How I accidentally discovered the power of email newsletters 25 years ago

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How I accidentally discovered the power of email newsletters 25 years ago

It began on my desktop computer with a few hundred names; it soon grew to 4,000

James Breiner

Jan 16

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You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.

Tim Bradbury and I both thought email newsletters could be a powerful tool for building relationships with readers. (from his LinkedIn photo).

My New Year’s Resolution 25 years ago was to start sending daily email updates to readers of the Baltimore Business Journal. I was publisher of the print weekly at the time.

My goal with the newsletter was to beat our giant competitor, the Baltimore Sun, by publishing major news announcements a day before them.

This is a story in five parts, ending with what’s ahead for building audiences in 2025.

My story of building a newsletter audience
How newspapers began publishing on the internet
How a national chain of business newspapers used newsletters
The first big digital media contracts
Recommendations of a pioneer, Tim Bradbury, on how to reach younger audiences

The playing field in the year 2000

Our weekly had about 10,000 print subscribers at the time, while the Baltimore Sun had several hundred thousand daily. The World Wide Web (www.) was still in its infancy. Even the newspapers that had a website did not publish stories on the web until after they had appeared in print.

The print edition was sacred to newspapers. It produced all the advertising and subscription revenue. The internet was — what? A new toy for the tech department? Maybe a marketing tool? Maybe, in the future, a source for some scraps of advertising? Nobody really knew.

Our parent company, American City Business Journals (ACBJ), had 40 weekly papers across the country but did not yet have a website in January 2000. Tim Bradbury was hired that month as president of ACBJ New Media. He had worked for a data information company and a book publisher. His mandate was to build ACBJ’s first digital media business. We recently exchanged emails and he filled me in on details of the launch.

My newsletter takes off

But in January 2000, Bradbury and I didn’t know each other yet. I was busy compiling a list of several hundred email addresses of Baltimore business people that I had on my desktop. Each day, I walked around the newsroom — we had about a dozen reporters and editors — and asked if anyone had any news I might put into a short newsletter that afternoon.

If one of the big banks, brokerages, hospitals, real estate firms, or public figures made an announcement, I could have it in people’s email inboxes that afternoon. The news wouldn’t be in the Sun till the next day. Radio and TV barely mentioned business. As a former reporter and editor, this satisfied my competitive instinct. It was David beating Goliath.

Positive response was immediate. People told me how much they liked the newsletter. It gave them empowering information directly in their in-box. It was personal, from me, the publisher. It felt real, genuine, trustworthy.

Before it was spam

Dozens asked to be added to the list. I paid my teenage son to comb through our annual Book of Lists, which contained thousands of businesses, and harvest any email addresses.

At the time, spam was still just a canned meat product; emailing people without their explicit permission was not illegal. I don’t remember getting any complaints. Compliance came later.

My list grew to about 4,000, and it crashed our parent company’s email system once or twice. The chairman noticed. Was this a glitch or was this an opportunity?

Later that year, the company began offering all the publishers in the 40 cities served by American City their own daily news update. The subject line of these emails contained the name of the local publisher. The goal, Bradbury recalled, was to make it feel like a personal communication, direct from the publisher to the recipient.

The first digital advertiser

Promoting this feature and traffic from the chain’s online archive helped Bradbury to secure a six-month advertising sponsorship of the email updates from an office supply company looking to expand nationally. The contract was in the high six figures.

That contract in turn helped Bradbury land an even bigger deal, in eight figures. The client was a software company that offered to help small businesses establish “a complete web presence,” from obtaining a domain name to advice on doing digital and email marketing. Remember, this was 25 years ago. Few knew how to build a website.

The attraction for digital advertisers was the same as for our print clients — our audience. It consisted of C-level executives, decision makers with a high level of education, salary, purchasing power, and personal assets.

What to do in 2025

I left ACBJ in 2006 to begin working with media in Latin America. Bradbury left ACBJ in 2013 to join a series of innovative ventures in digital media as a founder and investor. Today he is President/General Manager-Publisher Alliance @ 5x5. We recently reconnected in a media data group run by Johnny Levy of Data Joe.

I was planning to end this post by recommending to all my readers to consider launching an email newsletter if they already haven’t done so. I still believe that its personal, direct communication to readers is a powerful way to build engagement and loyalty.

So I asked Bradbury if he thought this was still good advice. Yes and no was his answer.

Conclusion: Own the relationship

Yes, the value of the newsletter in the early days was that it “delivered complementary value to the print product,” Bradbury told me. “It created a direct relationship between the publisher and reader. At the time, it was the main way to identify and understand who were our digital customers.”

But maybe email shouldn’t be the primary vehicle any longer for connecting with your audience, he said. Email has also been misused to deliver spam, misinformation, and information overload.

In addition, there are too many uncontrollable variables that affect the delivery of the newsletter — too many intermediaries, platforms, search, social, etc. So publishers should “surround the newsletter with other services to engage the user.” Eliminate the middleman.

A new one-to-one tactic

One tactic he suggests is a highly personalized nudge that is more message-based, not email. He gave as an example a Germany-based leadership development app he subscribes to called Bunch.

Bunch asks the user to fill out a form revealing their leadership interests, their industry, and their objectives. “Once a week I get their nudge, 160 characters, which is a reminder and suggestion to click here for more.

“I only reference this because the 25-to-40-year-old is a digital native, has a short attention span, and is willing to share information. So create a short information-based product that is for THEM, to reach them wherever they are, to build brand trust etc.”

In the new digital ecosystem, it’s best to own the relationship. Go direct to the consumer. They trust you.

That’s a recommendation I plan to take. Thank you, Tim!

Next: An expert in digital news media explains why email newsletters are still his favorite tool for engaging an audience. — James

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