It was big NBA news when the San Antonio Spurs signed a $229 million contract extension with star point guard De’Aaron Fox this summer. But for the San Antonio Express-News, the timing of the four-year deal was lousy: The paper’s Spurs newsletter had gone out the day before.
Not long ago, the newspaper would have counted on push alerts or social media posts to draw readers to its website. But as habits shifted, newsrooms across the country began leaning on newsletters — free or paid — to deliver stories straight to inboxes, building loyalty and creating new revenue streams. When the news broke in August, the Express-News reached its most dedicated fans with a special e-mail blast to its Spurs Nation subscribers.
The payoff was immediate, said JJ Velasquez, the paper’s managing editor of audience, citing a spike in opens and clicks.
“It’s the guaranteed way to engage with our audience when other channels like social media or search falter or change, as they are apt to do,” he said. “We know that our newsletter audiences are stabilizing for us.”
Newsletters have become vital to more organizations and individuals across the journalism industry as a direct-to-consumer vehicle that’s not tethered to potentially unreliable social or search platforms. They give outlets a consistent way to reach readers directly, strengthening ties at a time when referral traffic from social media is falling. A 2024 report from Chartbeat and Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform, showed that Facebook referral traffic to publisher websites declined 50% over the past year. Meanwhile, news websites are facing growing competition from AI-fueled search engines and chatbots, which can summarize news articles and answer questions without sending users to the original source. That shift threatens to further erode website pageviews and undercut the advertising and subscription models many newsrooms rely on.
All of that has pushed many outlets to double down on products they can fully control — such as newsletters.
E-mail newsletters earned their first dedicated chapter in the 2022 edition of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, which tracks trends in consumption patterns across dozens of countries. Researchers found that 22 percent of U.S. media consumers read a news email newsletter weekly. In 2025, the share of readers was 21 percent, but newsletter audiences continue to skew older than the general population of news consumers and are more educated and politically active than the average news audience.
Newsletters are critical to reader revenue, especially in subscription-focused models, the 2025 Reuters report found. Conversion rates of e-mail newsletter readers to paid subscriptions are higher than conversions from most social channels, particularly when integrated with membership or tiered access models, Reuters reported.
For many newsrooms, this means newsletters are no longer just a low-cost tool for engagement; they’ve become a core part of the business model.
“Our newsletter is very stable and successful,” said Joe Coughlin, editor of The Record North Shore, a five-year-old nonprofit serving Chicago’s suburbs. “It’s just been such a reliable part of our landscape as a newsroom and who we are. In fact, some readers think that’s all we are, and we’ve learned to think that’s okay.”
While it’s not a game-changer for web traffic, the outlet’s main weekly newsletter has proven its worth in brand awareness and sponsorship revenue. Coughlin writes the top, giving readers a behind-the-scenes look at how the main story was reported, before highlighting headlines and linking to other original coverage. “It’s kind of its own product,” Coughlin said.
Embracing that product has paid off. Coughlin’s team sells three ad placements within the Thursday newsletter — one banner and two square slots — and those are now included in larger sponsorship packages. The Record North Shore also has a newer newsletter, sent on Mondays, that is for paid members.
Chris Krewson, executive director of LION Publishers, said 85 percent of LION’s 500 local independent member publications in the U.S. and Canada now produce newsletters, second only to original reporting. What many newsrooms once left at aggregated headline dumps has matured into smartly curated and voice-driven products.
“A newsletter is a tactic,” Krewson said. “They are really key to monetizing a membership program.”
Effective independent publishers use newsletters to widen the reach of enterprise stories or investigations, he said, and to draw readers toward sustained support. “You actually see a funnel from total newsletter subscribers to a conversation rate to people who eventually get on the path to membership,” Krewson said.
Major news events can of course drive interest and readership. The Express-News picked up paid subscribers after the devastating flooding over the Fourth of July weekend in Central Texas and other flooding in June that killed 13 people in San Antonio.
“All of our enterprise coverage and on-the-scenes reporting has had a profound impact on conversion,” Velasquez said, using the term for moving readers of free content to ones who pay for news.
The numbers can be small, he added, but understanding the details of the metrics – and the revenue they stand to represent – is important. “People are attuned to clicks and page views and visits a lot more than conversions. I think psychologically it makes sense: You’ll see thousands or tens of thousands of views and conversions only in the dozens. But that’s 24 people who decided from reading your story that they wanted to pay us for our news.”
The evolving role of social media also has made newsletters an attractive method for building audiences and trying to expand reach. The unpredictability of social platforms’ operations in recent years — Facebook’s algorithm tweak one week, X’s tech meltdown the next – has spooked newsrooms. Newsletters, by contrast, have direct reach and are stable.
Spotlight PA’s newsletter strategy is a prime example. Colin Deppen was hired in 2023 and put in charge of the investigative nonprofit’s two newsletters, one that is free for anyone who signs up and one for readers who donate. “We want everybody to support our news because our news is responsible and reliable and thoughtful and all that,” he said. “But supporters sometimes want a little something extra, too.”
The content strategy is pretty simple. “We stress brevity, familiar-sounding language, all those hallmarks of digital journalism,” Deppen said. “We try to use best practices there.”
The daily newsletter, PA Post, has the larger audience of email subscribers — 35,000 — but it also has generated conversions among those free readers to donors, Deppen said.
Crafting a strategy and then building the readership for it requires time, editorial voice and an understanding of audience needs. In addition to Deppen, the outlet’s lead editor of news products, Spotlight PA also has a dedicated newsletter reporter.
“I think a lot of the industry approach to newsletters is to have a reporter do this in between writing,” Deppen said. “If you invest a little more time in that, it comes across to their readers.”
That understanding is also driving changes at Verite News, a Black-led nonprofit newsroom in New Orleans.
Editor-in-chief Terry Baquet, who oversaw The Times-Picayune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago, said Verite is rethinking its newsletter strategy to better reflect the depth and direction of its journalism.
“What our newsletters do right now, and we plan to expand on, is to let people know the kind of coverage we’re doing,” Baquet said.
In a natural disaster of similar proportions today, newsletters would be essential, he said.
“I think newsletters would become even more stand-alone in the case of Katrina,” Baquet said. “They are not going to want to read long stories.”
Arvin Tchivzhel of Mather Economics, a Georgia-based consulting firm for publishers, said that deciding whether a newsletter is worth developing requires a hard look at the numbers and potential for payoff, however an outlet defines that. “Do the math,” he said. “How many opt-ins can you get? Two hours a week or two hours a day and you’re only getting a couple hundred and only converting one person a week. If you’re really small, the math might not work out.”
At The Record North Shore, the effort is worth the time. Coughlin estimates it takes him about 15 minutes to write the introduction at the top of the Thursday newsletter and 60 to 90 additional minutes to compile headlines, add links to original coverage and format the rest of the edition.
That personalized opener is key, according to this year’s Reuters Digital News Report, which is produced by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Researchers found that successful newsletters are increasingly personality- or voice-driven, often authored by reporters or commentators familiar to audiences. Formats such as explainer threads, curated commentary and behind-the-scenes journalism also are gaining traction.
Tchivzhel said it comes down to choosing the right strategy depending on a newsroom’s size and resources. Many larger outlets have subscriber-only newsletters that are clearly generating revenue, he said. Smaller publishers, such as the Bangor Daily News, have taken a more targeted approach, producing a premium, subscriber-only politics newsletter aimed at institutions, nonprofits and government entities.
“It’s an email marketing campaign,” LION’s Krewson said. “But it’s also your best chance at a forecastable revenue stream.”
