Email newsletter platform Substack has been generating a lot of discussion in recent months as a number of high-profile journalists (for a variety of reasons) have migrated to the website full-time.
It’s certainly true that more and more writers are using the newsletter format as a way to disseminate the sort of journalism that they used to produce for traditional media publications.
However, the medium still retains a lot of its ‘traditional’ value as a means of periodically sharing interesting and useful links and resources relating to a particular subject or niche.
Unsurprisingly, the media industry is home to many valuable newsletters that serve this purpose. Here — in no particular order — are five of the best.
1. The Objective: The Front Page
The Objective, which operates off Substack’s platform, is run by a group of journalists and academics in the USA as a voluntary project on top of their day jobs.
They launched the publication “to cover marginalized communities more deeply and to make newsrooms more open to people from those communities“, and publish The Front Page every second Friday.
The fortnightly newsletter summarises the latest stories from inside newsrooms that relate to these communities, while also updating its readers on upcoming events and professional opportunities.
2. Axios: Media Trends
Newsletters on a range of topics are an important part of the business model of Axios, a news site launched by three Politico alumni in 2016 with the goal of delivering “the clearest, smartest, most efficient and trustworthy experience for audience and advertisers alike“.
Their weekly newsletter on the wider media industry — Media Trends, written by Sara Fischer — lives up to that billing, with the information-dense offering arriving in the inbox of over 100,000 subscribers every Tuesday.
3. Press Gazette: Media Monitor
UK trade magazine Press Gazette — which is owned and operated by the New Statesman Media Group — covers news and produces a wide range of editorial content on the media industry.
It launched Media Monitor in October “to provide strategic intelligence for news industry leaders“; the weekly newsletter collates the best articles of the past week from its website and sends links to them directly to your inbox first thing on a Thursday morning.
4. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: weekly newsletter
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, through its Fellowship and leadership programmes and other research, tries to help media professionals “build better and more sustainable journalism for tomorrow“.
Funded predominantly by the Thomson Reuters Foundation (a charity attached to the news company with which it shares a name) the RISJ publishes a range of editorial content relating to the industry on its website, and also has a podcast.
Its Tuesday email covers a lot of ground, providing overviews of its own published journalism and research — as well as links to good reads about the media from elsewhere on the internet — in an accessible and engaging fashion.
5. Nieman Journalism Lab: The Weekly Digest
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University fulfils a similar role to the RISJ.
The Foundation has a number of fellowship programmes, but it also runs a number of journalistic initiatives through which it reports and comments on the major issues affecting the media industry.
One of these initiatives is the Nieman Journalism Lab: focused on the future of journalism “in an Internet age“, it employs a few full-time writers who produce an abundance of thought-provoking work.
The Weekly Digest provides an overview of the Lab’s new published content each week, and goes out to inboxes on a Saturday.
(Nieman Reports and Nieman Storyboard — two of the Foundation’s other initiatives — also have newsletters that are worth your time.)