Peter Kafka spoke with Dan Primack, the business editor at Axios who previously worked at Reuters and Fortune, each time creating and authoring a popular email newsletter, on Recode Media about his job.
Here is an excerpt:
So how do you balance, “I know this arcane detail,” or, “I know this one really interesting detail about a deal that frankly probably only a minority of you care about,” versus, “There’s a lot of you who don’t know very much about a lot of things. I’m gonna tell you a little bit about all of it”?
So my newsletter, which is Pro Rata, which is my daily, is structured a little differently than most of the Axios newsletters, and that’s kind of just historical just because …
It’s what you’ve done.
It’s what I’ve done. It’s different than the past ones. There’s different pieces to it, but a bunch of it’s the same, which is there are news blurbs in it, maybe 30 or 40 depending on the day, and those are really short and those are linked out to other places because I’m not gonna analyze 40 deals in a day and no one wants to read that.
In general, though, my goal with this newsletter is the same as it has been with any other, and I think it’s true for most of the newsletter writers at Axios, and we’ve got over a dozen of them now. I want to tell a reader something they don’t know yet. I want to give them … I want to make them feel smart when they get to work and feel like they’re ready to do their jobs and when they get to …
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