All posts tagged: newsletter

Win £100 worth of tickets to Henley Literary Festival with the Independent Culture newsletter

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter We’re giving away four sets of tickets worth £100 each to this year’s Henley Literary Festival – and here’s how you can win. Henley Literary Festival returns 2–11 October with more than 130 talks, performances and workshops across the town. Among this year’s headliners are Caitlin Moran, Jon Ronson, and Meera Syal. Highlights span fiction, history, politics, food, sport and entertainment, with appearances from Sathnam Sanghera, Alexei Sayle, Lucy Worsley, Tony Adams, Maggie O’Farrell and more. For families, there’s Julia Donaldson with the eagerly anticipated return of The Gruffalo, as well as events with Dr Ranj Singh, Liz Pichon, Katie Kirby, Nick Sharratt and Pippa Goodhart. This competition is open exclusively to subscribers of the Independent Culture newsletter. Delivered every Saturday, it’s your essential guide to the week in arts and culture – from the plays, galleries and exhibitions worth seeing …

Newsletter focus spells success for news digest brand The Knowledge

Published by Sam Flores

The Knowledge team from left to right: Charlie Lyons, Jon Connell, Michele Lavery, Harry Byford, Imogen Williams. Picture: Natasha Pszenicki Daily newsletter The Knowledge is nearing profitability 18 months after ditching web content to focus on its email. Founder and editor-in-chief Jon Connell, who also started The Week in the 1990s, set up The Knowledge in 2021 as a news digest that takes five minutes to read and was backed by investment from Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere. The Knowledge begins with an “In the headlines” news summary, followed by sections that highlight comment pieces and other news deemed by the team to be “positive” and “surprising” from across the UK and global media. It is designed to be easily finishable and says at the bottom each day: “That’s it, you’re done.” It goes out at lunchtime each weekday and at breakfast time on the weekends. The Knowledge has more than 160,000 people signed up, of whom more than 13,000 pay to subscribe and get the full newsletters. Connell and editor Harry Byford told Press …

This NotebookLM workflow turned my newsletter graveyard into a searchable goldmine

Published by skeptic

I subscribe to newsletters I actually want to use. So, remembering their content is a battle. I usually lose as I forget most of what’s in them. That’s the real reason I started an experiment to pipe newsletters into NotebookLM: I wanted to recall what I’d read, not just archive it. My hope is that some real value will show up between issues and between newsletters covering related themes. Maybe I can cross-pollinate ideas in ways a normal inbox never allows. NotebookLM has no built-in email connector, so I had to build the bridge myself with a handy automation tool and NotebookLM. Related 7 Ways to Manage Newsletters on Gmail Without Cluttering Your Inbox Get lots of newsletters to your email? Use these tips to manage them in Gmail to avoid cluttering up your inbox. Free methods for getting newsletters in Every option is a workaround with variable effort Saikat Basu/MakeUseOf Before automation, you’ve got three manual options: copy-paste text directly into NotebookLM, batch-export a Gmail label to PDF once a month, or set up …

B2B tech title The Stack boosts newsletter audience with acquisition

Published by Sam Flores

The Stack announces its acquisition of Tom Krzit’s Runtime. Picture: The Stack UK-based B2B publisher The Stack has almost tripled its newsletter audience after buying US tech title Runtime. The acquisition of Tom Krazit’s Runtime increases The Stack’s reach while allowing founder Ed Targett to focus on the business’s commercial arm and expansion. The deal was funded with cash and shares in the combined business. Targett, former editor of Tech Monitor (owned by Press Gazette parent Globaldata), and seasoned technology marketer Nishal Ratanji launched The Stack in 2020. “We spun it up with a grand total of £300 of launch capital from my overdraft,” Targett told Press Gazette. “We hired a guy in Nigeria who I found on Twitter to do us a website for £100, and we basically just started writing – no newsletter, just a really bare bones site, and tried to hope that the quality of what I was trying to write would bring in people.” The Stack operates as a website and newsletter, covering enterprise technology. Before the acquisition, The Stack’s …

Newsletter tips for publishers from the Edinburgh Minute

Published by Sam Flores

Michael MacLeod. Picture: Andrew Paterson Edinburgh Minute founder Michael MacLeod has shared his newsletter tips for publishers. The Edinburgh Minute was launched in 2023 on Substack and later moved to Ghost in 2025 as the newsletter gained more revenue through paying subscribers. In May 2024, MacLeod set up the London-based iteration, The London Minute, which remains on Substack. At £45 a year, the newsletter includes links to around ten news stories from other organisations with additional context and summaries also provided. The ad-free newsletter is sent every weekday and has inspired imitators around the world, MacLeod told Press Gazette, including: The Glasgow Wrap, The Belfast Drop, The Bath Bee, The Melbourne Snap and two newsletters based in Tokyo. While paid subscribers details are not shared, the Minute emails have doubled free subscribers every year since launch to 30,000 today. MacLeod shared his insights for publishers on how to produce an effective daily newsletter. How to identify a content gap for your newsletter “The Minute newsletter is free daily newsletter letter that arrives at 7am every …

Local newsletter network The Lead buys Stoke-on-Trent title

Published by Sam Flores

Helen Dalley, Luke Beardsworth, Mike Harris, Ed Walker and James Routledge of The Lead and The Knot. Picture: Submitted The Lead, which runs a growing regional newsletter network, has bought Stoke-on-Trent-based brand The Knot. The Lead already has titles based on Substack covering Blackpool, Lancashire, Southport and Calderdale, and recently expanded outside the North of England into the South Wales Valleys. It won the Newsletter of the Year (Specialist/Regional) prize at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Awards last year for its “wonderful example of local news journalism fighting back with original reporting, and an eye to rebuilding a local news ecosystem fit for the 21st century”. It now adds The Knot, which was launched in 2024 by founder James Routledge to provide “independent, quality and optimistic journalism” for Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire. The brand is run on Substack and has a mix of free and paying subscribers. [Read more: Press Gazette recently profiled growing Staffordshire news magazine The Signal] Routledge, who will continue to advise the brand, put out a call for support in March looking …

Rob Shuter Wants His Gossipy Substack to Be the National Enquirer of Our Era

Published by Sam Flores

The platform, he said with visible satisfaction, “should be horrified that I’m going to be successful.” (“Ultimately, people decide what resonates by subscribing to those they want to hear from, and Rob has clearly found an audience!” a Substack representative told me. “He’s currently #43 Rising in Culture, and hundreds of people pay for his Substack, which speaks to the connection he’s built with his community.”) Despite the boasts, Shuter has an air of good cheer that makes him hard to resent. “You could write a gossip column about you or me,” his friend Elvis Duran, the longtime Z100 radio host, said, “and you could make it nice or mean, and he always makes it nice.” On this point, opinions may vary—it depends what one makes of a headline like “EXCLUSIVE: MEGHAN MARKLE’S NEW ASTROLOGY OBSESSION IS NOW RUNNING HER LIFE.” “Publicists are still not sure what to do with Substack,” Shuter said, but he has admittedly run afoul of some of them with his coverage. One is Matthew Hiltzik, CEO of communications firm Hiltzik …

Food newsletter launches with eight staff and tech-style incentives

Published by Sam Flores

A media company covering the business of food, restaurants and hospitality in New York “and beyond” has launched with eight full-time salaried staff after a $2.5m (£1.8m) seed funding round. Caper has been set up by two of the founders of newsletter-based publisher Puck, Max Tcheyan and Dan Tsinis, along with former Vanity Fair deputy editor and Air Mail columnist Dana Brown. It plans to focus on “in-depth stories and scoops”, avoiding reviews and listicles. Investment in the title began in the autumn so it could launch with “the right founding journalists”, Tcheyan, co-founder and CEO of Caper, told Press Gazette, adding the business model offers staff revenue-linked bonuses and equity participation in the company on top of a competitive salary. This means Caper’s staff are compensated more like tech startup employees than journalists at traditional publications, which allows Caper to compete with those institutions for top talent. The Caper newsletter, sent three times a week, launched in February, followed by its website at the end of March. Monthly events will launch in April. Caper’s …

Daily newsletter is Telegraph’s ‘biggest source of subscribers’ one year after launch

Published by Sam Flores

Picture: The Telegraph Flagship Telegraph newsletter From the Editor has become its “biggest source” of new paying subscribers one year after launch. From the Editor promises news, comment, analysis “hand-picked” by Telegraph editor Chris Evans. The newsletter, sent at 7.30am each morning, also includes reader comments, puzzles, cartoons and an exclusive column. Everyone who registers for free to The Telegraph’s website (giving them limited access behind the paywall) is automatically opted in to receive the newsletter. The publisher claims From the Editor is read by more than 850,000 people every day. Deputy editor Catherine Bentley-Gouldstone told Press Gazette in December it had a total audience list of more than two million. [Read more: The projects publishers were most proud of in 2025, including From the Editor] Telegraph executive editor Christopher Williams, whose role includes accelerating the newsletter strategy, told Press Gazette: “We have an intelligent paywall that takes you on a journey from being just somebody who’s flown in from Google to giving us your email address to subscribing,” adding that this method has helped …

Guardian’s first Substack experiment is republishing food newsletter

Published by Sam Flores

The page on The Guardian’s website for the Feast newsletter The Guardian has decided to experiment with Substack by recreating its weekly food newsletter Feast on the platform. The Substack play is part of Project Berger, the multi-year transformation plan designed to make The Guardian “more visual, digital and experimental” as first outlined by editor-in-chief Katharine Viner to Press Gazette in October. Feast has more than 100,000 subscribers and open rates of almost 70%, according to The Guardian. It is one of almost 60 newsletters at The Guardian following a pivot over the past four years away from link-led automated dispatches towards authored emails with more original reporting and analysis. In total The Guardian reports having more than five million unique newsletters subscribers. By cross-publishing Feast on Substack, Feast can make use of social media style features on Substack like the Notes feed. Readers can now sign up for the Substack version here. Substack also has recommendation features that mean, for example, food publishers can recommend each other to their subscribers. Some Guardian food writers, …