Omaha World-Herald starts business newsletter

The Omaha World-Herald has started a weekly business news email newsletter written by business editor Brad Davis.

The newsletter came after World-Herald for the past year had been a part of the Knight-Lenfest “Table Stakes” initiative for metropolitan newspapers.

As part of that, the World-Herald looked at reaching audiences in new ways – and at reaching new audiences.

“We came up with the idea of a weekly newsletter that would distill our business and business-related coverage into an easy-to-read and conversational format,” said Davis. “Not exactly something that’s never been done, but something that we hadn’t done.”

The paper’s newsletters until last year had been largely automated affairs. Now, it has several “hand-curated” ones, including the one written by Davis, called Building Omaha, which comes out on Mondays.

“I write quick, hopefully snappy summaries of a few stories and stuff those summaries with links,” he said. “I also collate three to five headlines from the week’s most interesting stories and two or three headlines from other publications.”

The paper is keeping track of the metrics of who opens and clicks on what to refine the newsletter and help it form strategy for possible future newsletters.