The power of the good old email newsletter

Email, and not social media, is the number one application people use on their smart phones, says the Polis report released on Friday. Indeed, email technology is unaffected by the continuous migration of users from desktop to mobile phones.

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“For some media organisations the audience that can be reached through email newsletters might be worth more than the audience reached through social media,” wrote Swedish journalist Charlotte Fagerlund in the report, based on interviews with a range of journalists who produce newsletters.

Charlie Beckett, director of Polis and one of the editors of the report, told Journalism.co.uk that while producing newsletters can be resource-intensive, they open a direct line of communication between a media organisation and its audience.

“I am somewhat surprised that people aren’t more enthusiastic. It seems to me that we’re all really worried about having to do all our journalism dissemination through digital intermediaries like Facebook or Twitter, and here’s an opportunity to reach our readers directly,” Beckett added.

Although email does seem to be more popular among older readers, it is not limited to that target group. The Skimm, a digital native media company targeting millennials, reached 15 million subscribers since its foundation in 2014.

Source: WAN-IFRA

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