This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog post is August 29, reporting from Amsterdam.
Undrrated : a new newsletter from Cosmopolitan deputy editor Marina Khidekel, where notable creatives share the under-the-radar culture, food and style finds they love
Clover is a daily email newsletter and new app for girls, created by former magazine editors Liza Darwin and Casey Lewis.
READ.LOOK.THINK. is a regular compilation of the thoughtful, complex, beautiful and good.
At a recent media seminar, one of the first questions from the audience, from a daily newspaper editor, was about email newsletters; “Do you think it pays to produce email newsletters once or twice a day?”
Of course, I said. Anything that will land on the user's mobile device is going to get at least three seconds of attention. It is all part of our leaning forward behavior with mobile devices.
The follow up question was more practical: “It takes time to produce a compelling email newsletter that really captures the attention of the reader. You still recommend that we invest such time?”
Again, the answer was positive. The good email newsletters from newspapers, specifically, are going to be highly curated.
AT their best, a curated email newsletter is a piece of information where we stumble into content that we may have missed otherwise. And it is here that lies the secret: If you are a newspaper editor, you don't want to produce an email newsletter with 10 items that are part of everyone else's agenda for the day. The purpose of the email newsletter is to seduce the hard to seduce. I like the verb “stumble” because that is what we do when we window shop, or when we find that new salad dressing at the supermarket. We were not looking for it. We simply stumble upon it. Momentary alertness and seduction follow.
For women’s magazines: email newsletter success
That is why I was so interested to read a piece about how women's magazines, which, as we know, have been suffering from circulation decline the past two years, have found another way to reach, and to seduce, readers via email newsletters.
Knowing how much we use our mobile devices to get information, the editors of three publications are capitalizing on the use of email newsletters to attract and to retain audiences.
Not surprisingly, the piece informs us that emaiul newsletters are making a resurgence in popularity, despite the constant flow of content from social media outlets: ” With 55 percent of email opens happening on phones, it’s an increasingly powerful way to reach readers directly on mobile.”
The three are: Clover, a lifestyle newsletter aimed at teen girls; READ LOOK THINK, a collective of thought-provoking links; and UNDRRATED, a curation of places and things to visit and use by a different creative every week. All emphasize a personal approach to the content selected. As the editor of one of the newsletters put it: We simply did not want to go with the mundane, as in 10 trendy vegan restaurants in the city.
The idea is to surprise and to delight. Most importantly, it is about the stumbling effect. The Wow of seeing a story about a subject of interest that you had not seen anyplace else.
Marina Khidekel, writer and cofounder.of Undrrated put it best:
It’s like a tool for surprise and delight, which are buzzwords right now. It really is what people are looking for from the content that they get, and authenticity too.
There is such a resurgence of newsletters lately and I love that. I love that there is a different outlet for people to get content that they’re passionate about and that they think speaks to them, delivered right to them.
Rio 2016 Summer Olympics design competition
www.newspaperdesign.in,India's first and only international newspaper design site,is celebrating
its 10th anniversary this September.As a part of it newspaperdesign.in is conducting a news design
competition based on Rio Olympics 2016 jointly with SND 19 (Society for News Design Asia-South Pacific).
For more details click the below link
http://newspaperdesign.in/forum/topics/rio-olympics-news-design-competition